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Thursday, February 20, 2003

By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor

WASHINGTON -- If he'd had his way, Col. Thomas Jackson might have chased Yankee soldiers from his beloved Virginia all the way back to their nation's capital. His arrival at the Battle of First Manassas rallied fleeing Confederate troops. A fellow officer yelled, "There stands Jackson like a stone wall!" giving him a nickname that would be chiseled into history.

	Cable magnate Ted Turner says "Gods and Generals," the movie he's financially backed, is "about courage," not just the Civil War. (Photo by Steve Granitz) Related coverage Recounting the Civil War as a calling Official Movie Site www.godsandgenerals.com

Col. (and later Gen.) Jackson never managed to lead his troops to Washington. But a modern-day Atlanta swashbuckler once known by the title Captain Outrageous invaded the district, bringing some of his own soldiers to help him put his money where his mouth is -- a prodigious but shrinking wad blasting from a loose cannon.

Cable magnate Ted Turner finds himself bleeding these days, thanks to the precipitous drop in stock price of AOL Time Warner, the carpetbaggers who now own Turner's companies. Yet he put up $90 million of his own cash to fight the Civil War one more time -- and the South still loses.

"Gods and Generals," which opens tomorrow , recounts some of the early battles of the war, leading up to the events portrayed in Turner's 1993 film "Gettysburg." He hopes to complete the story with a third film, "The Last Full Measure" -- but only if "Gods and Generals" recoups its costs.

"At the time, it represented about 1 percent of my assets," Turner said. "Today, it's 15 percent of my liquid assets. It's become important to me financially. But it wasn't significant at the time that I went forward with it. Who could have ever foreseen that AOL Time Warner stock was going to go down almost 90 percent?"

He takes his share of the blame for what went wrong, although he quit his executive position in the company because he thinks he can do more from the outside.

"I couldn't do very much on the inside except raise my hand and object to some of the things," he said.

But this is the man who bought a tumbledown independent television operation in Atlanta and turned it into a cable superstation, then persisted against open derision at his plan for a 24-hour Cable News Network. So why wouldn't he spend $90 million on a Civil War movie that no one else wanted to make, one that lasts almost four hours?

"I'm a history buff. I'm interested in anything. I'm a journalist, too," he said. "I'm interested in the environment, and I'm interested in the United Nations and the inequities in the world -- the diseases, the poverty. I'm interested in just about everything. I am interested in history. And the Civil War -- a case could be made it was very close to the most important part of our history.

"I don't think it's just about war. I think, even more so to me, both 'Gettysburg' and this film are about courage. For young people or even people our age sitting there today and seeing these guys marching shoulder-to-shoulder across an open field with no protection whatsoever -- it's unthinkable today."

He was asked about "Gods and Generals" being one of the few Civil War movies told from the Southern point of view.

"That's right," he said. "Well, 'Gone With the Wind' did. But 'Gone With the Wind' isn't really a Civil War movie. It's a romance. I loved it, though ..."

And we're off on a Ted Turner tangent, one in which his audience of journalists laughed harder as he continued.

"... and that was one of the reasons I bought MGM. I bought MGM instead of one of the other studios because they had 'Gone With the Wind.' And 'The Wizard of Oz.' And 'Doctor Zhivago.' And there were Warner Bros. prints of 'Casablanca' and all the Errol Flynn movies. I loved them when I was a kid.

"I'm the movie man. I assembled that 8,000-film library that AOL Time Warner owns. I brought most of the movies to it. New Line, Castle Rock. 'Lord of the Rings' -- I green-lit that. New Line still reported to me when that decision was made. I said, 'Let's do it -- 300 million bucks.'"

Turner made "Gods and Generals" because he couldn't get a studio to finance it.

"Hey, listen. You've got to have big kahunas to be in this business. Nobody knows what the hell's going to work. Who would have thought 'Dumb and Dumber' would have been the success it was? Hey, doesn't Jeff Daniels have a lot of acting ability to be in 'Dumb and Dumber' and to be Chamberlain [a Union officer in both 'Gods and Generals' and 'Gettysburg']?"

Turner gets his own on-screen appearance in "Gods and Generals" -- as a Confederate officer, of course -- singing along with other soldiers to a patriotic song.

"I drove my girlfriend crazy. For two weeks before, I sang, 'Hurrah for the bonnie blue flag.' I sang it at least a thousand times. And with that, she left."

The scene required a few more takes than Turner would have liked. "Time is money, right?" he said. And money matters now that AOL Time Warner has eaten at his wealth.

"As the budget kept going up, my net worth was going down. ... I've called every friend I know: 'Please, the first weekend, go and see it!' "

Thomas Jackson stood like a stone wall as the enemy fire came at him. Ted Turner manages to laugh at adversity as the ramparts tumble around him.

"It hasn't been easy for me, but I'm carrying on," he said. "They're not going to get me down. Only a bullet will stop me."

Maybe he identifies with Jackson more than we know.