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Last Spring, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture invited 49-year-old screenwriter/director Ronald Maxwell to participate on a panel of filmmakers at Paramount Studios. The subject was Hollywood and historicity in film. The usual pontifications regarding art and entertainment permeated the discussion—"compression," "inescapable subjectivism," "pre-eminent aesthetic considerations"—until it came to Maxwell.

"[People say] it's only a movie, not brain surgery. I disagree. What we do is soul surgery, and it reaches millions. We have important stories to tell—wonderful, mythic, true stories. The first job of the filmmaker making a historical film is to tell the truth. … I must try, as hard as I can, to discover the truth and tell it."

It is this commitment to truth that made Maxwell's 1992 film Gettysburg—with its moral dilemmas, its praying, psalm-quoting soldiers, and four-hour length—so remarkable.

In it we meet the young classics professor-turned-colonel, Joshua L. Chamberlain, as he faced his mutinous Union regiment. They knew he was free to shoot them, but they refused to fight. The rebel army was massed just up the road near Gettysburg, only a few days' march from Washington. History has credited the words Chamberlain found to say to the angry, dispirited men with assisting the progress of freedom in the world. The men were moved to fight. Chamberlain's stand at the Battle of Little Round Top was a pivotal victory at Gettysburg, and Gettysburg was the turning point in the Civil War.

Because of Maxwell's film, millions of moviegoers heard Chamberlain's masterful articulation of America's founding principle. Still, for us to hear those words, Maxwell at one point had to mortgage his house to hold on to his film rights to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book the movie was based on, Killer Angels. And he endured going to every Hollywood studio numerous times for financing, without success. Fifteen years after he began work on the screenplay, Ted Turner put up the money. Gettysburg has grossed over $25 million in video sales alone, surprising everyone in the industry except Maxwell.

EVERYMAN HERO
History's really evil characters don't interest Maxwell as subjects. He believes their exaggerated inhumanity lets the audience "off the hook"—hence his choice of "everyman" characters, like a young civilian colonel. He wants his audience "to identify with the moral dilemma," and to ask "the big questions" of themselves.

Maxwell will soon begin filming another historical epic about another Christian patriot and leader of men—Joan of Arc. "In the case of Joan, I have to work hard to leave this world and all its post-Enlightenment paradigms behind and go back to the fifteenth century when everyone really believed in God."

Joan will portray the girl-warrior historians credit with forging the French nation as she was in life: a smart, levelheaded, fiercely brave, obstinate-for-good, playful teenager, bursting with love for her family, nature, and her peasant people. But above all, Maxwell is interested in bringing Joan's "absolutely rock-solid faith" to our impoverished culture.

BEYOND PROPAGANDA
Born at Wheelus Air Force Base in Libya, Maxwell explains his "contrarian nature" by pointing to his formative years in Europe (his father was an army air corps lieutenant, his mother is French) and to an early, serious reading habit. His philosophical mind is broad and knowledgeable but free of the self-importance that afflicts Hollywood's auteurs.

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October 6 1997, Vol. 41, No. 11