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...Filipino resort workers. Under cover of darkness they were taken to Jolo island, in the southern Philippines, about an hour away. For days the captors' identity was a mystery, with speculation running from plain pirates to Abu Sayyaf, the most feared Muslim rebel group in the predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines. At midweek the Philippine Defense Secretary confirmed that the hostages were being held by Galib Andang, a.k.a. "Commander Robot," the Abu Sayyaf leader on Jolo and perpetrator of other kidnappings. He wanted a multimillion-dollar ransom. Late in the week Abu Sayyaf allowed a free-lance journalist a glimpse...
...Anyone with a little showman in his blood knew it could work." And now the rest of Hollywood knows too. Even before it opens, Gladiator smells like a hit. Its early glow has movie people saying "Of course!" Of course there's a magnetic pull of audiences to Roman Empire epics--stories about palace sex, political backstabbing and violent raids are as today as the Clinton Administration. Of course Ridley Scott, whose only big hit was the 1979 Alien but who directed influential films such as Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise, possessed the vision and stamina to bring a complex...
...Walter Parkes, the production boss at DreamWorks who greenlighted Gladiator, says, "Recently there have been very successful movies--Titanic, The Mask of Zorro, Saving Private Ryan--that introduced classic genres to new audiences, employing modern writing and digital techniques. The Roman epic occupies a strange, special place in the heart of moviegoers. We love the good ones like Ben-Hur and Spartacus, but even the bad ones are guilty pleasures." Scott recalls seeing these epics in his youth. "I loved the costume drama of it all and remembered that world vividly," he says. "But I also knew...
...plot, familiar from the 1964 epic The Fall of the Roman Empire, is this: in A.D. 180, Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) is ailing. He anoints his best general, Maximus (Crowe), a man whose motto is "Strength and Honor," as Protector of Rome until it can again become a republic. Before announcing his decision, Marcus informs his son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who lusts to be Emperor. Commodus is displeased by the news; he smothers Marcus in his bosom, murdering him with a filial embrace, and proclaims himself Emperor. In short order, the nasty boy has swiped Maximus' job, ordered...
...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...