Movie makers interested in Hannah Duston story

HAVERHILL - Several independent movie makers and script writers are interested in bringing controversial Colonial heroine Hannah Duston to the big screen. Scott Baron, CEO of Los Angeles-based Dynamo Entertainment, a new film-making company that seeks to produce as many as five low- to mid-budget movies per year, said his writers have already started developing a script about Duston "to see if we can do her story justice while creating a moving and exciting film."

Duston made history March 15, 1697, when she was kidnapped by Abenaki Indians, who killed her infant daughter by bashing the baby's head against a tree. Two weeks later on March 30, Duston escaped with her nursemaid and a young boy from an island in the middle of the Merrimack River near present-day Concord, N.H., by killing and scalping as many as 10 of her captors.

"The Colonial time and locale of the story really caught my eye," said Baron, stepson of prolific movie producer Art Levinson. "There seems to be such a reliance on weaponry, gadgets and explosions these days. But Hannah Duston's story is compelling without relying on such devices.

"This is a story not only with a strong female lead but also a solid tale of triumph over adversity and overwhelming odds," Baron said.

Hollywood has served up such recent movies based in Colonial Massachusetts as "Amistad," "The Crucible" and "The Scarlet Letter."

Benjamin Jackendoff, another Los Angeles film producer who recently worked with director Larry Cohen on "Phone Booth," is also intrigued by Duston's story, which he said he read about as a college literature student and recently in a newspaper account of her re-emergence as a controversial figure in Haverhill.

"Her story is every parent's worst nightmare," Jackendoff said. "She's a strong, complex and ambiguous character. That lends itself to a narrative that combines the very different versions of her story from Cotton Mather and the Abenaki. After working with Larry Cohen, you can't help but see the commercial potential for a thriller in a story like that."

In a version of the story by the Abenaki tribe, Duston is more blood-thirsty murderess and less victim. In the Abenaki account, she befriended members of the tribe, got several of them drunk and then slaughtered them with a hatchet as they slept.

In the Colonial version, Duston returned home to Haverhill in a canoe, and the government rewarded her with 50 pounds sterling and other gifts. In 1879, she became the first woman in America to be immortalized with a statue, and her story was told in accounts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Cotton Mather and Henry David Thoreau. Although she is the heroine of several books, she has yet to be portrayed in a movie.

Interest in Duston's story and her past were rekindled recently when she was made official ambassador of this Saturday's battle of the bands organized by Team Haverhill and the city. Posters of Duston holding an electric guitar, in place of the axe she wields in her Main Street statue, have been hung throughout the city.

Media accounts of Duston and Haverhill have appeared in newspapers across the country since The Eagle-Tribune published a story Friday about the city's use of Duston as a symbol of its downtown revival.

"It's the ultimate feminist story," said Rebecca Day, a Massachusetts native and freelance writer who has done script development for Hallmark Entertainment and Lifetime Television. "It has all the qualities of a hot Lifetime movie. I would pitch it as 'Ransom' meets 'The Crucible.'"

"What interests me is exploring what made her tick," Day said. "I think the story perfectly illustrates what happens when one's world turns into chaos. A person really has to go into survival mode, regardless of what role society thinks he or she is supposed to play. Although women at this time were considered second-class citizens, I think it's funny how many men so easily became her followers and admirers."

Constantine Valhouli, principal of a Bradford company that specializes in revitalizing historic urban centers and who is helping to promote the music festival, said he has spoken to representatives from New York and Los Angeles production houses about Duston.

"Hannah's story would make a good film for the same reason she makes a great symbol for Haverhill," Valhouli said. "Her story of courage and conflict is timeless. Change the details slightly and it is still happening around the world."

Day, the Los Angeles producer, said he believes Duston's story could be produced on a reasonable budget and still connect with audiences.

"The biggest issue that films like this will face is that period films are often expensive to produce," he said, noting that the most recent film of the genre, "The New World," was a critical disappointment. On the other hand, "Dances with Wolves" grossed over $424 million, and "Last of the Mohicans" made over $100 million, he said.

Haverhill reporter Shawn Regan may be contacted at 978-373-1000, or sregan@eagletribune.com.

"But...but...what about the Indian with the tear rolling down his cheek at the pollution?"

You mean the Italian guy?

http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/ironeyes.htm

Claim: The actor known as Iron Eyes Cody was a true-born Native Indian.

Status: False.

Origins: Although
no one could say exactly when we humans first began to have concerns about the effects our activities have on our environment, most of us baby boomers could pinpoint 1970-71 as the Iron Eyes Cody timespan during which we first became aware of the "ecology movement," as the era when concern for what humans were doing to the world they lived in ran at a fever pitch. Protecting the planet's resources by calling upon each person to pitch in and do whatever he or she could do to limit the abuse was seen as the right and proper focus of the times. High schools offered classes in ecology. Public school students painted posters decrying pollution. And television ads worked to remind everyone that the problem was real, here, and now.

Three events which occurred during the year between March 1970 and March 1971 helped bring the concept of "ecology" into millions of homes and made it a catchword of the era. One was the first annual Earth Day, observed on 21 March 1970. The second was Look magazine's promotion of the ecology flag in its 21 April 1970 edition, a symbol that was soon to become as prominent a part of American culture as the ubiquitous peace sign. The third — and perhaps the most effective and unforgettable — was the television debut of Keep America Beautiful's landmark "People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It" public service ad on the second Earth Day in March 1971.

In that enduring minute-long TV spot, viewers watched an Indian paddle his canoe up a polluted and flotsam-filled river, stream past belching smokestacks, come ashore at a litter-strewn river bank, and walk to the edge of a highway, where the occupant of a passing automobile thoughtlessly tossed a bag of trash out the car window to burst open at the astonished visitor's feet. When the camera moved upwards for a close-up, a single tear was seen rolling down the Indian's face as the narrator dramatically intoned: "People start pollution; people can stop it."

That "crying Indian," as he would later sometimes be referred to, was Iron Eyes Cody, an actor who throughout his life claimed to be of Cherokee/Cree extraction. Yet his asserted ancestry was just as artificial as the tear that rolled down his cheek in that television spot — the tear was glycerine, and the "Indian" a second-generation Italian-American.

(The spurious use of Native Americans to promote "save the Earth" messages was not limited to this one instance. A moving exposition on the sanctity of the land and the need for careful stewardship of it is still widely quoted as the bona fide words of Chief Seattle. Though the chief was real, the speech was not — the words came not from the chief's own lips in 1854 but flowed from the pen of a screenwriter in 1971.)

Iron Eyes Cody was born Espera DeCorti on 3 April 1904 in the small town of Kaplan, Louisiana. He was the son of Francesca Salpietra and Antonio DeCorti, she an immigrant from Sicily who had arrived in the USA in 1902, and he another immigrant who had arrived in America not long before her. Theirs was an arranged marriage, and the couple had four children, with Espera (or Oscar, as he was called) their second eldest. In 1909, when Espera was five years old, Antonio DeCorti abandoned his wife and children and headed for Texas. Francesca married again, this time to a man named Alton Abshire, with whom she bore five more children.

As teenagers the three DeCorti boys joined their father in Texas. He had since altered his name from Antonio DeCorti to Tony Corti, and the boys apparently followed suit as far as their surname was concerned. In 1924, following their father's death, the boys moved to Hollywood, changed "Corti" to "Cody," and began working in the motion picture industry. It was about this time Iron Eyes began presenting himself to the world as an Indian. Iron Eyes' two brothers, Joseph William and Frank Henry, found work as extras but soon drifted into other lines of work. Iron Eyes went on to achieve a full career as an actor, appearing in well over a hundred movies and dozens of television shows across the span of several decades.

Although Iron Eyes was not born an Indian, he lived his adult years as one. He pledged his life to Native American causes, married an Indian woman (Bertha Parker), adopted two Indian boys (Robert and Arthur), and seldom left home without his beaded moccasins, buckskin jacket and braided wig. His was not a short-lived masquerade nor one that was donned and doffed whenever expedient — he maintained his fiction throughout his life and steadfastly denied rumors that he was not an Indian, even after his half-sister surfaced to tell the story in 1996 and to provide pointers to the whereabouts of his birth certificate and other family documents.

Cody died on 5 January 1999 at the age of 94.

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