by TOM MACKAMAN
America’s first two revolutions, the American Revolution and the Civil War, offer serious dramatic possibilities for film and television. Their intrinsic interest arises from the fact that revolutions can destroy old, seemingly permanent social orders—even in America… especially in America! To borrow the phrase from Tom Paine, revolutions contain in themselves the “power to begin the world over again.”
Despite the dramatic prospects for both, worthy historical treatments of the American Revolution have been far outnumbered by those of the Civil War, although those are mostly recent (for years, Hollywood studios avoided dramas about the Civil War, for fear of offending southern audiences or adopted a pro-Confederacy stance, as in Gone With the Wind, 1939).
World Soicalist Web Site for more