Alamo battles. (Hollywood Report).

Last year, 48-year-old director Ron Howard stood next to Texas governor Rick Perry at the Governor's Mansion in Austin looking at a painting of the Battle of the Alamo. Both men were hopeful the scene would come to life on the big screen: Davy Crockett defending the famed San Antonio mission against a bloody siege by the Mexican army with nothing but bare hands and a rifle butt as weapons.

Howard, who directed A Beautiful Mind, had come to Texas to scout locations and secure the governor's support for his project. He envisioned a film shot in grand style, using the battle itself--which left all defenders, including Crockett, dead--as its linchpin.

When the cameras finally began rolling this winter, Howard wasn't behind them. That baton had been passed to John Lee Hancock, 45, whose directorial debut came in 2002 with The Rookie, a popular film from Disney starring Dennis Quaid.

It seems the story behind the making of Hollywood's next epic film has become a saga in itself, one that dramatizes in real life how the industry operates, and how a shortfall in a media conglomerate's profits can often short-circuit the plans of even the most influential of filmmakers.

News that Howard was off The Alamo as director sent Hollywood buzzing. "Disney Gives 'Rookie' Ace 'Alamo' Reins," read the Variety headline. The fact that Hancock, with only one picture to his credit as director, would now be at the helm of a film that executives were estimating would cost $125 million, was indeed a surprise. Some insiders speculated that Disney didn't want the gritty, mature version of the Alamo battle that Howard reportedly had in mind (in fact, Stephen Gaghan, who wrote the drug war drama Traffic, had been working on the script), preferring to go instead with a more commercial, PG-13 version.

It seemed more likely that Disney head Michael Eisner didn't want shareholders breathing down his neck. They were already disgruntled with corporate performance, and Eisner knew that if the studio overextended itself it la Pearl Harbor, he would have trouble in Burbank.

The making of The Alamo became a ...