Custer vs. Mosby by Stanley Kubrick and Shelby Foote

Whaaaat?

From the LA Times:

Stanley Kubrick’s unproduced 1956 screenplay “The Downslope,” a historical drama set against the backdrop of the Civil War, is being developed as a feature film trilogy, with Marc Forster (“World War Z,” “Monster’s Ball”) attached to direct and produce the first installment.

The story, which Kubrick developed with Civil War historian Shelby Foote, focuses on a series of bitter battles in the Shenandoah Valley between Union Gen. George Armstrong Custer and Confederate Col. John Singleton Mosby.

More below…

Well that oughta be interesting…

Custer was a successful Civil War commander of Union Cavalry. Mosby was the leader of a highly-effective irregular band of Confederate Partisan Rangers. After the War, Mosby became a successful attorney and diplomat. Custer… well, you know the rest.

From Entertainment Weekly…

“We’ve been given the unique privilege to produce a Stanley Kubrick script no one has had the opportunity to make,” said producer Lauren Selig (Lone Survivor). “The first installment of the planned trilogy, written by Kubrick, is an engrossing story illustrating a crucial moment in history toward the end of the American Civil War… The succeeding stories will expand upon Kubrick’s original story and journey west, as post-war Americans settled the new frontier, delivering on the country’s unbending ambitions and dreams of Manifest Destiny.”

Kubrick had worked with Foote to bring the story to the screen. “It’s about John Mosby when … Custer’s division hang(ed) six of his rangers,” the late Foote told The Paris Review in 1999. “Mosby from then on, when he captured one of Custer’s men, had him taken to a schoolhouse in the backwoods until he had about 50 of them. Then he had them line up and draw slips of paper out of a hat. Six of them would be hanged in retaliation. You can imagine the relief everybody felt who got a blank slip instead of a black dot. Then they discovered that one of the black-dot unfortunates was a drummer boy about 14 years old and Mosby said, ‘I’m not hanging no boys. Have them draw again.’ So they had to draw again.”

Holy smokes, people… Done right this could be brilliant.