Me?
A Movie? Well sure. What's playing?
WHAT???
MAKE a movie? ME? You have GOT to be kidding!
Do you know what a career shift that would be for me? I mean, look at my steady, plodding past:
Ice Cream scooper (Baskin-Robbins) to loading dock worker to bank teller...as you can see a perfectly reasonable (if entry-level and plodding) career arc.
Then it was shoe salesman (Florsheim and Freeman Free-Flex: Doesn't break an egg!) to seminary. (And as a good friend told me, "Not that big a change. They're both the sole/soul business" (works better out loud.) I punched him out.)
Then it was Rev. to Wine Shop to a lunatic with a laptop blogging.....blogging......blogging for days, weeks, months between Franken..... and Coleman...... and Lillehaug ........and Ginzburg ........and YOU! All of you!
But now.....movie-making?? Really?? As mixed up an idea as the whirling, tail-chasing, Orange Squirrels of Power just ahead.......
A movie?
Well first, let me put your minds at ease. The subject will NOT be the Franken-Coleman Senate recount.......whew! (Those of you who were hoping for cinematic lunacy can now move on to another diary.)
No, it goes like this.
I have been a Civil War buff since I was a kid. I read Catton's Centennial during the Centennial (WineRev shows his age!). I did book reports on Keith's "Rifles for Watie." Plowed through Nevins and McPherson.
When Ken Burns came out in 1989 (23 years ago?? Surely the space-time continuum is LYING!) on PBS with his "Civil War" series I took the phone off the hook every night it was on. (For you young'uns, that's how you indicated "No incoming calls" with a landline phone.)
I read Shelby Foote's trilogy and finished it convinced I need never read anymore on the War. (The man covered the War from Glorieta Pass to St. Alban's for crying out loud. Glorieta Pass?? Really? And as my seminary friend from New Mexico put it, "Yep. The battle that decided the War.")
And yet......yet in Burns' last episode he spends just a little time on the aftermath of the War, dropping just a hint here and there about what happened to the thousands of now veterans who stacked arms and went home after Appomattox and Bentonville. He mentioned in the after years the veterans kept meeting together, first locally, then statewide, and finally nationally. They formed the UCV (United Confederate Veterans) and the GAR (Grand Army of the Republic, an officially Racially-Integrated national body, almost unheard of for the times) and even got together across that old Blue-Gray line. When Ulysses Grant died in 1885 the GAR post and the UCV post of Norfolk, VA held a joint wake in his memory. Later on, Burns' noted, there were statewide and even national Reunions, including one at Gettysburg in 1913 on the 50th anniversary of the battle.
That got me thinking, thinking about a story. What if an old Confederate and an old Yankee met at Gettysburg 50 years later? Suppose they'd both been in the battle? Maybe fought with each other? What would they have said to each other in 1913? What might they have felt?
My notes say that 10 years after Burns, in 1999, I put down my first thoughts on paper, a scene, a few lines of dialogue. And yet, something was off, something wrong. 185,000 black men had fought in that War too, volunteers to a man. What if, well, if the GAR really was integrated, and there was a Reunion, wouldn't some of the African American vets come too? I wrote more scenes, more dialogue.
And I started researching the 1913 Reunion. I found out the US Army posted a colonel to Gettysburg in 1911 to give him and several officers and soldiers 2 full years to get ready. The state of Pennsylvania invited every honorably discharged veteran, land or sea, to attend, and offered to pay for the event themselves; when they ran out of money they turned to Congress, and Congress put up cash and ordered more support from the Army.
I found out they first planned for 30,000 men. They raised this to 35,000, then, by the spring of 1913, to 40,000. The Army made efforts to prevent veterans from coming because they feared they could not handle the crush. And that same spring they declared the Reunion would be only for white veterans.
Everyone was worried about the civilians descending on a little town of 4000 to gawk at the veterans---where would they stay? Could they be fed? How many would come?
The press of the day caught wind of a big story and reporters kept turning up all spring in Gettysburg doing background stories. Western Union started adding telegraph operators and equipment for the event and extending office hours. The US Signal Corps began stringing up miles of telephone wires so that the vets could even make a free call home (for many of them it would be the first phone call of their lives.....assuming they knew someone on the other end who actually had a phone.)
For me, by 2007 I had a first draft, and a second, and a third. Passed around a novel manuscript among family & friends. Added chapters. Took out paragraphs. Went to a writer's conference in Madison that so impressed me I wrote a completely new version in 6 weeks. Found a publisher and came out with "Encampment: A Novel of Race and Reconciliation" in November of 2009. (Melange Press: Generations, Recount, Encampment)
And yet now I was an accidental expert on the 1913 "National Peace Jubilee" at Gettysburg. I had over 600 photos on my computer (now up to nearly 1000). I have film clips from 1913. On eBay I bought a copy of the official report on the event from the Army to PA. Gov. Tenner published in 1914, complete with more photos and with maps and charts to boot.
I found that while this was THE news event of 1913, a piece of America's Reconstruction story and a unique moment of healing between armies, it has been utterly forgotten. I know professors of American History who have not heard of the event. Bigger Civil War buffs than me, who can track regimental movements at Stone's River down to the square yard are amazed to hear about 1913 for the first time in their lives.
"You need to tell them," say friends and family and acquaintances. "It should be a documentary on PBS, 'The American Experience." because it IS part of America." Or they say, "It should be on 'History Channel' or even 'Military Channel.'
So......last summer and fall I put together a working script, and then went looking for people who could tell me how to make a movie......
....and that trek I will save for the next diary.
So now you know how I got here. Just thought many of you would like to know. Not exactly a Kos sort of diary, and yet.....1913 at Gettysburg was about peace, peace-making in public, a moment of national reconciliation. As such it pre-figures some of the public healing that has been done in South Africa in out times. Such events are all too rare in world history. It seems to me the Kossack community might well be interested in a piece of our national past that speaks about our better side and a better moment.
(1913 was a partial victory for peace. There was a genuine reconciliation between the sections, North and South. Until then there had been some serious concerns voiced about the strength of the nation across such a bloody war.
But it was only partial. The event was in real life a "whites only" event. The re-joining of North with South was done at the cost of denying black Americans any presence or any part in national life. It was a reconciliation on white Southern terms. It was a moment of healing, but it could have been an even greater moment....which is what my novel ended up telling--- a tale of "what if" and "if only".)
Shalom for now.