"My Kingdom for a historically accurate movie!" Topic

Which historical character from the conflict commonly known as the "War of the Roses" is most deserving of a full length movie?

Mine:

5) Henry the 6th
4) The Yorkist Princes (of the Tower)
3) Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick & "Kingmaker"
2) Edward the 4th (admittedly probably the best story)
1) Richard the 3rd (everybody loves a good Badguy)

I'd LOVE to see a good miniseries covering the whole shee-bang!

That said, Ian McKellen is my favorite Richard III of all time….

I DO think you could do it all in 3 movies (Henry 6th, Edward the 4th & Richard III).

A Netflix & BBC show would be great too.

(6) Margaret of Anjou. Even if you're a Yorkist sympathizer, you have to hand it to her for her extraordinary, heroic efforts to keep her coalition going, to win foreign support, and to even swallow her fury at Warwick to try to win for her son what she considered her birthright. A suitably tragic end would make a powerful end to the film.

No love for Lambert Simnel…?
<dives into bunker>

I'd love to see a fair historical treatment of Richard III, given that much of our attitudes towards him are colored by centuries of Tudor propaganda, which extended to re-touching paintings to create the "hunchback king" myth, Shakespeare's play (which was approved by the Tudors), and so forth.

SBminisguy +1

I would like to see something like The White Queen with fights, battles, and male characters with depth. The strong emphasis on personal and family relationships was exactly the right theme for Medieval politics, but war is drama, and the subject is the Wars of the Roses, fergoshsakes.

Richard Neville or Richard III for me

But Margaret of Anjou would be good too

Find some perpetually snozzled Irish absurdist playwrite, get him royally polluted, bring in a medium to channel Samuel Beckett, and have him pen the tale of the Princes,…

Waiting for the Blade.

Movie of the battle of Bosworth, So I can see Richard get his due.

Edward, never lost a battle but done in by eels.

I think a good one would be to focus on the House of York. A bunch of interesting people there.

I thought The White Queen was excellent and a very fair representation of both Warwick and Richard (even if he was a bit emo!). Yes, it was a histori-drama, but was good fun. The books go on a bit though.

Got to be Edward IV, for me.
Shakespeare as "history" of Wars of the Roses? That's like saying the movies "Braveheart" or "Cromwell" are history!

"I think a good one would be to focus on the House of York. A bunch of interesting people there"

I'm reading a book right now called "The Brothers York" that would be a good starting place for a script.

All good except Princes in the tower.

White Queen was very good in my opinion, and I'm pretty critical of most ‘medieval' movies.

I sort of feel there is no real chance of an historically accurate movie for this period, who would know? A few scholars would catch some things, but for history this old, script writers have a ton of blanks to fill in. We have no real clue about everyday speech, for example. Writings are not the same. Anachronisms abound in these things. That we even know of.

So just make it a good drama, like Shakespeare did with Julius Caesar, and I will watch.

There are clues about contemporary speech, between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales' and 'Gawain and the Green Knight' (although representing different dialects) Rhyme schemes help ascertain pronunciation.

I don't think, though, that the audience would thank you for using a script in authentic vernacular.

"Yondah is the castle of my fader" Now _that_ is historical drama.

I always thought line was "Yondah lies the cassle ov my foddah". What a great movie.

A WOTR film in Middle English would be a real hoot. It is OK to make out written down, but some of the words are bit obscure, and add in contemporary pronunciation… Still if they can shoot Vikings in Old Norse and Frankish, why not?

Andrew Trollope is another fun story if you wanna avoid the Nobles.