Well, if you say so...

[selenak]

Martin Scorsese and Michael Hirst want to do a tv show called THE CAESARS, about the early rulers of ancient Rome.

I, Claudius who? Rome what? Well, okay, fine, it never stopped anyone in entertainment that there are earlier versions. And given how uninspired the first half of the latest Vikings season came across to me (which is why I haven't reviewed in these very pages, gentle reader), I'm not surprised Hirst is ready to move on. Allow me some amusement, though:

He says his dramas are not documentaries but the details are rooted in history: “Just like Shakespeare’s history plays, they only start with some historical facts, then the drama takes over. You can’t have both.”

Hirst, you're not Shakespare. (Not that he's more accurate, I'll grant you.) Your shows are at their best entertaining schlock with some compelling characters. Stand by it.

Also:

The Caesars aims to give a new insight into the young Julius Caesar: “In the movies he’s usually a middle-aged guy, struggling with political complexities. But he was fantastically interesting and ambitious when he was younger.

Because clearly, a middle aged guy struggling with political complexities is dull. (So much for you, Londo Mollari, character of characters of my heart.) Btw, the idea that Caesar grew less ambitious as he grew older would amuse everyone in Rome to no end. (Or not, depending on their political pov. And state of survival.) This said, Caesar's younger years are less covered. Basically, here are young Gaius Julius Caesars I recall from the last decades:

1) The one from Xena, played by Karl Urban. Spoiler: he's a villain.
2) The one from Spartacus: War of the Damned, where he's one of main antagonist Crassus' two sidekicks. Spoiler: he's a villain.
3) The one from Colleen McCulloughs Masters of Rome book series, volume 3, Fortunes' Favourites. Meant to be a hero, but alas, she commits the dreadful mistake of Gary Stuing him into boringness, here and in subsequent volumes. (Which is why I like the first two volumes with Marius and Sulla as main characters so much better. She didn't make that mistake with those two.) (Err, Caesar is around for many more books in that series, of course, but we're talking about young Caesar specifically.
4) The one from Waltraud Lewin's YA novel about young Servilia, written in German and so my knowledge not translated into English. For my money the most interesting of the lot, though she takes some liberties as in: young Servilia and Caesar already meet when Sulla rules, Servilia just got married to Brutus and Caesar is on the run. It's a coming of age novel about Servilia, and young C. is both charming and ambigious, more of a trickster character. Also prone to fall sick with Malaria at the worst moment.

Basically, there's room for Hirst to deliver his own version to pop culture, and he's bound to use both the on-the-run-from-Sulla episode and the interlude with the pirates, but what I really want to know is whether or not he'll use the King of Bithynia as boyfriend, and not, as Colleen McCullough in her Gary Stu tale did, as a paternal friend. More Hirst talk:

A lot of the Caesars came to power when they were young, and we’ve never really seen that on screen. It’s the energy, the vitality, the excess of a young culture that’s being driven by young people.

Um, what? Octavian/Augustus was young when coming to power, granted, but Tiberius was OLD. (Part of the problem. By the time he'd finally made it to the throne, he was too bitter not to take that out on people.) Caligula was young again, whereas Uncle Claudius was old. And then Nero rounds it off with another young Caesar as the last of the Julian-Claudian dynasty. That makes three young power reachers versus three old ones (if you count Caesar himself, who most definitely was NOT young when making it to true power in Rome.

Mind you, in the most recent season of Vikings, Hirst presents an adult Alfred (who has thus the bad luck to compete with the one from The Last Kingdom, and well, that's a tough job to live up to) who gets on the throne in a decidedly ahistorical way and at an ahistorical point in his life, so I wouldn't put it beyond him to shorten the reign of Augustus so Tiberius isn't that old and sour and keeping Claudius magically young. (I mean, Lagertha looks unchanged since season 1, which means the actor playing her son Björn now looks older than she does.) And of course, this is the producer/writer who cast Jonathan Rhys Meyer as Henry VIII and kept him from gaining weight and grey hair until the very last episodes of the last season of The Tudors. What confounds me is that that Hirsts older characters are more often than not his most interesting ones. His Cardinal Wolsey was the only one I was interested in in the first season of The Tudors. To give credit where due, Hirst was the only one who really used Chapuys the Imperial Ambassador as key supporting character through the entire show, and Chapuys isn't a youngster, either, at any point. As for Vikings, Siggy was my favourite for the first two seasons (alas), and never mind Ragnar, Ekbert was the magnificent bastard for me, as played by Linus Roache and thus no spring chicken, either.

Another thing: no one would ever dispute Martin Scorsese's cinematic eye, but the combination of the two definitely makes me think "male centric saga to the nth degree". And you know, not that Rome was feminist (au contraire), but Atia and Servilia were among the most memorable characters, and I, Claudius would never have had the impact it did without Livia in the first half. In conclusion: if I were you, Michael Hirst, I'd hire some female scriptwriters to work with me.

Lastly, on an unrelated note: tomorrow I'll be busy the entire day, so I won't get to watch the Star Trek: Discovery finale until the evening, if that. Pray remember the spoiler cut is your friend, oh fellow Disco admirers, and so am I!

Comments

[sovay]

"The past and the present are virtually the same to me, because it's just continuity. With the Tudors and Vikings, we make them seem resonant and relevant to people today."

I think somebody just woke up and decided what they really want to make is The Tudors with togas.

Which is fine if that's what you acknowledge you're doing, but if you try to present it as some kind of recovery of lost and important history, I am going to continue to give you the raspberry, which was my first response to reading that article. "Make them seem resonant and relevant to people today": because no one has ever become interested in the classical world for what it was really like, not because the power players were Just Like Us, Only Sexier.

[moon_custafer]

Well, at least they’re ensuring Frock Flicks won’t run out of things to snark about any time soon:
http://www.frockflicks.com/stop-trying-to-be-relatable/

[maidenjedi]

Interesting. I suppose I'm not opposed to this, but it'd need a lot to actually draw me in to watch. :-/

[4thofeleven]

Man, why does everyone want to do the Julio-Claudians again? When do we get a Crisis of the Third Century drama, or the Year of the Five Emperors?

[lilacsigil]

Colleen McCullough was a terrific writer, but boy did she love Caesar and it really damaged her books once he was the central character.

[selenak]

I hear you. Bring on the Flavians! Or go Byzantine, there’s no shortage of endless melodrama there in Constantinople.

[selenak]

No kidding. Textbook example of “why falling in love with your central character can have terrible results, even for a good writer”. That’s why I think Alfred in Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon series benefits to no end from NOT bveing either the central character nor the author’s favourite, and that the author has indeed considerable reservations towards several of his actions. Result: a far more interesting character!

[selenak]

It will depend on my time schedule. There so many shows reccommended to me by now which are supposedly excellent!

[selenak]

No kidding. Hooray for shows like “John Adams” which were willing to give their characters non-contemporary attitudes and did cast an actor as the lead who looked plumb and wasn’t tall, i.e. just right for who he’s supposed to be!

[selenak]

Oh, I so agree. I’m not immune to soap operas in costumes, but pretending that they want to explore actual historical differences is really not on, if that’s what you want to do. Mind you, to be fair to Hirst, Natalie Dormer convinced him between seasons 1 and 2 of the Tudors to alter his Anne Boleyn characterisation to something more historical, with the result that s2 Anne is way more interesting, so he’s open to input and doesn’t regard himself as above criticism. And the early seasons of Vikings did try to get across some of the Norse and Saxon otherness (in both cases). But the overall tendency of his shows is very much “sexy and bloody soap”.

[sovay]

or the Year of the Five Emperors?

I would love a Year of the Five Emperors done as a black comedy, maybe Death of Stalin-style.

[selenak]

Me too!

[vaznetti]

I'm not a huge stickler for historical accuracy (at all -- I just watched ALL of Britannia) but a change would be nice. We were in the Neues Museum this morning because we're visiting Berlin and A turned to me and pointed out that the next big thing should really be a drama about the Amarna Period. And he's right: it has all the intrigue, beautifful people, dramatic reversals, you could squeeze in some battles and there is a reasonable argument for canonical incest. I don't know why no one has thought of it before this!

[moon_custafer]

Rewatched Heaven Can Wait (1943) last night. The costumes and hairstyles in the late-nineteenth-century scenes didn’t seem too “off;” but since the turn of the 19-20th century is a period covered pretty frequently, I’m wondering how much of that was the costumes being right and how much was the costumes being wrong but in a way I’m used to*. Certainly the women, at least the ones meant to be young and attractive, had on makeup, and that’s one of the things I do tend to forgive as long as it’s not too blatant, since a movie production usually requires at least some makeup on everybody. The one outfit that always weirds me out, though, is Gene Tierney’s dress and hairstyle in her last scene: I’d always thought that at this point in the movie it’s the late ‘teens, but I re-did the math and if Don Ameche’s character was born in 1872, was twenty-six when they eloped, and this is their twenty-fifth anniversary party, then it’s actually 1923. In which case that’s a pretty weird dress and hairstyle for 1923. It would have been not incomprehensible as a 1940s attempt at a 1918 gown, although nothing can explain that hairstyle except that Guy Pierce did the makeup and he’s also responsible for the Bride of Frankenstein**. Tierney’s character by this point is supposed to be somewhere in her late forties, so I guess you could argue she’s not keeping up with the fashions, but since physically she looks pretty much the same as in her earlier scenes except for the gray streak in her hair (I repeat: Guy Pierce, Bride of Frankenstein), and she’s married to a wealthy gadabout, it seems unlikely we’re supposed to assume she’s let herself go***. It seems strange that the scene which is set only twenty years before the movie’s time would have the least-believable period costumes, but I’m guessing that they were trying to dodge the “recent enough to be frumpy rather than quaint or romantic” trap****.

*Studying screenshots, I think the 1890s evening gowns definitely have some 1930s/40s influence, especially around the shoulders.

** Commenters on this post wonder whether Tierney’s beauty aroused some kind of jealous rage in her hairstylists, though another notes that it does look like a vigourous though misguided attempt to combine 1940s “hair horns”/victory rolls with a 1920s marcel wave.

*** I think she was also pregnant towards the end of filming (with the daughter who was injured by Tierney having been exposed to rubella by a fan who’d broken quarentine), but she’s not visibly so in any of her scenes, at least that I can tell.

****I’m led to believe that from 1930 until maybe 1974, the popular wisdom was that 1920s fashions were the-worst-thing-ever, so I guess I can understand a 1940s costume designer, faced with a non-comedic scene set in the period, deciding to just pretend that everyone at the time wore a mashup of teens and ‘thirties styles.

[likeadeuce]

LOl I mean, I'm gonna watch it but WHAT?

[alethia]

In conclusion: if I were you, Michael Hirst, I'd hire some female scriptwriters to work with me.

Except that Hirst doesn't work with other writers and has betrayed contempt for them in his interviews. Part of the problem with his shows, imo, is that he does it all on his own, so his creepy biases and shitty writing tics come through unfiltered.

[saturnofthemoon]

Well, it could be worse. At least he's not rebooting I, Claudius...

[selenak]

Well, there was a three part miniseries called "Tut", I kid you not, just last year, complete with canonical incest, but don't bother checking it out, it wasn't very good. (And started after Akhenaten and Nefertiti were already dead, with the main characters being Tutanchamen, his sister and his fictional true love, with Eli and Horemhab as important supporting characters as well as some made up OCs.)

Now book wise, I've seen a lot done with the Armana period, both centred on the royals and not, and it tells you a lot not about historical research as much as about the spirit of the era how Akhenaten's monotheism is presented. In Mika Waltari's The Egyptian, he's a noble idealist going up against a corrupt priesthood. The damage he causes is unintentional, and the novel's main character, Sinuhe, who ends up killing him, considers him the best person he's ever met. Fast forward a few decades, and in Pauline Gedge's "Pharao", he's basically David Koresh, a sex obsessed incesteous cult leader and life ruiner. Then there's series of mysteries by an author I can't recall right now which is set during Tutanchamen's reign, but with flashbacks to Akhenaten's reign because the hero, a true believer in polytheism, was persecuted and his father killed when Akhenaten made Aten the sole god, and in these flashbacks Akhenaten is basically Ayatollah Chomenei. Meanwhile, the sole recent Egyptian take I've read, by Nagib Nachfus, written during Mubarak's reign, has Akhenaten as a noble idealist again who is up against a corrupt military in league with the (polytheistic) priests. And Judith Tarr's "Pillar of Fire" has followed Freud's idea of him being Moses, with the twist being that he has to realise you can't start a monotheistic revolution from the top, you have to give up your office and power and become one of the people. There is incest in this take, too, but out of Egyptian tradition, not for actual lust, and post-stint in the desert and change of identity to become Moses, there never is again.