Remember the Alamo? Unless you recall it as the last stand of a multicultural Paradise Lost, filmmaker John Lee Hancock is sure you remember it wrong.
"Whites and browns lived together," said Hancock, a Texas native, describing his home state's pre-revolutionary past. "It was really culturally diverse. People intermarried. There was very little racism." For one brief moment in the still-aborning 19th century, he believes, "Tejas, Mexico, was a very, very interesting place."
As writer-director of Walt Disney Co.'s planned Christmas release "The Alamo," Hancock is well along the way to recapturing that idyll, real or imagined. In the process, the 46-year-old moviemaker and his partners are reinventing one of America's core historical legends -- and showing how carefully the studios must tread when turning history into entertainment for a rapidly changing and culturally entwined audience, particularly as war clouds are gathering.
For decades, the story of the Alamo -- in which fewer than 200 mostly white Texas rebels were crushed by the 5,000-man Mexican army in 1836 -- has had a decidedly nationalistic bent. The good guys had names such as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and William Travis -- white frontiersmen and revolutionaries fighting the occupying forces of Mexico's Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.
The carnage that befell Crockett and the others holed up behind the Alamo's adobe walls transformed them into American martyrs, lasting symbols of the high cost of freedom for Texas and the U.S.
Perhaps no one stamped this version into popular culture more deeply than John Wayne, who directed and starred in the 1960 movie "The Alamo," which was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture. Wayne, always the hero, donned a coonskin cap and cast himself as Crockett. The movie portrayed Crockett and Texas' white residents, known as Texians, as driven primarily by a thirst for liberty.
But that was just one dimension of the real story. Wayne gave short shrift, for example, to Mexico's case for putting down the rebellion, avoiding such ignoble Texian motivations as the desire of some to own slaves, which was not permitted by Mexican law.
More recent literature has portrayed Crockett as an overambitious politician trying to rebuild a broken career in Texas. Contemporary authors have further contended that the Texas Revolution was fomented in large part by colonists driven by expansionist notions of Manifest Destiny.
