selenak: (Cleopatra winks by Ever_Maedhros)
selenak ([personal profile] selenak) wrote2018-02-11 06:03 pm

Well, if you say so...

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!
sovay: (I Claudius)

[personal profile] sovay 2018-02-11 06:46 pm (UTC)(link)
"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.
Edited 2018-02-11 18:46 (UTC)
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2018-02-11 07:24 pm (UTC)(link)
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: (awkward)

[personal profile] maidenjedi 2018-02-11 11:03 pm (UTC)(link)
Interesting. I suppose I'm not opposed to this, but it'd need a lot to actually draw me in to watch. :-/
4thofeleven: (Default)

[personal profile] 4thofeleven 2018-02-12 03:02 am (UTC)(link)
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: 12 Apostles rocks, text "Rock On" (12 Apostles)

[personal profile] lilacsigil 2018-02-12 04:08 am (UTC)(link)
Colleen McCullough was a terrific writer, but boy did she love Caesar and it really damaged her books once he was the central character.
sovay: (I Claudius)

[personal profile] sovay 2018-02-12 08:25 am (UTC)(link)
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.
vaznetti: (Default)

[personal profile] vaznetti 2018-02-12 12:03 pm (UTC)(link)
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: neon cat mask (Default)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2018-02-12 03:53 pm (UTC)(link)
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: (genius)

[personal profile] likeadeuce 2018-02-12 11:44 pm (UTC)(link)
LOl I mean, I'm gonna watch it but WHAT?
alethia: (Vikings Lagertha Einar)

[personal profile] alethia 2018-02-13 01:53 am (UTC)(link)
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: (Default)

[personal profile] saturnofthemoon 2018-02-13 03:12 am (UTC)(link)
Well, it could be worse. At least he's not rebooting I, Claudius...