Alamo Heights
Or maybe it should be "Alamo Depths." In late October Disney delayed the release of its $90 million restaging of the mythic battle from Christmas Day to April, a decision that set the rumor mill spinning. Will Hollywood ultimately pass this history test? Or will Travis, Bowie, and Crockett die at the box office too?
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Of course, the biggest Alamo movie of all was John Wayne’s, released in 1960. Although Wayne’s publicity machine cranked out story after story about how authentic The Alamo was going to be, moviegoers and critics had a field day spotting errors—the old mission is located alongside the Rio Grande instead of the San Antonio River; Goliad is said to be north of San Antonio instead of southeast—and historians have been able to find little that is accurate in it. But according to the Duke, his version made plenty of sense: “I think it’s the greatest piece of folklore ever brought down through history,” he said at the time, “and folklore has always been the most successful medium for motion pictures.”
By simultaneously ducking the question of historical accuracy and offering a brilliant explanation of the difference between history and film, Wayne pointed to the essential dilemma of anybody seeking to tell the absolute truth about the Alamo: No one knows what really happened. The truth is always changing, as new scholarship and new documents and new interpretations challenge the old, received ideas, many of them burned permanently into the collective American consciousness by powerful celluloid images. There is a whole body of Alamo scholarship that is constantly being roiled by new books, and there is a whole body of scholarship about the Alamo movies themselves. Anybody trying to sort out fact from fiction has his work cut out for him. But there are plenty of Texas males (women, on the whole, have not written much about the Alamo, but that may be changing) who visited the Alamo when they were in short pants, never fully recovered from the experience, and have gone on to become Texas historians, pouring out a seemingly endless drip-drip-drip of books and articles on this peskiest of all Texas stories.
FROM THE BEGINNING, JOHN LEE HANCOCK felt the hot breath of Texas patriots on the back of his neck. He was very much aware of the controversial reception a poorly researched Alamo movie would likely get in Texas—or a well-researched one, for that matter. When I spoke with him in October, as we both thought he was putting the finishing touches on the film, he talked about the problem: “I think that when you’re doing something like this, when it’s a story as important as this is to me, anyway, you’re always going to feel the burden of history.”
Hancock sees the mythic tale as a “character drama”—it’s both a “big story and a small story at the same time,” he said—and has sought to open up the narrative, to explain how the men, especially the major figures, came to be at the old mission. In his telling, Texas offered them a second chance. Travis fled debts and a wife and child; Bowie had a decidedly unsavory background as a slave trader and frontier brawler; and Crockett wanted a fresh start in a place far from Washington, D.C. The Alamo gave them all a shot at redemption, though they would have much preferred to walk away from it victorious to fight another day. And unlike most Alamo films, Hancock’s doesn’t end with the fall of the garrison but goes on to dramatize what happened in its aftermath.
The Alamo story has built-in expectations because it has been filmed so many times and has inspired so much commentary. Starting out, Hancock was faced with a mass of material. “Like every other kid in Texas, I took Texas history and knew all of that,” he told me, “but there had been so much written in the last thirty years that I hadn’t read, and catching up on that, I said, ‘I’m just gonna find the most interesting stories.’” The reading continued right through the making of the film, and by the end, the production-office crew had assembled a small library of Alamo volumes, some 21 titles in all, ranging from Walter Lord’s A Time to Stand to Jack Jackson’s comic-book format The Alamo: An Epic Told From Both Sides.
Faced with so many conflicting versions and arguments, Hancock adopted a clever strategy to ward off the accuracy police: He enlisted the help of historians more fully than any previous director of the Alamo story ever had, embedding them in the day-to-day work of making the film. Their purpose was to help him get the facts right and, one has to believe, to preempt and defuse criticism from historians such as themselves.
He called upon Jesús F. de la Teja (A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguin) and Andrés Tijerina (Tejano Empire: Life on the South Texas Ranchos) to review the script to verify the Mexican perspective and Stephen Hardin (Texian Iliad) and Alan Huffines (Blood of Noble Men: The Alamo Siege and Battle) to be on the set every day of shooting. As Huffines told the Austin American-Statesman, “We sit behind John Lee and look at what the camera sees and try to find mistakes.” Of course, Hancock said, “There’s always going to be those moments when they point out, ‘Gosh, that guy has the wrong shoes on,’ and you tell them, ‘Well, he’s about a thousand people back, and no one will ever see that.’” And sometimes the historians had to suspend their allegiance to literalism. The decision to film the Battle of San Jacinto at the Lost Pines Nature Ranch, near Bastrop, prompted Hardin to observe, “Does it look exactly like San Jacinto? No. San Jacinto is a swamp. We have all this dust here, but it looks great on-screen.”
The striving for historical accuracy extended to the kinds of details that few viewers would be able to distinguish, like the uniforms worn by the Mexican army, which are said to be correct down to the last button, and the linguistic variations among the soldiers and officers. Hancock sought the expertise of Arnoldo Vento, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin, to get it right because, explained Hancock, “It’s not just period Spanish; it’s the caste system being in place, several different types of Spanish being spoken,” and he brought in a “Cherokee specialist to monitor our Cherokee.” All of the non-English dialogue will be rendered in subtitles for those of us who aren’t up to speed on Spanish and Cherokee.
One of the things that just about everybody can agree on is that the set, built on the Reimer Ranch, near Dripping Springs, is the most authentic Alamo set ever constructed. Designer Michael Corenblith, another Texan who visited the Alamo as a child, oversaw the construction of the mission and its environs. On a site covering 51 acres, the set is reputed to be the largest ever built in the U.S. (Alamo films, like the state, thrive on superlatives.) Harrigan, among others, has praised Corenblith’s scrupulous devotion to detail, telling the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “The set is, almost brick for brick, San Antonio de Béxar in 1836.” It won admiration from all who saw it, including Frank Thompson, an author of several books on Alamo lore, who rhapsodized to the Dallas Morning News, “I think we all want to be able to visit it once a year for the rest of our lives.” (Among Alamaniacs, such enthusiasm is not uncommon.)
I asked Hancock about the mise-en-scène of his film, the particular style and look that he has given the story. “I call it Dirty Dickens,” he said. What this means, along with the dust and grime, is a lot of shaggy facial hair in the form of period muttonchops. “People think of it as a western, for some reason,” Hancock went on, “which is beyond me, since it happened in 1836.” He said that when folks tell him they’re “dying to see a western, lots of cowboys,” he replies, “We got some top hats but no Stetsons; they’re not invented yet.” I raised the question of firepower. Repeating pistols and rifles would certainly make for a lot more bang-bang, but of course they hadn’t been invented yet either. “You got the old black powder and a few percussion rifles,” Hancock noted, “but you’re pretty much slow-loadin’.” I was reminded of Michael Lind’s long poem, The Alamo: An Epic, in which he inexplicably gives Travis a “Colt revolver,” which Travis certainly could have used but which did not yet exist.
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