Originally published on May 4, 2003.
By Joe O'Connell
Special to the San Antonio Express-News
DRIPPING SPRINGS -- More than 300 Tejanos frantically scurry past the church of San Fernando. Mothers cradle children, and dusty men in top hats clutch tattered suitcases and jugs of whiskey. A team of longhorns aims a rickety cart forward. Somewhere behind them Santa Anna's men are lurking, and the only escape is across a bridge and into the Alamo compound.
William Barret Travis, natty in a sky-blue suit, and his slave Joe aim their horses toward a doorway where Juan Seguin is loading sacks of corn on a mule-drawn cart.
"Capt. Billy Goat, get your men to the Alamo," Travis says.
"Go to hell," Seguin says. "We're eating corn."
Cut!
A grin crosses the face of "Alamo" director John Lee Hancock. The crew around him erupts into laughter.
"We get a little loopy on Fridays," he says of the joking improvisation from Patrick Wilson (Travis) and Spain's Jordi Molla (Seguin) during the scene rehearsal.
A month to go and all is calm on the set of the biggest budget film production to ever come to Texas - the official number is $90 million - and certainly one that drills to the core of the Lone Star State's mythos. Floating above it all are the ghosts of John Wayne and the seventh-grade Alamo history lesson that every Texas boy and girl has learned for generations.
"I try not to look at the horizon too much for fear of not getting out of bed," says Hancock, a Texas native casually clad in baggy khakis, a T-shirt and sneakers. "Somebody once said, 'How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.' I'm eating it one bite at a time."
Filming began in January, but the project percolated long before, first as an idea by original screenwriter Les Bohem, then through re-imaginings by John Sayles, Stephen Gaghan and finally Hancock when he took over directing from Ron Howard (Howard continues as producer through his Imagine Entertainment).
Next, the 51-acre set sprouted out of ranch land here. Production designer Michael Corenblith, who grew up in Austin the son of a seventh-grade Texas history teacher, has tacked to his office wall a photo of himself at age 9 crouched in a niche of the Alamo where a statue of St. Dominic once stood (and does again in the film). Nearby is a photo of the set superimposed with a quote from Goethe: "Be bold, and powerful forces will come to your aid." It was Corenblith's motto as he conceived of centering filming in one spot.
"My prejudice that the film should be done in Texas was no secret to Imagine or Disney," says Corenblith, who presented Disney with photos of four location finalists culled from 80: Montana, Sacramento, Calif., Santa Fe, N.M., Dripping Springs - without telling them which was which.
"The choice was unanimous and immediate," says Corenblith, who garnered Oscar nods for his work on "Apollo 13" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."
To re-create the town of San Antonio de Bexar and the Alamo compound, Corenblith and his design crew relied heavily on 19th century paintings such as one by Thomas Allen with chickens frolicking and residents lunching with a pink church of San Fernando as their backdrop.
"There is no architectural detail, no color that we can't point back to a painting from that period," Corenblith says. "This is not going to look like what people expect of the Alamo."
Still to come is a compound of 17 buildings that will be San Felipe de Austin and double as Gonzales; a Cherokee village set will be at Wimberley's Blue Hole. And Bastrop will serve as San Jacinto for the film's final act with Dennis Quaid portraying Sam Houston. Quaid arrived on the set last week.
San Antonio de Bexar was a half mile from the Alamo in reality, a quarter mile on the set. The orientation of the sun is different to accommodate the cameras. The Alamo chapel is moved up in relation to the long barracks that exist next to it to this day. Otherwise, all is eerily 1836.
Longhorn cattle wait in a raised corral, dead (plastic) rabbits hang from ropes outside a storefront. Everywhere horse droppings litter the ground. A dirt-smudged extra snoozing outside a cantina is a ghost from the past.
Tejanos slurp bowls of beans on the porch of the house where Santa Anna lived while in San Antonio. It is one of a few finished-out buildings used for interior shots.
Down the road and across the dry creek bed that portrays the San Antonio River, workers on cranes replace thatch on the Alamo complex roof. It burned in cannon blasts when the final battle recently was filmed, but must be restored for a few scenes to come.
The 18-pounder, the cannon left behind by Santa Anna's brother-in-law Gen. Martin Perfecto de Cos and used to hold off Santa Anna for a time, sits ready atop a ramp. Inside a building, Bowie's solemn death bed awaits, surrounded by gold drips of candle wax, a crucifix, crew members' discarded water bottles and an empty potato chip bag.
Back at Bexar, extras carrying flintlock rifles bide their time until the next take, while a worker wearing a cap bearing the name of Hancock's directing debut, "The Rookie," collects film cables.
Frank Thompson, an author of numerous Alamo books, including the upcoming novelization of the film, looks on with glee and points out how extras aren't wearing coonskin caps but top hats and frock coats more appropriate to the time.
"I've been studying this since I was 8 years old," Thompson says. "I'm like a kid in a candy store."
He points to the male extras, many sporting sideburns so huge Elvis Presley would be jealous, one sipping at a Gatorade bottle.
"I've only seen two guys with beards," Thompson says. "Anglo men in 1836 did not wear beards. I'm just delighted by this."
In fact, extras were instructed to grow out their beards and hair just so they could be shaved back into the period look the stars also sport.
Billy Bob Thornton is not on the set today and is now done filming his role (he marked the end with a visit to the real Alamo in San Antonio), but his presence as Davy Crockett is already legend. Thompson witnessed Crockett's death scene - the details of which are a closely guarded secret.
"If he doesn't get an Academy Award nomination, I'll be very surprised," Thompson says.
Thornton was said to often stop and regale extras with his latest joke; at one point he was reportedly surrounded by the Mexican army, happily doling out autographs.
"Billy Bob is so Crockett, it's scary," says Stephen Hardin, a Victoria College professor who serves as a historical consultant for the film. "He has the same magnetism Crockett had. All these other guys are acting; he's channeling."
Thornton's natural accent from his youth in northern Arkansas is a dead ringer for how someone such as Crockett from Tennessee would speak, Hardin says.
Hardin and fellow Alamo historian Alan Huffines went through the script looking to excise any words such as "OK" and "yeah" that weren't used in 1836. A Spanish linguist did the same for Spanish dialog.
Hardin scoffs at contentions this "Alamo" aims to take John Wayne's 1960 version and transform it with political correctness by also portraying the Mexican side of the story and showing how Mexicans fought both with the Anglos and against them. He sees the Texas Revolution as one theater of the larger Mexican civil war.
"The truth is that Anglos and Texans had been getting along for 15 years, thank you very much," Hardin says. "There is a sensitivity to Hispanics while never crossing the line to pandering. It's just historical accuracy. If that's political correctness, I can deal with it."
That attention to detail is what excites Marc Blucas, who portrays Alamo messenger James Bonham, about the film. He says the enthusiasm has infected crew members, who often engage him in Alamo history discussions.
Bonham's "actions defined a lot of themes of what this movie is about," says Blucas, who played basketball with the Spurs' Tim Duncan at Wake Forest before turning thespian. "Courage. Believing. Commanding. That's what we've talked about a lot as a cast."
Blucas, Thornton, Wilson, Jason Patric (Jim Bowie) and others loaded in a rented motor coach and drove to watch college basketball's Final Four teams compete in New Orleans. Much of the talk there and back was of the film, Blucas says.
"We've all examined the question of why these guys stayed," Blucas says. "Beyond their belief in what they were doing was a fraternal bond between men."
Back on the set, Hancock is ready to film a close-up of Travis' moment with Seguin. Extras are told to remove their 21st century sunglasses. An odd patch of rainbow hovers over the set.
Hancock is aiming for an "Alamo" with a large scope that still remains a character piece. He believes it's working. He's taking that elephant bite by bite.
But there are moments when reality blurs into the past, moments like when they filmed the Mexican army breaking ranks and heading toward the Alamo's north wall for the final assault.
"For a moment you're not a director," Hancock says. "You're just sitting back and living it."
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