SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES

Once again, it’s time to go to the movies (that never were).

“Trinity” was written with my best friend and fellow screenwriter, Ken Goldman. When you partner up in a creative endeavor, it works best if each partner brings different talents to the project - with each bringing what the other might lack or need more of. In the case of Ken and me, he brings diligent research and attention to small detail, while I bring the sizz-boom-bah. Too much of what Ken does can result in a movie that will put you to sleep. Too much of what I do can leave you hungry again two hours later. Put them together, though, and you have a good chance of scoring “interesting.”

“Trinity” is a historical “what if?” To do that successfully, you have to have the real history down cold, so that no one notices when you insert the “rubber history.” In the case of “Trinity,” people who read it were convinced we had come across something in the declassified files, they went along with it so well.

The “pitch” was: “The Great Escape” meets “The Wild Bunch.”

“Trinity” is the story of how the “Buffalo soldiers” - the African American cavalrymen who were relics of a departed past when World War II came along - stopped the German commando raid against the Manhattan Project.

A little background:

During The Second World War, 375,000 German POWs were held in 511 camps in 44 of the 48 United States.

Though fewer than one percent of them escaped, some were never caught...

In 1943, the last members of the Tenth Cavalry, the legendary "Buffalo Soldiers," were declared irrelevant to the war effort, and assigned to guard German POWs in Arizona...

“Trinity” almost made it to “green light.” If your mind says “Morgan Freeman” as you follow the character of Sergeant Major Marcus Williams, you’re thinking right. Everybody thought that, because we wrote the character with him in mind. We went with the producer we did because he said “I can get his to him.” Which he did. And Morgan, who is also a history buff, liked it enough to say “Let me know when you have it together.” With that, the search for the other parts of the project proceeded. and then Hollywood Rules intervened. We were close (which only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades) when Steven Spielberg sent Morgan the script for “Amistad.” Nobody says no to Spielberg. And none of us could think of anyone else for the role…

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