About Gods and Generals.(Ron Maxwell)(Interview)

Interview of Ron Maxwell by William F. Jasper

Film maker Ron Maxwell is a distinguished screenplay writer, director, and producer. His credits include Antony and Cleopatra, The Guest, The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, Parent Trap II, in the Land of the Poets, and the first two parts of an epic Civil War trilogy, Gettysburg and the recently released Gods and Generals. He hopes to make the final segment of that trilogy, Last Full Measure, and is currently pursuing a film project on Joan of Arc.

THE NEW AMERICAN: First off, allow me to compliment you on your extraordinary achievement with Gods and Generals. In spite of the savage reviews that it received from a hostile, liberal-left press, I think that time will show it to be one of the great epic films of all time.

Ron Maxwell: Thank you, I appreciate that, especially alter all of the very negative media comment.

TNA: What are the actual box office figures? Do you think that you may recover enough financially to film the third part of the trilogy? Maxwell: It's been very disappointing. It cost $60 million to make the movie, not including distribution costs, and we've grossed in the neighborhood of $14 million. We're trying to understand what happened. Part of it is that I thought that the movie needed long-range. marketing to an audience that, by and large, doesn't go to the movies. And that wasn't done with as much lead time and comprehensiveness as was needed. Because, I think, most of the people who will respond to this movie -- much of the Christian community and conservative community -- normally do not go to the movies.

But it was marketed the way any old movie is marketed, and that just relies on regular moviegoers. And, of course, for many of those moviegoers, this is not necessarily their cup of tea. At least not in the numbers we needed to turn out to the theaters.

Also there is the fact that unless you're over 40 years old you've probably never been to a movie with an intermission. I'm in my 50s, so I remember routinely seeing movies that long. The last movie with an intermission was Gettysburg, 10 years ago. The last one before that was Gandhi, another 10 years before that. You really have to go back to the 1960s to get where we routinely had intermissions.