Produce your own film,unlimited budget!!!

A lot of good ideas!!!

 

My wife reminded me of the writer Sanora Babb. It would be a tiny little film.

She was born in 1907 in Indian territory in Oklahoma, and even though she didn't start attending school until she was 11, she graduated as the valedictorian of her high school. After college she went to Los Angeles to work for the Times, but the stock market crash of 1929 meant she wound up sleeping in the park, eventually working as a secretary at Warner Brothers and then the Farm Security Administration documenting the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants. Her detailed notes were borrowed by John Steinbeck, who used them to write The Grapes of Wrath - which meant that the publication of her own novel on the subject Whose Names Were Unknown was canceled. Her novels about her girlhood An Owl On Every Post and The Lost Traveler are excellent.

She married the great cinematographer James Wong Howe in Paris, but California's anti-miscegenation law would not recognize their marriage. The studio's "morals clause" and his traditional views meant that they had two apartments in the same building until the law was overturned, and it took them three days to find a judge who would marry them.

Anyway, it would be a tiny film about an unconventional woman, but one that I would like to see. Ray Bradbury, Ralph Ellison and William Saroyan would also be characters in the film.

 

Hollywood must look through hundreds of scripts, do they think ..nah forget it “we can make more money doing a remake “?

Actors have agents, what about directors ?

 

I’d love to see a major large budget film made about the Eastern Front of WW2. Due to moral (who are the good guys?) and nationality issues (subtitles, or Germans and Russians speaking English, no American characters) there has been little made about this subject matter by Hollywood. It’s not PG-13 stuff, that’s for sure. An American studio would be crazy to spend $200,000,000 making a realistic and un-sanitised film about this. It’s very bleak, very brutal and a very dark moral quagmire. It would be as much a horror film as it would be an action picture. Yet what action! It would make Apocalypse Now look like nothing with the tank battles and the columns of men attacking, retreating, then fleeing in mass panic. If done right it would be so extreme and grim it would struggle find a large mainstream audience. The Eastern Front was insane and makes the carnage of the Western Front look like a polite disagreement between some chums.

These books could make for a very strong two part film series:


Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir by Wolfgang Faust

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tiger-Trac...ords=Tiger+Tracks+-+The+Classic+Panzer+Memoir

“Wolfgang Faust was the driver of a Tiger I tank with the Wehrmacht Heavy Panzer Battalions, seeing extensive combat on the Eastern Front in 1943-45. This memoir was his brutal and deeply personal account of the Russian Front's appalling carnage.

Telling the story of a vicious three-day tank battle, Faust describes how his Tiger unit fought on the steppes of Russia against the full might of the Red Army: the T34 tanks, the Sturmovik bombers, suicidal Russian infantry and the feared Katyusha rocket brigades. He reveals the merciless decisions that panzer crews made in action, the devastating power of their weaponry, and the many ways that men met their deaths in the snow and ice of the Ostfront.

Originally published as ‘Panzerdammerung’ (‘Panzer Twilight’) in the late 1940s, this memoir's savage realism shocked the post-war German public. Some readers were outraged at the book's final scenes, while others wrote that, ‘Now, at last, I know what our men did in the East.’

Today, 'Tiger Tracks' stands as one of the great semi-autobiographical accounts of World War Two: a crescendo of horror, grim survival and a fatalistic acceptance of the panzer man’s destiny.’”

The Last Panther - Slaughter of the Reich - The Halbe Kessel 1945 by Wolfgang Faust

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Panth...QE4_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1550054135&sr=1-2

“While the Battle of Berlin in 1945 is widely known, the horrific story of the Halbe Kessel remains largely untold.

In April 1945, victorious Soviet forces encircled 80,000 men of the German 9th Army in the Halbe area, South of Berlin, together with many thousands of German women and children. The German troops, desperate to avoid Soviet capture, battled furiously to break out towards the West, where they could surrender to the comparative safety of the Americans. For the German civilians trapped in the Kessel, the quest to escape took on frantic dimensions, as the terror of Red Army brutality spread.

The small town of Halbe became the eye of the hurricane for the breakout, as King Tigers of the SS Panzer Corps led the spearhead to the West, supported by Panthers of the battle-hardened 21st Panzer Division.

Panzer by panzer, unit by unit, the breakout forces were cut down – until only a handful of Panthers, other armour, battered infantry units and columns of shattered refugees made a final escape through the rings of fire to the American lines.

This first-hand account by the commander of one of those Panther tanks relates with devastating clarity the conditions inside the Kessel, the ferocity of the breakout attempt through Halbe, and the subsequent running battles between overwhelming Soviet forces and the exhausted Reich troops, who were using their last reserves of fuel, ammunition, strength and hope.”

Zack Snyder’s dark tendencies, long running times and big budget action experience would make him a good choice as director. His style and inclinations would fit this subject matter very well.

Also FYI this book would make a great mini-series:

The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Forgotten-...&qid=1550054234&sr=1-1&keywords=guy+sajer+ww2

 

He was maybe not the right man for Batman Vs Superman but his darkness would be helpful with this material.

I don't know German or Russian actors so no opinion on that. No American or British actors as they should be talking in their proper languages (hence why it would be commercially a very bad idea to make these films).

 

Thought Enemy At The Gates was very good.

 

I hated it. I thought it was very compromised.

I haven't seen Come and See (1985). I assume it's not an action film so it's not too comparable to the films I'm imagining, which are vulgar action epics with brutal violence and creeping dread in every frame.

 

What about A Midnight Clear?

 

Come and See is one of the bleakest films I have ever seen. Basically a young innocent boy thrust into the horrors of fighting on the eastern front and it doesn't pull any punches. It needs to be seen, it is a classic. There is some action but only secondary in its importance.

 

If I had a time machine I would go back and take over Jodorowsky's Dune:

In 1973 film producer Arthur P. Jacobs optioned the film rights to Dune but died before a film could be developed. The option was taken over two years later by director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who (along with producer Michel Seydoux) proceeded to approach, among others, Virgin Records with the prog rock groups Tangerine Dream, Gong and Mike Oldfield before settling on Pink Floyd and Magma for some of the music; artists H. R. Giger, Chris Foss and Jean Giraud for set and character design; Dan O'Bannon for special effects; and Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Udo Kier, Amanda Lear and others for the cast.

I love Denis Villeneuve so I think his upcoming pic would do the trick now.

 

Great choice. It's amazing how little people know of some of history's characters who made a real difference. Less surprising given his chosen field!

I remember seeing a documentary about him - part of a series on WWII espionage.

I will now read your wiki article ……..

 

Not likely.

 

Alex Winter actually LIKED my idea about doing THIS, with Zappa's 'orchestral' music!.....
I called it...... "FRANKtasia"!

 

A bit of poetic license is alright.
Don’t forget your films genre /director /actors though.

 

Gritty, violent western about the "Regulator-Moderator War" in early 19th Century Texas.
Robert Duval on board (health permitting).

 

A faithful adaptation of Vincent McHugh 1943 novel "I Am Thinking of my Darling" would be a wonder to behold. It's a very cinematic and moving story, and gracefully integrates elements of romance, comedy and thriller. In regards to epidimiology and public health in the last 50 years, it is strangely prescient as well. IMO it belongs somewhere on the list of Great American Novels.

Note, it was very (extremely) loosely adapted for 1968's "What So Bad About feeling Good" but lets ignore that.

Kirkus review summary follows if you're interested
"A toboggan slide of fantasy -- with Manhattan attacked by a mysterious malady, a fever bringing happiness, disinclination for work, amorality to all who contract it. The story is Commissioner Rowan's search for his wife, Niobe, who vanishes with the fever, and his organization of the city against the dangers of the mass infection. Both jobs provide a springboard for many a relevant, and irrelevant, fact, fancy, character, incident, for Niobe is spotted in various disguises, all over town, and the search for the cause, and cure, of the disease brings in a detailed blueprint of civil departments and their workings. Rowan, too, catches the fever, is confronted with political opposition, has his personal troubles with the fever's sexual aspects, and is saved, together with the city, by the finding of the cure and the arrival of cold weather. A potpourri of scientific, artistic, musical, literary interpolations that gives this novel a realistic-fantastic appeal. Interestingly different."

 

Sequel to Good, Bad and Ugly with 'Blondie' in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake, and siring the man who would become the father of Detective Harry Callahan; in other words, Man with No Name is Dirty Harry's grandad.

And no one in the family likes punks.

 

I like your idea too. And really quite a bit of Frank’s music could lend itself to that.

 

I would produce a 10 part HBO mini series about Led Zeppelin.

Directed by Scorsese
Timothy Chalamet as Jimmy
Brian Blessed as Peter Grant

Lol idk the rest

 

Martin Scorses produced a TV series called Vinyl with

• Zebedee Row as Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin

• Ian Hart as Peter Grant, manager of Led Zeppelin

• Vince Nudo as John Bonham, drummer of Led Zeppelin

And it bombed dreadfully. You appear to be throwing good money after bad?

 

A trilogy about the Soviet Union from it's inception / revolution, through the war years, and into the 50's, based on this book:



There were a few films that skimmed over the topic (Stalin with Robert Duvall) And, weirdly, a comedy on the subject of Stalin came out last year. But I think a good, historically accurate overview is in order.

 

Fascinating read!

I was not aware that Pujol had managed to snare some German encryption protocols - makes sense and is consistent with what he was trying to achieve.

To be a fly on the wall: "At Allason's urging, Pujol travelled to London and was received by Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace, in an unusually long audience. After that he visited the Special Forces Club and was reunited with a group of his former colleagues, including T. A. Robertson, Roger Fleetwood Hesketh, Cyril Mills and Desmond Bristow."

The British were/are masters at dissembling. Pujol fit in perfectly - interesting that he had developed a distaste for communism and fascism, two ends of the same equation.

So Chris, will you produce the film? @Chris DeVoe

 

As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me (2001).

 

That show was soooo bad, terrible story and characters.

Ok, not Scorsese, Alfonso Cuaron

 

I don't have an academic saying it, so I never managed to add it to the Wikipedia article, but he was a huge help to the effort to crack Enigma.

Here's how:

Pujol and his MI5 handler Tomás Harris were given the best paper cipher the Germans had for their transmissions from England to Spain. Once there, it would be decrypted and re-encrypted using an Enigma and sent on to Berlin. That transmission station was monitored by the Allies, and they would have a good estimate of how long it would take. In cracking any encryption, if you have the original text, aka the "plaintext", the job becomes vastly more easy. So this huge wad of verbiage could be used to reverse engineer that day's Enigma key, so the Allies could get orders and reports from genuine Axis spies.

The Communists had taken his family business. He went to school for animal husbandry, and the Communists took over the poultry farm he was managing and drove it into the ground.

The tragedy of his life was that Franco outlasted him, which was one of the reasons he moved to Venezuela.

Not much chance of that. I just want to see someone with the skills to do it make it happen.