A new, occasional feature of HOGELAND’S BAD HISTORY: “My Pitch.”
Here I literally pitch little-known events from the American past—to be adapted as plotted dramas.
Not docudramas. Also not biopics. I want to reimagine rich ensemble events as fiction and narrative-nonfiction books, as feature films, as standalone or limited TV series, and as any or all of the above, and I hope you’ll get something out of imagining them that way too.
While you may learn certain historical facts from “My Pitch,” if you didn’t know them already, the real idea is to get at some ways of bringing overlooked characters—and types of characters—out of the shadows, bring difficult truths to exciting life, and consider the uses and abuses of fictionalizing. To envision some degree of tough realism. Yet to keep things fun and gripping and avoid resorting to lame narrative tricks that readers and viewers should be totally sick of by now. And not to get too deep in the weeds—not here, anyway. Because this isn’t the thing itself. This is My Pitch!
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Pitch #1: Bacon’s Rebellion
Too good to be true, but true. A group of enslaved African men, women, and children, brought to tidewater Virginia to labor in the tobacco fields, work side by side with a group of white men, women, and children, some indentured, some transported convicts. Despite their differing levels of bondage, and despite mutual mistrust, the black and white workers find common cause and together plot a joint uprising for freedom.
Having stockpiled weapons and made tactical plans, the interracial rebels take advantage of conflicts among the colony’s elites and make their move. They attack the necrotic colonial government; burn the capital at Jamestown; and shock royal bureaucrats in London into sending a man o’ war across the ocean to suppress this first American revolution. Personal, political, racial, gender, and class tensions develop on every side, as idiosyncratic characters, of all classes, take actions mounting to a violent climax in a very strange American world.
Too good to be true? OK, here’s a twist. These allied unfree laborers are led in rebellion by a mercurial, narcissistic Virginia planter (Bacon). He is not to be our main character—he’s the one with power to fund the uprising. And he’s a big problem. Behind Bacon, the rebels attack not only the colonial governor but also the Susquehannocks and Occaneechee and other indigenous people whom planters like Bacon want to get rid of.
Your heart may have sunk. Black and white laborers attacking indigenous towns? Even taking part in a massacre of the Occaneechee? But this twist is part of what would make the story a true drama, as revealed in the brief character sketches, arcs, and plot elements very roughly sketched below.