elmore, how interesting your desire to see a more comprehensive coverage of the Trojan War.
Twenty-odd years ago...when I was first getting a foothold in this business, I wrote a 176-page almost scene-for-scene bible for a eight to ten hour mini-series on The Trojan War that began with Paris' birth to when the Greeks sacked Troy and began their returns.
Well, God knows you could do it! And didn't John Barton put together for the Royal Shakespeare Company from all the extant Greek tragedies? A major problem is the chronology:
1. The whole thing begins with Eris, the golden apple, and the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, Achilles' parents, so if Paris is a young shepherd on Mt Ida this very same day, Achilles is either a young bastard or a not-yet-born infant! We do know that Telemachus, Odysseus' son is no more than a year old, maybe not even born, at the time the Ithacans joined the War, because he's a young man when Odysseus returns after 10 years at war and 10 years on the road!
2. Is it a 10-year war by our contemporary dating system or a looser period of fewer months, such as the 1000-year-old Methuselah? My biggest problem with TROY as a movie is that the filmmakers have no problem with the violence of battle, but no interest in the violence cause by the Greeks to the area, the raping and pillaging of neighboring territories to maintain their existence outside Troy. Also, several important characters die far much earlier than any legend says. And I always wondered, how did a walled city sustain itself for such a long siege?
3. How to deal with the supernatural? Like A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, the human world is reflected in the supernatural one, with gods and goddesses taking sides, picking favorites, bribing and cajoling aliances: the War was so epic that all worlds known to the Greeks were involved in it. I would prefer nothing like the gods in CLASH OF THE TITANS or JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, but I miss having the deities involved in some way, such as Thetis' involvement with forging Achilles' armor, Aphrodite saving Paris in his battle with Menelaos, Hera seducing Zeus (that's just low humor in the ILIAD but the War wasn't all serious), in the later variants on the story, since the ILIAD only covers one section of time in the War: Achilles' snit and the death of Hector, we've got Artemis, a Trojan ally, driving Ajax mad, besides supposedly saving Iphigeneia from sacrifice.
Incidentally, there's a new novel about Iphigeneia's sacrifice, THE SONG OF THE KINGS, by Barry Unsworth, which I enjoyed immensely.
And also, DR CharlesPogue, I just got the DVD of SIGN OF FOUR; I know you're not that happy with how it turned out, but I look forward to watching it.
