Word: franzoni
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Coleman had put in hundreds of hours helping screenwriter David H. Franzoni create a script that accurately represented the Roman Empire at the time of Emperor Commodus...
...Franzoni, who also produced the film, says that logistical problems at times hindered their precision...
...When we got in full swing of production there were script problems and we were rewriting. Cries for accuracy were lost in the thunder of this being made," Franzoni says. "Most historians have an agenda and are willing to bend the facts to make the agenda work...So it's not just filmakers...
...idea for Gladiator began in the '70s when screenwriter David Franzoni read Daniel P. Mannix's Those About to Die, a briskly lurid history of the Roman games. "It really made a connection between that era and ours," Franzoni says, "about how sports heroes are slavishly worshiped by their fans." A few years ago, while writing his script for Steven Spielberg's Amistad, he worked on an idea about gladiators as "commercialized idols, their endorsements on frescoes, chariots and jars of olive oil." When Scott was hired, he brought in John Logan (Any Given Sunday) to create Maximus' life...
...other words, words--lots of words. But Spielberg is up to their challenge. His handling of the long courtroom scenes is wonderfully alert to unsuspected visual and dramatic possibilities. Better still, he and the screenplay (credited to David Franzoni) are alive to the--yes--sometimes humorous, and therefore humanizing, struggles of the slaves and their would-be rescuers to surmount the language and cultural barriers that separate them. In our own age, with democracy travestied by ethnic- and interest-group politicking, the most instructive thing about Amistad may lie in its demonstration that broad principle, shrewdly advanced, can find ways...