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captioning performed by vitac >> -- find a way of taming young people in going forward into the 1960s. it needed to reconcile with germany and i think this film is probably the high water approach of films about -- or implying a kind of understanding of germany. another film like this would be the enemy below, the submarine hunt movie. i think there's great value today in cornelius ryan's reporting. i wish more stories were told from all sides and i hope that at some point in the future people will go back to his perspective and more historical movies will have this kind of

multi-contributor perspective. to me to anticipate a question about the best d-day movie, to be honest it's the one in my head when i'm reading "the longest day." that has everything. it has the color, it has the realism and i find it terribly moving. thank you for your attention, i look forward to a discussion. [ applause ] >> thank you both, marsha and nick. i will be wandering the pavilion floor to serve as the moderator from the floor. before we get to rick with a question here in the front, there is a question from online and it's for nick. torah, torah, torah, 12:00 high, "the longest day," those are all darryl zanak films, i guess either one of you could answer, this is specifically for nick. differences, favorites, your own

personal favorite. can you elaborate on these three classics? >> i like "the longest day" best because it's got british people in it and one of them plays the bagpipes. >> that's a good answer. i'm a fan of "the longest day" as well. i'm not sure which one can zanak felt so strongly about. i did think of one thing while nick was talking, you said something about what realism looks like and how it changes over time and i agree that's very interesting, but it's also what it sounds like. just as an exercise this is the professor in me if you ever want to really experience that d-day landing scene in "saving private ryan" close your eyes and listen to it. the sound design is extraordinary and it sounds so different than these other landing scenes. so, you know, obviously this is a matter of technology partly, but also really kind of refining

what it would sound like to be part of this assault. so i just wanted -- >> i think that's a very good point. but each generation has a different thing that it emphasizes in terms of realism. and we also -- as viewers we become more -- more attuned. so i don't know if you've had the experience of watching "jurassic park" you can now see the joints in the original "jurassic park" movie. the effects that were 100% convincing in whatever it was 1992, i don't remember, is no longer convinced. our eyes get better, our ears get better and our expectations change. i think the effects in -- especially back projection in "the longest day" now seems incredibly obvious and unconvincing. >> a question at the front to your right, please. >> nick, i had a two-part question about "the longest

day." can you tell us about the critical acclaim that the movie had, what did critics think. and the second, can you talk about the german actors, were they actually participants in world war ii? >> yes. first thing to say is critics were divided, some thought it was stagey and corny and ironically some of them complained about incidents that were real incidents. i think what they disliked was history, not -- not the motion picture. in terms of the germans, yes, a number of the germans had been veterans in world war ii. to me the most moving thing i found research this is that bernard vicki had been a german occupier and was famously kind to french and when french people had been arrested he would try to cheer them up while they were waiting to find out if they had they were going to be shot or

not. he had trained as a clown so he would do these clown routines. a frenchman has written a novel remembering this kind german who would try to cheer them up while they were waiting for their death. the german actor who plays the man to looks through the binoculars -- probably the greatest shot in the movie -- looks through the binoculars and sees the ships coming over and turns and says, oh, my god, they're coming. he has scars on his face. he was a veteran of the eastern front. so because the german soldiers that we get to know in "the longest day" are older, because they are hiring in the ranks they tend to be people who were enlisted men in world war ii now playing senior officers. so they are not actually playing themselves, but they're playing -- or trying to recreate the people who were in charge of them. but i think that gives it a certain authenticity that you

have these people playing themselves. it had happened before. in "all quiet on the western front" a lot of the extras had been -- were veterans of world war i, but wearing different uniforms, so they had americans playing germans, germans playing americans, french playing germans as part of the novelty of being in the film, but it gives these films -- i think they have a special -- they should have a special draw on our authenticity when -- on our sense of authenticity when participants are involved and were present on the set while particular scenes were being shot. and there are examples of french people coming forward and saying, no, you can't show that, that didn't happen, let's -- please change it around and zanak going with requests interest participants, participants opening the film making to make it more as it was. marsha? >> correct me if i'm wrong, nick, but the reviews i've read are by and large incredibly

positive and especially emphasizing the realism aspect. i always wonder, you know, every studio when they release a film they send out press releases and i wonder how much of that, you know, comes from, you know, we spent $10 million on this picture and this was very authentic and that was very -- and how much of it is really kind of a critical reaction that is not drawing from the press releases that had a kind of power, i think, more so than they do now. >> here is an interesting thing because the reviews of "a bridge too far" really go after ryan o'neal being cast as -- is jim -- and they say it's ridiculous that a man that young would be in command of troops, but he was exactly the right age. he was exactly the right -- the right age. in a way the war movie starts to give the public the idea that the battlefield commander should

be some grizzled old john wayne type like sergeant striker in "the sands of iwo jima" or benjamin vander sorority in "the longest day." so hollywood undercuts reality and hollywood's realism undercuts the reality of actual life and makes people doubt a thing that is actually completely accurate. so there is a strange relationship between realism and audience expectations or reality and audience expectations. >> i really liked that phrase that nick used of people watching "the longest day" to kind of remember remembering because i think that gets precisely at that, this idea that, you know, that hollywood can supplant history in some cases and that's how we imagine and think of some of these things as opposed -- because it's so powerful and it's so easy to grasp when you see it on a big screen as opposed to reading about it.

>> question at the back table to your left, please. >> yes. a couple of points i'd like to comment on. isn't one of the reasons that tora, tora, tora did poorly is the japanese attacked pearl harbor and presenting even a partly sympathetic view of the japanese in their preparations for it was a reason that it elicited a very adverse audience reaction, also, of course, that except for amamoto there probably wasn't anybody in the japanese command that was known even to americans back then. and on "the longest day," also the fact that at that time you were literally at the height of the cold war released the same year as the cuban missile crisis. that to have presented any kind of event like that negatively then would have been something where they wouldn't even have

gotten much cooperation from the department of defense, whereas private ryan comes along, we've won the cold war, we've had the 40th and 50th anniversary celebrations and people can more easily accept the darker side of it later on. >> i think that zanak couldn't have known that the berlin crisis was going to happen, that the cuban missile crisis would be going on when "the longest day" was released, but it certainly met an emotional need as kind of a certain -- it gave a reassurance to audiences and reminded them of what underlying values were, underlying principles were. the flip side is tora, tora, tora came out at a difficult moment in the relationship between the united states and asia because of the vietnam war, but i don't want to get bogged

down in "tora, tora, tora" because it is a long time since i looked at or thought about the film. i think that "saving private ryan" i see it as being a part of this reevaluation of what's become known as the greatest generation and i think that you have to think about the filmmakers as being people who had fathers and those fathers were passing away in the '90s, the person that they had been trying to rebel against in the '70s was not the person they were trying to understand in the '90s and actually the films that i look at for that contrast, "star wars" where you see george lucas casting the father figure, the dark father, darth vader in the 1970s, but by the late '90s when those -- the generation that had pushed those kind of feelings are now leaving -- leaving life behind, is sudden

sympathetic, trying to understand those people and he has that second cycle of "star wars" films where it's about how a good person could do bad things and they are reestablishing that generation as a kind of a heroic generation. so i see "saving private ryan" as being part of that process of revisiting with affection and admiration the people of the 1940s from the perspective of the '90s. part of the problem of "saving private ryan" is that it does so using the language of the 1990s and to me so many things in "saving private ryan" are realistic. it's like a train driven by a great locomotive of realism and then the actors open their mouth and they're bantering like they are in a tarantino film. and the script is not -- to me the script is not worthy of the visuals and the sound and the -- the amazing stuff that goes on on scene. i now think that the script in

"saving private ryan" is dated very, very badly. i'd rather watch it with the sound off so i don't hear what they're saying. >> and i think to support your argument about the idea of the greatest generation and understanding, it's the framing device of the film, revisiting normandy as fuller talked about doing and that's the way into the picture is one person's kind of memory of what happened. >> i'm actually going to have moderat moderator's preference here. you brought up "star wars." >> i did. >> i'm a child of "star wars." marsha, one month prior to the big red one being released was empire strikes back. how did fuller feel about one of his stars maybe outshining his film or was this good? did they ride the coat tails of the second "star wars" film? >> well, i mean, i think this was obviously -- it's good anytime you have someone in your film come to prominence in another film, but, you know, the big red one did terribly at the

box office, it didn't make its money back so it was not a great success. of course, as i told you all, it was also a greatly diminished version of what fuller wanted to release. yeah, i mean, having mark ma'amma'am -- hamill in that role i think was a kind of casting coup. but he found actors like gene evans and giving them roles in films and seeing something in them that other directors and producers had not yet seen and starting many careers. >> marsha, do you think that he cast mark hamill deliberately? it occurred to me that in all three of these films you can see an attempt to have generational casting, to have an iconic father figure, but also a symbolic younger generation figure. >> absolutely. >> so the casting of mark hamill -- you also see a kind of

a cross-generational message within the film. >> right, and robert caradine. "big red one" with lee marvin starts off at the end of world war i. so fuller was really interested in retread soldiers that came back to fight in subsequent wars. so that was another way to -- well, not only that history repeats itself and here we are again and they run into a big red one mon ult from world war i actually in "the big red one." the young guys go, oh, look, wow, they've already got a monument up for us. it was like, no, that was from the last war. >> the front table right here. >> comment for dr. cull, question for dr. gordon. you briefly mentioned -- you will efficient that question hanging as to why john wayne in his late middle age was in that position. i will suggest that perhaps it was an attempt to redeem the fact that, as i understand it,

wayne used his celebrity status to stay out of combat in the second world war. that sort of always bugged me. but the more substantive question, further casting question for dr. gordon, is it seems to me by 1978 at the beginning of the film that both fuller and lee marvin were about the same age when asked about their connection they were both combat veterans, marvin in the pacific, of course, fuller in europe. i just wondered about having a 55-year-old buck sergeant, i mean, lee marvin of course has that wonder of ravaged face and i think really underrecognized, but i was curious as to what the connection is between marvin and fuller and how fuller made a decision to use someone so much older than his sergeants would have been. thank you. >> that's a great question and i don't really have a definitive answer to that. i don't know -- i don't know precisely why fuller -- i know he really wanted marvin, he

really had to talk him into that role and i think marvin if i remember correctly was a little hesitant because of his age to play that role. but, you know, fuller really loved working with veterans and he loved working with people who he didn't have to basically send through basic training in order to understand what it was like. i mean, that idea of authenticity. so i think that that certainly would have appealed to him and obviously as time went on it would have been very different casting this in the 1950s, in the 1960s. by the time you get to the late 1970s if you are looking for combat veterans they're getting older, right? so that's the reality. >> in the back to your left. >> a little bit of a preamble. so as somebody who has watched probably dozens of world war ii movies i'm fascinated how the arc of the movies changes and particularly the quality. if you think about it you have the story of gi joe, you have battle ground, in my opinion very good movies made right in

12:00 high made right after and then in the '50s there's really not a lot in my opinion except for a movie named "attack" which has john palance and eddie albert and whatnot. of course, that's a movie where the army doesn't cooperate at all because it shows cowardice and so forth. it seems to me and just a comment about how are these movies made? in other words, my understanding is hollywood is famous for copy cats. if somebody comes out with a great movie, i have to get mine. you know, you see in the '60s with the great escape, you see "the longest day" and then you see a huge flop although a similar formula in "the battle of the bulge." it's like who is the lunatic making this in spain, they are in the middle of winter and in the closing scene you don't see any snow, anything at all. just a comment maybe about how

does hollywood look at making world war ii movies and what are the factors of why they make what they make, when they make it, that kind of thing over maybe the last 40 years. is there an arc there? i mean, you are the folks who study this better than we do. take it with what you want. thanks. >> boy. >> that's a book-length answer, my friend. that is a big question. >> i find it a fascinating question and i think part of the answer is to do with what do people want to get out of world war ii. is world war ii there to stand for itself or is it there to stand for some kind of proxy for the moral purpose of the country? i think that once the united states was involved in vietnam it became difficult to represent world war ii. so you can see how the film --

world war ii is changed by vietnam and the film has become more realistic, but also more morally ambiguous. i'm fascinated by the presence of world war ii in "star wars" and how in some ways "star wars" is used as a way to have the moral certaintiees of the first way of world war ii without the complexity of the post world war ii film. we now move to a situation where we're looking at -- instead of "star wars" being about world war ii for many younger people world war ii is about "star wars." they are looking at it as a place of goodies, baddees, it doesn't have -- it's very distant from something we would recognize as history. >> let me also say one of the things that i talk about fairly extensively in the book is kind

of fuller's dealings with the department of defense and department of the army on all of his films and dod often refused cooperation with fuller for a number of reasons that are too lengthy to go into. but this is to say that if you wanted military cooperation, your script had to be approved, right? and you had to have certain things in it and not have other things in it that might have tarnished the image of the army or the american military. so that -- what's acceptable in terms of that representation is always changing, too. very different during the war hand after the war and ten years after the war. so that certainly shapes the nature of what you can and cannot do in a film that has any kind of staff of approval from outward participation. >> and that still affects things today. so you have a situation with wind talkers where the pentagon insisted on scenes of marines taking trophies, that is, teeth

and ears being cut out of the -- cut out of the film. that's correct, isn't it? it's not in the film. >> i don't think so. >> i don't think so, yeah. >> in the middle row to your righ right. >> i'm by far not an expert on john wayne. i wish my wife was here because i think she is the local expert where we live on john wayne, but it's my understanding to correct the gentleman about his comments about john wayne, it's my understanding that he tried to join the military, went to the army, air corps, went to the army, went to the navy and i don't recall the reason why he was turned down, but he was turned down from serving. i think it bothered him a lot. >> there is even a story that he was -- the oss tried to recruit him, but they sent the letter to the house of his ex-wife who just to mess with john wayne didn't pass the letter on to him. he did get a certificate for participation in the oss.

but i think he was very guilty about it afterwards and it certainly affected his desire to be supportive and patriotic and the saying is he was a super patriot because he hadn't served and was -- in the way that he would have hoped and felt badly about it, but -- so i think that there is something to that, however, john wayne was not taking on "the longest day" as a charity case. he was paid a lot of money to do it and insisted on being paid ten times as much as the other members of the cast because he wanted to get revenge on zanak for a comment zanak had made about the alamo. so this is why he insisted -- i think it was $250,000 he was paid for being in the film.

but there must have been a reason why zanak really wanted to have john wayne in the middle of it all rather than william holden who was initially cast in that part. >> question to your right at the same table. >> thank you. i'd like to bring up something that we might all keep in mind as this goes on. i'm a combat veteran from vietnam and my father was killed in normandy and i've done a lot of research and written some articles. i'm also in years past just to discover some things was a civil war reenacter. i know you think that that's ridiculous, but you learn quickly what not to carry when you're hiking in wool on a hot day. that also leads you to an appreciation of authenticity. but i'd like to make a point about world war ii movies in general, that civil war reenacting is easy to do, you have a few cannons, a few horses and a bunch of guys marching along carrying muskets. you're real. you can't -- from vietnam you

can't get a perspective just how huge war is. the tanks, the trucks, the artillery, the masses of planes, the even small unit stuff in vietnam, you almost can't capture it, so what do you do? for world war ii you have to reduce it down to a small unit and you're trying to create the feel of a huge, huge operation. when you are in the military and you are in one of these things you don't have the sense you are by yourself, even special units don't. so in order to try to put world war ii on the screen, you've got to do it -- you're focusing on small -- a small unit. and that's very hard to do because small units didn't

operate just by themselves. so you end up with all these, you know -- what was the movie where they -- dirty dozens, this type of movie. the second best movie ever made also did that, it was one where clint eastwood and -- they had to go capture some -- "kelly's heroes" was a brilliant movie for the purposes of war. they managed to get you a sense of something big and then turn it into something small. so "saving private ryan" one of the things -- and by the way i disagree with you about the banter. it's exactly what people do in small units in combat. >> about the what? i didn't hear that. >> the banter. about the script. >> oh, no. i'm saying that the things they're saying, they're using lines, versions of lines from tarantino films.

it isn't banter like 1940s banter, it's 1990s banter. >> well, it would have been 1960s banter, 1965 banter when i was in vietnam. >> okay. i thought we were talking about d-day. >> and "kelly's heroes" also was -- the banter in there was very -- >> but in "kelly's heroes" is a good example of how a world war ii movie is dealing with the present. i don't think donald sutherland would make sense as a character in world war ii but he is basically a hippie and it's a great invention, but it's part of the film having a trouble existence. existing in its own time and existing in the time that's being represented. so sure there's going to be banter, but, you know, if you are interested in millitude it may make sense for the banter to

reflect the time that's being represented rather than -- the film is going to date if it's very much of the moment in which it's made. >> i think it's a really important -- thank you for bringing that up -- an important reminder, right? there is war and there are war movies and that includes documentaries. even if you think about something about the marines at tarrawal, you have to be able to tell a story that people can digest and understand, to tell the story of a war or one day in the war, that's what "the longest day" is trying to do, but it's still telling this much even though it has that ambition of the wide-angle perspective. you have to be able to create narrative, right, otherwise people wouldn't watch it. wouldn't understand it. >> we have an online question that's sort of along the lines of what the gentleman was just speaking to and this is open to either of you, hopefully both. do you believe there are any more unique or original ways that d-day can be presented in films instead of maybe just

following the squad or maybe just following one day as marsha just mentioned? are there inhere any unique or l days that d-day can be presented in film moving forward? >> i actually think that the answer of that has more to do with technology because i think even 20 years down the line what spielberg does is so kind of heightened and, i mean, i can barely breathe during that -- i remember seeing it on the big screen and holding my breath, but with the kind of technology that we have with virtual realty i think eventually somebody is going to do something quite interesting with that. i don't know exactly what that will be like that will be more experiential. isn't that what all of these directors are trying to do. this goes back to the fuller quote about firing behind the screen at his audience randomly during the film. the more you can i can percent someone in that feeling of being there with all of their ens is,

all the senses that you can activate in this way. i suspect that we will see that at some point maybe even here. >> i would agree that each generation will look for its own retelling to find the things that are meaningful to that generation in the story. i know that captain dye is working on a project at the moment that returns to d-day. and that will have a special authenticity and a special meaning because of the people who are involved with it. i think that our collective memory doesn't include all of the telling of d-day. so it may be that there's new ways of thinking about it that are already out there of which you are unaware. in the early '90s there was a british tv movie called "foreign field" written by a talented writer called roy clark. this movie includes in it alec guinness as a veteran returning to d-day who has a mental

disability. coming out of the war he was brain damaged. and lauren bacall is an older woman looking to return to the grave of her brother, veterans meet each other, interact, it's quite funny but quite sad, too. that idea of focusing just on the returning veterans gets into a whole -- a whole way of thinking about memory of d-day in an important way. it occurred to me that there are enough stories in "the longest day" to tell the whole thing over again from the same source material and have a very compelling movie but without repeating any of the material that's in the motion picture. the story of the midget submarines on d-day is particularly -- i find particularly interesting. also there's the polish

involvement. there were poles on both sides on d-day, poles that were forced to man the defenses by the germans and poles who were part of the invasion army. i would be fascinated to see what does it feel like to be polish and trying to repel the allied invasion or to be polish and being part of the allied invasion, how did that play out? >> we have about ten minutes before the break so i think we will be able to get most of the questions. >> you mentioned that there was a four and a half hour original director's version for "the big red one." is that version lost or is it still available? >> it's lost and that's why in 2005 richard shickel oversaw this attempt to reconstruct it based on fuller's script materials and there was a discovery in the archives of some of the material that had been cut out. so that is literally an attempt to kind of stitch it back together as close as is possible and that clock is in at just a

little under three hours so it adds an hour to the release version, but, no, to my knowledge that does not exist. >> in the back to your left. >> i have a question for both of you, actually. both of you have talked about these movies that we all love and enjoy and the context of the times that they came out. so last year there were two books that came out on different subject matter, one was called "we will always have casablanca" which was the story of bogaerts and bacall and casablanca and then all the actors that were basically refugees from europe. another book had come out about "high noon" that called about the mccoughy hearings and how that worked with the movie. have either of you written any books or have thought about writing any books about some of these fantastic war movies and the context of the times that they came out?

>> i have not, but it's certainly very interesting because this is so on my mind, you know. the behind the scenes stories are so fascinating and like with "the big red one" to think about making a film in the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, it doesn't come out until 1980s. the way that that shifts over time, it's an incredible story. i mean, certainly an entire book could be written about that one, but i have already done my fuller book. >> i've worked on other genres so i did a volume on how films about the british empire reflect the times in which they were made, looking at pictures like john houston's "man who would be king" or "indiana jones" and what's going on in there as it

reflects on a world of empire. i also did a book about the future, some images of the future change. you think the future would be -- and how we think the future will be is very revealing of the present. it had a chapter on what robo cop tells us about 1989 and things like that. i think pretty much everything i do is trying to look for the moment, using film as a window on a historical moment in which the film is made rather than as a sort of textbook on the past. >> and we just recorded a podcast yesterday, the world war ii museum has started this podcast about movies and we did it on "best years of our lives" which came out after the war and that was thinking about the context of its release and how that film was really looking forward and trying to figure out how to -- not dismiss the past,

but move on from it and to find of reintegrate. i think especially when you are dealing with war films, you know, they are, again, made during war, after war, immediate aftermath, five years later, ten -- it's always changing because of that perspective. >> not every war gets a film made about it. what do you do if you were the people in my generation who went to the falklands. they don't really have a war -- a film to revisit their experience. they have to try and look for things in other people's films that sort of rhyme in some way with something they recognize. there's a great luxury in being a country that has enough of a film industry to tell these sorts of stories. >> but i think it's also very telling. i mean, if you look at proportionally how many films were made about world war ii versus korea or vietnam during and immediately after it's

really tells us and that tells us i think a lot about how those conflicts were perceived in the vulture and continue to be perceived. >> the reality of film making is that it's a business and you have to think that enough people worldwide now will be interested in the story to make it worth -- worth telling. >> yeah. i mean, when fuller was making his second war film which was -- he made his first two war films were korean conflict films, it's "steel helmet" and "fixed bayone bayonets" it was a difficult time in that conflict and it was hard for him to convince that producer that he could make a second film that people would want to go and see because it was depressing news and are people going to want to go see that on screen. yeah, so it's always a challenge of box office. >> one thing i want to get to that hasn't come up so far is that in "longest day" there is a

moment where a line is pretty much repeated but once by an american and then once by a german and it raises a really interesting philosophical point. early in the film where they're getting ready for the -- they're trying to choose are we going to go on the 6th of june, is the weather going to be right. the john wayne character says all this problem with the weather makes me wonder whose side is god really on. >> yeah. >> and then in the context of the film it's an hour and a half later kurt jergens commenting on what's happening, he said this is so disastrous it makes me wonder whose side is god really on. that idea that both sides in the conflict believed that they were doing something right, that they were -- good was on their side, that the germans had on their buckle god with us, that should be troubling because just because we think we're doing good in the world, doing what's

right, shouldn't stop us really reflecting on that and considering, well, are we sure that this is the right thing to do. i thought that that was -- it was really interesting that they would include that kind of moral tension and perspective in "longest day." >> to your far right, please. >> thank you. it's been a fabulous presentation, but i wonder what fuller would have done if he would have had the ability that we saw take place in "band of brothers" and the ability to do sequential presentations of this subject, which is coming out again with some more productions of other matters. the scenes from d-day in "band of brothers", for example.

>> yeah. it pains me that he didn't get to make multiple versions of this story, actually. that certainly could have been the case. i mean, he actually agreed to do merrill's more ladders because he was told think of this as practice for making your big war film and it took another 18 years. but, yes, i think -- i think fuller is someone who was so invested in all -- i mean, and he was part -- i mean, he has one of those trajectories where he saw so many different fronts that he could have told so many more stories. in fact, his journals and his letters -- there is a lot of unpublished writing that i believe some of it will be coming out in a collection i think with the university of california press in the next year or two of his unpublished writings including some of the journals and letters. this is a richness to that material that it would have been

wonderful if he had not been so constrained by financial circumstances. >> for my part i was really taken with "band of brothers" and the quality of what was put on the screen and the way in which i think it captures -- it does a better job of representing the -- something -- it seems like a more authentic story in the interpersonal dimension than "saving private ryan." it's an amazing art form that has emerged, what is though called peak tv, the idea of an in-depth telling of a story with a high budget on cable television platforms. that's an amazing tool and it's terrific to see what is now -- what is now being done and i'm sure that this is -- "band of brothers" was really at the opening of this new era of television with the sopranos and

these other long-format shows that are really rewriting the book on visual story telling. >> i mean, fuller, in case that didn't come across, had a real disdain for the kind of strategic higher level stories. he thought the story should always be about the men on the ground and that was really where the story was. i mean, there are so many of those stories and so many that he really wanted to tell. >> we will go over our time just a little bit, maybe one last question. >> thank you. sorry. it's two last questions. i was going to ask four hours fuller must have known that was not going to make it. i would be curious to know what you think he was thinking and it seems like a real go for broke kind of a play with the studio. and the question i have in general, because you are talking about how we make a movie for our time, i think "saving

private ryan" does focus very much on -- it seemed to me to be where we really want to focus on the veterans, get their stories while we can, and then you have films right after the war like you mentioned "best years of our lives." i also think "go for broke" about the 442nd combat team was a real we've got to get these veterans' stories out. it was really trying to get a particular story out to recognize the soldiers. is that kind of a fashion, too? do we go from focusing on the soldiers and getting their stories to, oh, let's use world war ii as a backdrop for a lighter social political message and do you think there are different -- is that a fashion, is that skirts or shorts kind of a thing? >> do you want to answer that first. >> i would just say yes and pass it to you. >> okay. let me answer the fuller

question. i have such empathy for this situation because i'm trying to imagine what it would feel like to be him, right, and to have this attachment to this experience and to this story and to take 35 years to get to finally tell it the way he has wanted to tell it all these years. do you know what, i don't think i could have turned in a two-hour version of that. i mean, how do you do that? it's been building up. i think it probably would have been easier for him to do that in 1956 than in 1980 when he knows this is his one shot at it. so strategically it was probably not a good move, right, because he lost control of what was released, but, yeah, i don't know how -- how you can be as draconian as you have to be when you're editing a film when it's so personal and it's been building up in you for so long. >> it's a shame they couldn't have done multiple versions to have a four-hour version for

showing on tv, like they did with the boat, for example, that exists in multiple lengths so you can have the -- however -- is it six hours, the full thing? >> something like that. >> well, thank you all very much. thanks the conclusion of our first investigation. i think it's a great start. mart martin. "saving private ryan" came out 20 years ago this summer. more from the symposium in a moment with a historian to discuss the accuracy of "saving private ryan" and that's followed by the military adviser who helped make the movie realistic. then how the national world war ii is connected to the movie. american history tv is normally seen only on weekends but this week the u.s. house is on break and we're using this chance to show you some of our weekend lineup. if you'd like to see more from the "saving private ryan" conference it will be on

american history tv prime time tonight starting at 8:00 eastern. the conference was hosted by the national world war ii museum in new orleans. friday evening american history tv in prime time looks at the shen do with a heal battle fields foundation conference on the history and future of con federal heritage icons such as monuments and the battle flag. speakers include james robertson and christy coleman. american history tv in prime time friday at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span 3. sunday night on q & a congressional historians richard baker, donald ritchie and ray smock. >> one of the questions that i hear people asking all the time, is this the most uncivil time in history? >> it's going to be close, if you were to pick another period certainly the years leading to the civil war, when, you know, a host member came over and caned

a senator in 1856 because he disagreed with what he said and there were a lot of senators who kind of cheered on that host member. >> there is a broadway musical now about the shooting of alexander hamilton, he was shot by the sitting vice president of the united states. that's pretty dramatic. we've had terrible times, political times. >> there was one brawl in 1858 before the civil war that had 80 members rolling around on the floor fighting one another. >> one of the members who had a wig, his name was kite, one of the members pulled his wig off during the fight and someone else yesterday, he scalped him. that was enough levity to stop the fight. >> congressional historians richard baker, donald ritchie and ray smock, sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q & a. there are lots of people who feel like i don't want my kid to

read stories that are sad, disturbing, down beat, whatever, right? and so that's like not a totally illegitimate thing to say, i want to choose as a parent when my kid understands stuff that might bring them grief, but there's also a certain point beyond which it's like, well, they are 14 now. when are you going to introduce them to the idea that not everything is perfect outside of your all white suburb. all of those factors i think swirl together to create the perfect dumpster fire of mass censorship of books by marginalized people. >> live sunday at noon eastern. discussing the latest book "walk away" his other books include "down and out in the magic kingdom" "little brother" plus 14 other novels. interact with him by phone, twitter or facebook. our special series in depth

fiction edition sunday live from noon to 3:00 p.m. eastern on book tv on c-span 2. the academy award winning world war ii film "saving private ryan" was released in theaters in 1998. the movie portrays the 1944 d-day invasion of normandy, france, and a mission to find a soldier behind enemy lines. next on american history tv, historians explore the accuracy of the opening omaha beach landing scene and then discuss the historical accuracy of the film in general. this 90-minute event is part of a symposium held at the national world war ii museum to mark the 20th anniversary of the film's release. this next session brings together both academic expertise and these are both scholars who have spent a tremendous amount of time