When I worked for
Roger Corman at Concorde-New Horizons, his deal with Lima-based filmmaker Luis
Llosa had us sending movie crews to make movies in Peru’s crumbling colonial
cities, stark grasslands, and dense jungles Though we used Peru as a stand-in
for Vietnam and many other places, we also dreamed up several projects intended to have a true Latin
American flavor. One was Fire on the
Amazon, an ecological drama that remains special to me both because it
contains a Sandra Bullock nude scene (yes, really) and because my rewrite of
the script gave me a screenwriting credit I probably didn’t deserve. We also
adapted a nineteenth-century Jules Verne novel called Eight Hundred Leagues Down the Amazon into a PG-13 action-adventure
that drove us all somewhat crazy. Here’s the official logline: Outlaw Joam Garral makes a clandestine
journey down the crocodile and piranha infested Amazon river to attend his
daughter's marriage. Not only must he brave the dangers of the Amazonian
jungles, but also the bounty hunter hot on his trail. This may sound
potentially exciting, but we hardly had the budget, nor the technical know-how,
to make an Amazon rafting trip seem really exciting.
I’ve just finished reading a book that makes me glad I never
went on an Amazon expedition. Candice Millard is an historian and biographer
who once worked for National Geographic. Her
first book was a 2005 bestseller, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. It chronicles the
period in which the 56-year-old Roosevelt, after his White House years and the
failure of his campaign to initiate a new political party, plunged with
characteristic vigor into an expedition to survey an uncharted Brazilian River
known as the Rio da Duvida, or River of Doubt. Among the adventurers who set
out with Roosevelt to travel the river from its source to its mouth were the
renowned Brazilian military man who had first discovered the river and was dedicated
to charting its course, a respected American ornithologist, a medical doctor, a
Catholic priest, and Roosevelt’s son Kermit. The latter was a brave and
stalwart young man quite accustomed to the rugged life. Though Kermit was along
on the trip to watch over his father’s well-being, he was distracted by his
recent engagement to a society beauty. Unfortunately, his impulsive decision along
the way led to the death of one of the corps of native paddlers who shared in the hazards of the
journey.
Roosevelt’s story has everything: dangerous flora and fauna,
hostile natives, fearsome rapids, lost canoes. There’s even a buffoon, the
priest who assumed that as the physically weakest member of the party he’d be
carried through the jungle on the shoulders of others. And there’s a villain
too: one of the local laborers (or “camaradas”) on the trip turns out to be a
thief and a murderer. As the men approached starvation, Roosevelt aggravated an
old injury that weakened him to the point that he seriously contemplated
suicide, as a way to keep from holding the others back. He somehow survived,
but in three months lost 55 pounds, or a quarter of his normal weight. He
returned home to international acclaim, but was never again quite the robust
specimen he’d always prided himself on being.
To read Millard’s book is to be reminded of how much
exploration has improved since 1914. For one thing, there was no penicillin
back then to fight off the infection that nearly drove Roosevelt to take his
own life. Some of the expedition’s choices seem foolish in the extreme, but nobility
of character is always worth celebrating.
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