"THIS IS EITHER
GOING TO BE THE GREATEST ASSIGNMENT
OF
my life," says John Lee Hancock, director of The Alamo, the
Disney film that opens this Christmas Day, "or my last. Or at
least the last film I'll ever make in Texas. Texans, you know,
take the Alamo very seriously." As Hancock well knows. He
grew up in Texas City, on the ship channel near Houston; his
father was from San Antonio. "One of my earliest memories,"
he says, "is visiting the chapel in San Antonio and suddenly being overwhelmed by this sensation. I could almost hear bugles
and smell gunpowder." Many Texans have never stopped hearing bugles. As Walter Lord noted in his compact 1961 classic,
A Time to Stand, the epic of the Alamo caught America's imagination almost from the day the stronghold fell, "and the end
is not yet in sight."
On March 6, 1836, following a siege of nearly two weeks,
about 1,800 men from the 5,000-man army of Gen. Antonio
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Lopez de Santa Anna assaulted and captured a decaying adobe
fort on the outskirts of the town of San Antonio de Bexar.
After a vicious struggle that lasted perhaps 20 minutes, all of
the defenders, between 200 and 250 of them, mostly Anglos
and a few Tejanos (people of Mexican blood living in Texas),
lay dead. And as many as a third of Santa Anna's attackers
either died on the spot or would eventually perish from their
wounds.
From a purely military standpoint, the Alamo had little significance. In fact, the commander of the Texian army (Texians
were Americans who had migrated to Texas), Sam Houston,
had originally ordered the Alamo, which was used more or less
as a storage dump by the Mexican army, to be destroyed before Santa Anna's forces arrived. If the Mexican commander
had been chivalrous enough to allow a handful of the wounded
defenders to survive, the siege and battle of the Alamo might
never have taken its place in American folklore. Instead "Remember the Alamo!" became the rallying cry that united Texans
and a great many continental Americans in the cause for Texas
independence.
In his film on modern Texas, Lone Star, the writer-director
John Sayles (parts of whose early script for the current Alamo
film have survived into the final production) has a character suggest that it might be time for everyone to "start from
scratch .... Forget the Alamo." Not likely. In the Sandra Bullock
comedy Miss Congeniality, a beauty pageant is held in front of
the Alamo chapel (presumably a last bastion of such American
traditions). In Saving Private Ryan, when Tom Hanks, Matt
Damon, and company fall back on their breastworks, one of
the GIs calls out, "It's Alamo time!" And when Pee-wee Herman is knocked unconscious while riding his bicycle through
San Antonio in Pee-wee's Big Adventure and a local asks, "Do
you remember anything?," Pee-wee replies, "I remember ... the
Alamo!" to the cheers of bystanders.
Simply to say the words the Alamo brings instant recognition from almost any American audience. Even schoolkids
who couldn't tell you who was fighting there or why recognize the silhouette of the little Spanish chapel with the bellcurved peak on the front facade. Everyone knows that Davy
Crockett, adorned with his signature coonskin hat and swingirig his long rifle, Old Betsy, died fighting there. Everyone
knows that the fort's commander, Co!. William Barret Travis,
drew a line in the sand with his sword and asked the defenders
who wanted to stay and fight with him to cross it. Everyone
knows there were no survivors; most know that the heroic stand
bought time for Sam Houston to prepare the army that eventually won Texas's freedom.
And virtually everything that everyone knows about the Alamo
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THERE WON'T
BE ANY LINE IN THE SAND OR DAVY CROCKET1
is wrong. Or at least so says Jeff Long, whose 1990 book, Duel
of Eagles: The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo, stands
as the most iconoclastic view of the battle and its participants.
"Make a list of the half-dozen most popularly accepted facts
about the Alamo," says Long, "and you'll find serious historians who support each claim and equally serious historians who
reject each point as utter nonsense. Did Jim Bowie fight in the
battle and go down fighting or did he slip over the walls in a
final attempt at escape? Did Crockett surrender? Was the siege
and battle of the Alamo important to the success of the Texas
Revolution, or did later patriots simply rationalize a military
blunder into a moral victory? And while we're on the subject,
what about that bell shape on the front wall of the chapel?" It
appears that it was added during a restoration years later.
If you're looking for a good scrap, walk into nearly any bar
in Texas-whether
primarily English- or Spanish-speakingand take either side of any of these propositions and see what
happens. "More people have died arguing those questions," says
Gary Zaboly, who illustrated Blood of Noble Men: The Alamo
Siege & Battle, "than died in the original fight."
The current generation of Tejanos is angered less by controversies of this sort than by the fact that the world's conception
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of what happened at the Alamo and in the rest of the Texas
War for Independence was shaped primarily by Walt Disney
and by John Wayne. (Wayne's version in his 1960 movie was
politically overt, preceded by a publicity campaign orchestrated
by the Texas-born press agent Russell Birdwell. The P.R. featured a famous two-page spread in Life magazine which proclaimed that the film should be seen by all Americans who had
"a bellyful of payola, influence peddling, quiz show rigging,
the ghost-writing of political speeches-symptoms
of a pallid
public morality-and
yearned for a return to the days when the
noblest utterances of man came unrehearsed.")
"I remember asking my parents to take me to see the John
Wayne movie when I was a kid," says Carlos Guerra, a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News. "Both my parents gave
me this look as if to say, 'Do you really want to see this thing?'
What I remember best about it was cringing as I watched it.
That's still my feeling now. I mean, I know that Santa Anna
was a ruthless, unprincipled dictator, but all the Alamo movies
I've seen dehumanize the Mexicans, as if they weren't men willing to die for their country. And it was their country."
There is a third perspective on the Alamo and the Texas
War for Independence. As the outspoken Wes Studi, an ac-
INGING HIS RIFLE ON A PARAPET.
The defenders make
their stand in Henry A.
McArdle's 1905 painting
(opposite) and in the
film; bottom, Hancock
on the set (pointing).
tor of Cherokee descent who has a role in the new Alamo
film, puts it, "If you're Indian, you might look on the whole
thing as rwo big gangs fighting to see who's going to take over
your land."
"I really don't think it's possible," says Dr. Ricardo Romo,
president of the University of Texas at San Antonio, "to make a
historically accurate Alamo movie. There are rwo primary reasons. One is all the things that we don't know about what happened. The other is the things that we do know. There are too
many people pulling and tugging at the facts, trying to make
political issues out of them."
Hancock and the screenwriter Les Bohem, however, are trying. At the very least, the newest Alamo movie will set new
standards for authenticity in terms of language and period
detail, and as Bohem puts it, "We won't be making anything
up. Everything in here is going to have some strong basis in
fact." Although no one will be specific about details, this at
least means that in the new version there won't be any line in
the sand or Davy Crockett swinging his rifle on a parapet while
Mexican soldiers fall around him.
Moreover, the new Alamo film aims at establishing the fact
that there was a Mexican side to the story. Bohem "started with
a schoolboy interest in the Alamo that was fired by Walt
Disney's Davy Crockett and, later, John Wayne's version. But
I always knew that the reality had to be more complex than
what I was seeing on the screen. I started digging for more
facts. It didn't take me long to realize that the Alamo was a
major source of historical contention and that the debate is
as heated today as it was 150 years ago. What drives you nuts
is not that everyone seems to disagree but that you can often
find conflicting accounts taken from the same sources.
"The Texians who fought at the Alamo were a diverse bunch
of men. There were patriots, who saw themselves as the heirs
to the American Revolution, some of whom hated the idea of
slavery; Davy Crockett, for all his faults, had a strong idealistic streak on the subject of fair treatment for other races. Some
were scoundrels and pirates and slave traders; Jim Bowie trafNOVEMBER/DECEMBER
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IT WILL BE THE FIRST FILM TO DEPICT THE FINAL ASSAULT
spectives and facts taken from what we believe to be the most reliable sources. I can't
nlh
ficked in slaves. Not all these men were even there for the same
political reasons. Some wanted Mexico to live up to its original
constitutional promises, some wanted Texas to become part of
the United States, and still others wanted Texas to become a
separate country.
"To further complicate the problem of historical interpretation, the Mexicans had divided loyalties too. A great many
of the peasants had no love for Santa Anna, and some of the
officers, who had the heritage of Spanish gentlemen, thought
he was vulgar and resented his brutality. There were probably
more than a few who weren't so sure that it was a good idea for
Mexico even to try to hold on to Texas. And, of course, there
were the Tejanos, the Mexicans like Juan Seguin, who sided with
the Texan rebels.
"There's no way that any movie can reconcile so many conflicting opinions, but what we can do is show something that I
think previous movies on the Alamo have not shown-namely,
that there were conflicting points of view and several sides to
the story."
John Lee Hancock suggests there is one other thing that
the movie can definitely do. "We can convey the terror and the
misery of the men on both sides of the conflict. One thing that
you get from all the diaries and letters and accounts of the fight
is how miserable the soldiers were. The Texans were cramped
inside an uncomfortable crumbling patched-up fort with bad
food and no comforts. It may have been even worse for the
Mexicans who were besieging the Alamo. There were freezing
winds and inadequate clothing, and often the only safe place
that could be found to sleep was a muddy ditch. It was a lousy
campaign for both sides."
Hancock insists that the film won't rely on the views of one
single historian. "The script is an amalgam of different
perI
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say that anyone will regard the movie as
100 percent historically accurate, particularly when you factor in what is not known.
Who's to say that in coming to San Antonio
Davy Crockett was acting more out of patriotism than opportunism or what the proper
mixture of both was? But I can promise that
where a factual claim is made, there is a very
good source to back it up."
When the project was initiated, says Les
Bohem, there was pressure to add fictional
characters. "A producer said to me, 'Can't
we have a romance where the girl leaves and
the guy stays?' I just looked at him for a moment and asked, 'When does the iceberg hit
the Alamo?'"
Hancock's film, which stars Billy Bob Thornton as Crockett, Jason Patric as Bowie, Patrick Wilson as Travis, Dennis Quaid as Sam
Houston, Emilio Echevarria as Santa Anna,
and Jordi Molla as Juan Seguin-will
be the
first one to depict the final assault on the Alamo as it actually happened, in the dark. "Santa Anna attacked just before
dawn," says Bohem, "so you can imagine what the scene must
have been like. It had to be pitch-black with the only light
coming from a couple of fires on the inside of the fort, lit for
warmth. Suddenly the men in the Alamo hear the trumpets
blaring deguello [a phrase from a medieval Spanish song dating back to Spain's war with the Moors; it means, literally,
"cutthroat"]. Then cannon and musket fire erupt from several
different areas outside the fort. The men on the inside can see
the flashes of the gun barrels. Then there are the sounds of hundreds of men rushing toward the walls. In the dark, the different
colored uniforms of the various Mexican regiments are almost
indistinguishable.
"Then there is the answering fire from the men on the walls.
Some of the cannon were firing canister; they were like giant
shotguns. One Mexican soldier later said that almost his entire
company, which included many of the men he had grown up
with in his village, were wiped out by a single burst from a cannon. You can imagine the confusion and horror of both the
attackers and defenders. The entire parade ground inside the
Alamo walls must have been illuminated by fires started by
Mexican cannon fire."
To simulate the most accurate account of the assault ever
put on film required what might be the largest freestanding set
ever constructed, one that included not only the Alamo compound but a church and several houses in the re-creation of
San Antonio, all done in authentic period detail. The production
designer, Michael Corenblith, also a Texan, says, "We checked
out locales in 18 states and even looked hard at Canada," before settling on a location near Austin. "Texans probably would
have disowned the film if we'd made it anywhere else."
I
I
ACTUALLY
HAPPENED,
IN THE DARK.
The area around San Antonio has become much more arid
than it was in 1836, so the set was constructed in the fertile
Texas hill country, about half an hour from Austin. It took up
over 50 acres with more than 70 structures, including a recreation of San Fernando Church and the Veramendi family's
house, reputed to be among the finest in San Antonio. Corenblith was such a stickler for detail that he was horrified when
someone brought him a model for the Alamo chapel that featured the famous peak. "'God, no!' I said. 'There's not going to
be any Taco Bell on my chapel!'''
But Corenblith does concede one important change that is
bound to annoy some purists. The Alamo chapel itself was
moved up approximately 60 feet closer to the fort's parade
ground, which strikes outsiders as minor but which Alamo
buffs will quickly notice. The reason, says the designer, is
that "we found we needed to use the chapel as a focal point for
everything that happens. You have to be able to spot it immediately to get your bearings. If we had left the chapel in its
original location, there would simply be too many shots in
which we couldn't see it."
A quick walk up the re-creation of the north wall where
Travis died validates Corenblith. From the spot where the assault began one can see virtually every corner of the amazing
set, from the front gate to the south to the chapel itself. The
structures look so authentic that it's almost impossible to be-
lieve the entire compound is made of wood and plaster instead
of adobe. (Located on private property, the set may be left standing-as, indeed, has the set for Wayne's epic-for visitors to
live out their own Alamo fantasies.)
With everyone from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas
to Mexican-American activists waiting in line to have a say on
the new film, the shape of the chapel facade might be the least
of the filmmakers' problems. When the project was first announced in winter of 2002 (with Ron Howard as the intended
director), Michael Eisner, chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, proclaimed that the film intended to "capture
the post-September 11 surge in patriotism." Following a surge
of negative reaction from Hispanic-Americans who feared that
Disney was out to remake Walt Disney's "Davy Crockett at the
Alamo," the producer Brian Glazer announced that the film's
intention was to avoid "anything controversial."
A movie about the Alamo with no controversy? Not likely.
Controversy about the Alamo will end when America's memory
of the Alamo ends, and early in the twenty-first century, four
decades after Walter Lord wrote his account of the siege, the
end is still not in sight.
*
Allen Barra, who writes the "Screenings" column for "History
Now" in American Heritage is the author of Inventing Wyatt
Earp: His Life and Many Legends.