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Jul. 24th, 2006 03:53 amI was daydreaming about Blood’s Ruby and wondering what would happen if it was ever made into a movie. There's optimism for you, but then Pirates of the Caribbean seems to have broken the curse which Cutthroat Island laid on that sort of period swashbuckler.
First of course was the fantasy casting, which drew several big blanks – I'd rather have Faces (and Voices) than Names any time; besides which, the salaries of Big-Name Actors do appalling things to a movie's budget, and since said budget is finite, other things suffer in consequence.
Timothy Dalton's face kept reappearing: I saw a little art film called The King's Whore (La Putaine du Roi sounds better, even though it means exactly the same thing.) In that movie Dalton was wearing, and looking very comfortable in, 1670s-ish costume and full-bottomed periwig, and I can't shake the image of him playing Charles II. On the 70mm widescreen of my mind's eye he'd look better than either Sam Neill (Restoration) or Rufus Sewell (The Power and the Passion - which in the US is known as The Last King for no reason I can understand.) Charles wasn't a "last king" any more than Lincoln was a "last president" or Gladstone a "last prime minister". A drama about the Restoration could more accurately be called "The Return of the King" – and then there’d be real confusion!
Then of course, who'd compose the soundtrack? Hans Zimmer, maybe, or Howard Shore, since John Williams seems to work exclusively for the Spielberg/Lucas cartel. I have a soft spot for Basil Poledouris; his Conan the Barbarian soundtrack is perfect "music to hack and slay by", while in Master and Commander, Davies, Gordon and Tognetti not only put Mozart and Bach, Boccherini and Corelli into a period actioner, but had the principal action hero play some of it on-screen - and the whole thing worked!
But finally I started wondering how the wording of the disclaimer at the end would have to be tweaked. You know the thing I mean: the more-or-less standard one is quoted in Wikipedia, and reads as follows:
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Just for interest I had a look at what sort of disclaimer had been added to the end of Alexander. I recorded it on Sky+ and watched it at my leisure for the first time late last night. After its uniformly dodgy reviews (and though many pinches of salt were taken, the general flavour didn't improve) either Diane nor I felt like wasting the five hours – two to get there and back, and three in a seat – necessary to see it in the cinema. By Jove, we were right. It's frequently splendid to look at, but structurally it's a formless mishmash that jumps around its times and locations like a flea on a griddle; the battle scenes start out looking magnificent, but degenerate into needless dust and confusion; and whether its dialogue was good or not, it's totally wasted since so much of it was screamed, yelled, bawled, howled and otherwise not-very-clearly declaimed. The disclaimer, fortunately, mentioned none of this.
This motion picture was inspired by historical events, However, certain characters, and aspects of the otherwise historical characters, events and dialogue portrayed in the motion picture were created for the purpose of fictitious dramatization, and any similarity of same to any person living or dead is purely coincidental and unintentional.
According to the Wikipedia entry, the All Persons Fictitious Disclaimer was introduced to avoid the risk of legal action for libel; I'd have thought that enough time had passed from Alexander in 360-odd BC to now that a certain amount of Statute of Limitations could be claimed! The same ought to apply to Restoration England, because while the cast is all dead (though Blood was dug up a few days after his funeral, just to make sure it wasn't another of his many tricks...) any resemblance is a lot more than coincidental.
The hero is Colonel Blood, well-known failed jewel thief and not-so-well-known secret agent; well, he is a secret agent, so no swaggering into the Fox and Henhouse pub and announcing "The name ish Blud, Thomash Blud." (All the same, it does have a certain ring to it...)
There are other "fictitious" individuals: Charles II (King of England and ladies' man – his monicker "Old Rowley" came from the name of a famous stud stallion.) Captain Henry Morgan (privateer and pirate, later knight of the realm and deputy governor of Jamaica), Isaac Newton (scholar, scientist and all-round boffin in the style of Q crossed with Barnes Wallis, as played by Michael Redgrave in The Dambusters - a definitive portrayal of boffindom at its best), and a whole swarm of equally-strange supporting characters who, if they weren't known to have existed, I wouldn't dare make up.
Take the buccaneer Antonio Fuët, aka "Captain Moidore" (named for a Portuguese coin.) This worthy's ship supposedly ran out of smallshot just as he was about to grapple and board a prize, so he had his guns loaded with bags of gold coins and swept the enemy deck with that. The story goes that his opponents were so shocked by his profligacy and apparent disdain for wealth that they surrendered at once; and also, that immediately afterwards the busiest man in his crew was his ship's surgeon, charged with recovering as many coins as he could dig out of the bodies...
This was quoted in Pirates - Fact and Fiction by David Cordingly and John Falconer, pub. Collins & Brown, 1992. While they concede that this particular yarn may be more on the fiction side, they also point out that where pirates are concerned - and especially the truly larger-than-life ones - it's impossible to dismiss anything that could be done as never being done...
Take Blackbeard (a bit later than the Restoration period, but never mind that) with his habit of wearing burning slow-matches under his hat and tied in his beard, his hobby of sitting in a closed hold with a brazier of burning sulphur to get used to what Hell would be like, and his robust management style of blowing out the candles at dinner then firing two pistols blindly under the table because "If I didn't shoot one of ye now and then, ye would forget who I am!"
All that is a matter of record. So maybe gold smallshot might have happened too...
First of course was the fantasy casting, which drew several big blanks – I'd rather have Faces (and Voices) than Names any time; besides which, the salaries of Big-Name Actors do appalling things to a movie's budget, and since said budget is finite, other things suffer in consequence.
Timothy Dalton's face kept reappearing: I saw a little art film called The King's Whore (La Putaine du Roi sounds better, even though it means exactly the same thing.) In that movie Dalton was wearing, and looking very comfortable in, 1670s-ish costume and full-bottomed periwig, and I can't shake the image of him playing Charles II. On the 70mm widescreen of my mind's eye he'd look better than either Sam Neill (Restoration) or Rufus Sewell (The Power and the Passion - which in the US is known as The Last King for no reason I can understand.) Charles wasn't a "last king" any more than Lincoln was a "last president" or Gladstone a "last prime minister". A drama about the Restoration could more accurately be called "The Return of the King" – and then there’d be real confusion!
Then of course, who'd compose the soundtrack? Hans Zimmer, maybe, or Howard Shore, since John Williams seems to work exclusively for the Spielberg/Lucas cartel. I have a soft spot for Basil Poledouris; his Conan the Barbarian soundtrack is perfect "music to hack and slay by", while in Master and Commander, Davies, Gordon and Tognetti not only put Mozart and Bach, Boccherini and Corelli into a period actioner, but had the principal action hero play some of it on-screen - and the whole thing worked!
But finally I started wondering how the wording of the disclaimer at the end would have to be tweaked. You know the thing I mean: the more-or-less standard one is quoted in Wikipedia, and reads as follows:
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Just for interest I had a look at what sort of disclaimer had been added to the end of Alexander. I recorded it on Sky+ and watched it at my leisure for the first time late last night. After its uniformly dodgy reviews (and though many pinches of salt were taken, the general flavour didn't improve) either Diane nor I felt like wasting the five hours – two to get there and back, and three in a seat – necessary to see it in the cinema. By Jove, we were right. It's frequently splendid to look at, but structurally it's a formless mishmash that jumps around its times and locations like a flea on a griddle; the battle scenes start out looking magnificent, but degenerate into needless dust and confusion; and whether its dialogue was good or not, it's totally wasted since so much of it was screamed, yelled, bawled, howled and otherwise not-very-clearly declaimed. The disclaimer, fortunately, mentioned none of this.
This motion picture was inspired by historical events, However, certain characters, and aspects of the otherwise historical characters, events and dialogue portrayed in the motion picture were created for the purpose of fictitious dramatization, and any similarity of same to any person living or dead is purely coincidental and unintentional.
According to the Wikipedia entry, the All Persons Fictitious Disclaimer was introduced to avoid the risk of legal action for libel; I'd have thought that enough time had passed from Alexander in 360-odd BC to now that a certain amount of Statute of Limitations could be claimed! The same ought to apply to Restoration England, because while the cast is all dead (though Blood was dug up a few days after his funeral, just to make sure it wasn't another of his many tricks...) any resemblance is a lot more than coincidental.
The hero is Colonel Blood, well-known failed jewel thief and not-so-well-known secret agent; well, he is a secret agent, so no swaggering into the Fox and Henhouse pub and announcing "The name ish Blud, Thomash Blud." (All the same, it does have a certain ring to it...)
There are other "fictitious" individuals: Charles II (King of England and ladies' man – his monicker "Old Rowley" came from the name of a famous stud stallion.) Captain Henry Morgan (privateer and pirate, later knight of the realm and deputy governor of Jamaica), Isaac Newton (scholar, scientist and all-round boffin in the style of Q crossed with Barnes Wallis, as played by Michael Redgrave in The Dambusters - a definitive portrayal of boffindom at its best), and a whole swarm of equally-strange supporting characters who, if they weren't known to have existed, I wouldn't dare make up.
Take the buccaneer Antonio Fuët, aka "Captain Moidore" (named for a Portuguese coin.) This worthy's ship supposedly ran out of smallshot just as he was about to grapple and board a prize, so he had his guns loaded with bags of gold coins and swept the enemy deck with that. The story goes that his opponents were so shocked by his profligacy and apparent disdain for wealth that they surrendered at once; and also, that immediately afterwards the busiest man in his crew was his ship's surgeon, charged with recovering as many coins as he could dig out of the bodies...
This was quoted in Pirates - Fact and Fiction by David Cordingly and John Falconer, pub. Collins & Brown, 1992. While they concede that this particular yarn may be more on the fiction side, they also point out that where pirates are concerned - and especially the truly larger-than-life ones - it's impossible to dismiss anything that could be done as never being done...
Take Blackbeard (a bit later than the Restoration period, but never mind that) with his habit of wearing burning slow-matches under his hat and tied in his beard, his hobby of sitting in a closed hold with a brazier of burning sulphur to get used to what Hell would be like, and his robust management style of blowing out the candles at dinner then firing two pistols blindly under the table because "If I didn't shoot one of ye now and then, ye would forget who I am!"
All that is a matter of record. So maybe gold smallshot might have happened too...
