"To Introduce our Guest Star, that's What I'm Here to Do..." The Hensonverse Fan Contribution Thread
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Not Exactly Shakespeare...oh, wait
One Man, Many Parts: Adaptations of Shakespeare in the 20th Century
Chapter 8 - Blockbusters
By Steven Ratford of the University of Waterloo, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature
Guest post by @Plateosaurus and Mr. Harris Syed with assistance from @Ogrebear and @MNM041
“What is past is prologue.” - The Tempest, Act 2, Scene I
In the 1990's, there was a renewed interest in adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays with an uptick in movie adaptations being produced on both sides of the Atlantic. However, not all adaptations of the folios were so straightforward. Many would go in different directions, whether by recontextualising it in new settings or deconstructing the story and values of Elizebethan England they were written in. The last part deserves special mention: coming in the Information Age, the knowledge of the most problematic parts of Shakespeare’s plays were increasingly being diffused to newcomers who had never seen or read the Bard’s works before, as well as the stereotypes of the plays being dusty and stale, so innovation and reinterpretation was needed to attract more public interest.
The most high-profile of the Shakespeare adapters of course being Northern Irish director and actor Kenneth Branagh. Continuing his streak after Henry V, Branagh continued to adapt Shakespeare's work for a then-contemporary audience, starting with Much Ado About Nothing in 1993 which had a cast of notable British and American actors such as Emma Thompson, Keanu Reeves, and Michael Keaton. The next would be 1994's Hamlet in which he would direct and star as the titular character in the 19th century[1].
The same year, just a few years after US Judge Clarence Thomas was disqualified for his post because of sexual assault allegations, American director Nancy Meyers wrote and directed a very irreverent and cynical adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew simply titled The Shrew. The film was set in ‘70s New York with the Minolas reimagined as an Italian-American family living the high life with Baptiste Roger (Baptista’s counterpart, here very similar to Rudy Giuliani) running for the the office of governor, but the outspoken nature of Katherine is seen as a potential dealbreaker, so the patriarchs hire Peter Richford (Petruchio’s counterpart) to make her behave, while he uses the opportunity to climb his way up the social ladder. Unlike the original play (or at least classic interpretations), the film examined the more uncomfortable aspects of the story, ultimately ending with it being shown that misogyny has left both sides hurt and deeply unhappy, with Katherine broken and traumatised by the abuse and unable to do what she could without her previous attitude, the Minolas getting away with their abusive behaviour, and Peter regretting his methods. Marshall and Meyers assembled the likes of Annabella Sciorra (Katherine Minola), Marisa Tomei (Bianca Minola), Robert De Niro (Baptiste Roger Minola) and Cary Elwes (Peter Richford) in this retelling of one of Shakespeare’s more controversial plays. Although the film would perform well amongst critics, it bombed at the box office to more successful tentpole and indie films, and the rather pessimistic atmosphere and the cast of unlikeable characters turned many people away from watching it[2]. Such a thing is actually the case for some Shakespearean adaptations of the time, due to the different societal standards of the England that he lived in. Nonetheless, The Shrew would become a masterpiece with not just critics but third-wave feminists along with Donna Deitch’s socially conscious Sexual Advances and Penny Marshall’s controversial NC-rated porn drama Kandi.
One year after The Shrew, The Tempest would be adapted to the silver screen in 1994 by the legendary Terry Gilliam (written by Neil Gaiman), and took influence from the goth subculture of the time, already one that would know Shakespeare better then others. While the prose was retained, the film emphasised the visual side.
Othello was the next to be given the major cinematic treatment in 1995 by legendary actor and director Sidney Poitier (written by Oliver Parker)[3]. Poitier changed the setting from Renaissance era Venice to 19th century colonial Jamaica and included a lot of racial subtext with the now-black Othello (Delroy Lindo) falling in love with the white Desdemona (Helena Bonham-Carter) and attracting the jealousy of Iago (Tim Curry), who views her as his bride and plots to kill Othello because he assumes he has stolen what he sees as rightfully his in a clear echo of discrimination such as the dehumanization of Africans and the self-entitlement of white supremacy.
Later that year, director Richard Lonclaire would make a modern adaptation of King Lear simply titled Lear with Ian McKellen as the titular character, who previously played King Lear in a 1990 stage production[4]. This version took place in Victorian Britain and reimagined the plot of the original play as a corporate power struggle between Goneril/Gail (Judi Dench), Regan/Reagan (Helen Mirren) and Cordelia (Natascha McElhone) for control of Rayburn Steel rounded out with a stacked ensemble cast comprised of Tim Roth (Edmund Gloucester), Rowan Atkinson (George Gloucester), Sean Bean (Edgar Gloucester), Michael Gambon (Richard Kent), Jean Reno (François), John Cleese (Duke Albans), Pierce Brosnan (Michael Cornish) and Gerard Depardieu (Bartholome) with a then-unknown Daniel Craig playing the Fool. Aside from the new setting, the film preserved much of the plot and themes of King Lear right down to the tragic, downbeat ending with Duke inheriting Rayburn from his competitors paralleling the folio version of the ending.
On the complete opposite scale of the seriousness/silliness scale that year was Fail Caesar! (dir. Rik Mayall; written by Mayall and Adrian Edmondson), which used Julius Caesar to lampoon Jacobean tragedy in general but in an affectionate manner like his previous works. As you would expect from a then-contemporary reinterpretation of a Shakespearian play, the plot sees Julius Caesar (played by Mayall himself) as the Consul of the Roman Republic who is later assassinated by sixty senators in a deliberately anachronistic and darkly comedic take on one of the most important events in European and world history.
1996 would see a modernised, contemporary takes on the classic Shakespeare play Macbeth with an almost all-Scottish cast comprised of Ian Glen as the titular character (renamed Macbeth Menzies), Brian Cox as Duncan McDonagal, David Tennant as Malcolm McDonagal, Tommy Flanagan as Donalbain McDonagal, Tilda Swinton as Rose Menzies, Dougray Scott as Banquo, James McAvoy as Fleance, Craig Ferguson as Michael Macduff, Emma Thompson as Elizabeth Macduff, Iain Robertson as John Macduff, Annette Crosbie as Hectate, Phyllis Logan, Lindsay Duncan and Laura Fraser as the Wayward Sisters, Peter Mullan as Sifton, Jared Harris as George Steward and Natalie Cassidy as Shelley Steward (a genderbent version of Siward’s son). The 1996 retelling of the Scottish Play was the brainchild of satirist Armando Iannucci, a writer for the BBC’s The Day Today. Iannucci had seen a 1991 London production of Macbeth with Cox and Glen and had written a script as early as 1993 with the intent of producing it for television[9]. However, BBC executives wanted Iannucci to direct and produce a big screen adaptation of the play, Iannucci complied with BBC’s request and got to work on updating Macbeth to a new audience. This Macbeth took place in modern Scotland with Macbeth Menzies running for the position of MP in the county of Fife by resorting to all kinds of treachery as in the original play up to killing Duncan and hiring a group of gangsters to kill his opponents all filtered through the lens of Iannucci’s dryly bleak satire. The BBC produced film would be distributed overseas by Disney’s Hyperion Pictures and made a modest profit at the box office, nevertheless helping establish Iannucci’s credentials as a director and writer.
The latter half of the 1990s saw lavish, big-budget epic adaptations of Shakespeare's most famous plays which included Ridley Scott's The Merchant of Venice (1997; written by Howard Franklin)[5], Branagh's Richard III (1998; written by David Mamet)[6], and Lonclraine's A Midsummer's Night Dream (1999; also written by Loncraine). Unlike the other Shakespeare adaptations, these films were mostly straight translations of the original plays which kept the settings as they were but with some changes to make them palatable to contemporary audiences. Much like their updated counterparts, these films brought together some of the finest actors from both sides of the Atlantic in major or minor roles such as Leonard Nimoy’s Shylock, Christopher Plummer’s Richard III, and Cate Blanchett’s Hippolyta. The films performed moderately or very well with critics and audiences and won or were nominated at awards ceremonies like the Oscars and BAFTAs.
1998 sae a retelling of Romeo and Juliet titled Crossed (dir. Spike Lee; written by Lee and Tupac Shakur), described by some as West Side Story meets Boyz n the Hood. Like West Side Story, Crossed would retell the Shakespeare classic with ethnic street gangs rather than Italian merchant clans, but featuring a mostly black cast and set in LA in the present, with the gangs being the Monarchs and the Caps, fictional stand-ins for the Bloods and the Crips respectively[7], thus being a crossover between the Shakespearean play and the Hood genre of films popular at the time. Chris Kelly of Kris-Kross fame, would play the Romeo-esque Rolls while Aaliyah was tapped for the Juliet role, Jewel[6]. Tupac himself would play the Mercutio-type mentor role of Mercury, backed by Biggie as the violent, sociopathic Tybalt-type character of Baller[8]. With an all-star cast of of rap and R&B singers[9] and an acclaimed soundtrack from Lee collaborator Terrence Blanchard, the film was a box office hit and was nominated or won multiple awards, notably at the MTV Movie and TV Awards (which even they acknowledge was not usually something they do) drawing in a rather diverse audience of different races and genders. It also helped build up the acting credentials of Kelly, Aaliyah and Tupac.
Another breed of Shakespeare adaptations would emerge en vogue in a place different yet familiar: high school. Many teen drama and comedy films of the 90’s into the 2000’s would re-imagine the plot of classic English literature as a whole as happening in the faculties where teenagers often learn and perform them in English and Drama classes, and the Folio was no exception. The most notable of these high school Shakespeare adaptations being 1998’s Ruthless, another retelling of The Taming of the Shrew set at a Chicago high school and directed by Tommy O’Haver with Natalie Portman as Catherine “Kathy” Staley, Heath Ledger as Perry Truman[10], Kirsten Dunst as Bianca Staley and Josh Hartnett as Cameron Jackson. Unlike Nancy Meyers’ take, Ruthless ended on a much more hopeful note, with Kathy reconciling with Bianca and begins dating Perry. Another was 1999’s "O" (dir. Tim Blake Nelson; written by Brad Kaaya)[11], which retold the story of Othello with a racial subtext as common as Sidney Poitier's 1995 version set at a Charleston high school with Mekhi Phifer as Odin Jones, Christina Ricci as Desi Brable and Freddie Prinze Jr. as Hugo Goulding. In the same year, there was As You Would Really Like It (directed by Weitz brothers, written by Adam Herz) which turned the play into a raunchy sex comedy[12]. Finally, another classic Shakespeare play adapted for a tween audience was 2001’s Summer Night, Summer Fright (a retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream; directed by Gil Junger; written by R. Lee Fleming Jr), which brought a violent horror-comedy take on the play in the vein of George Romero and Joss Whedon’s Final Girl, with a wedding being in the path of succubiand the protagonists Alison Woodward (Julia Stiles) and Bertram “Bertie” Sanders (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) fighting said succubi. As in the original play, Puck has a large role, here played as a puppet and voiced by Patrick Stewart.
All in all, Shakespeare adaptations experienced a great renaissance within cinematic circles, sparking creative interpretations that helped reach audiences that otherwise weren’t interested in the classics. However, at the same time these Shakesperian films were in theatres, television was also making its own forays into the Bard’s plays outside of televised recording, and even the golden age of interactive fiction would dip its toes too.
[1] No Frankenstein for Kenneth Branagh to direct and star in means his schedule is freed up in 1994.
[2] On TV Tropes, this would be called Too Bleak, Stopped Caring (formerly known as Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy).
[3] Concerning what happened to Sidney Poitier’s directing career, he did not direct Ghost Dad with Bill Cosby in 1990 as that movie would be a John Badham-directed Steve Martin star vehicle as originally intended due to butterflies affecting it’s production and the careers of the people involved.
[4] Ian McKellen said that he had no interest in playing Richard III because he saw the play as not suited for a modern audience and only changed his mind after playing Iago in a 1989 production of Othello. Ten years worth of butterflies means that McKellen does King Lear on stage which leads to Loncraine writing an adaptation of the play, six years later.
[5] Definitely not to be confused with the unnecessarily excessive torture porn, rape-filled zombie comic by Garth Ennis and Avatar Press from OTL which will have a different name if it still exists. Additionally, Lee’s Crossed replaces William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet as the modern 90s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet since Baz Luhrmann doesn’t make the film. And the idea of Lee doing a Romeo and Juliet is from none other than @Geekhis Khan himself.
[6] As confirmed by the Great Khan, Aaliyah’s tragic plane crash in the Bahamas has been completely butterflied. Because of this, she will get to have a long-lasting acting career.
[7] As films like Justice: The Bass Reeves Story and Star Wars Episode I: A Darkness Rising can attest, Tupac Shakur has a thriving film career and with his death being completely averted expect him to appear in more films or even TV shows whether as a leading man or in a supporting role.
[8] Other hip-hop artists and R&B singers starring in the film are Ice T as Rolls’ father Theodore (Lord Montague), Whitney Houston as Rolls’ mother Regina (Lady Montague), Snoop Dogg as Rolls’ oldest cousin Benji (Benovilo), Big Pun as Rolls’ second cousin Barker (Balthasar), Tevin Campbell as Rolls’ third cousin Georgie (Gregory), Usher as Rolls’ youngest cousin Sammy (Sampson), Luther Vandross as Jewel’s father Philip (Lord Capulet), Anita Baker as Jewel’s mother Diamond (Lady Capulet), Mary J. Blige as a gender-flipped version of Abra, Biz Markie as Pete (Peter), Queen Latifah as Rosie (Rosa), Big Daddy Kane as Vick (Valentine), Toni Braxton as Jenny (Nurse), James Brown as Mayor Prince (Prince Escalus), Ice Cube as David (Count Paris), Chris Smith (the other half of Kriss-Kross) as Antonio (Anthony and the other Capulet servants) and Barry White as The Dealer (Apothecary). Tupac and Biggie’s friends Freddie Mercury and Kurt Cobain would have small roles as gay businessmen, the film’s analogues to the friars.
[9] Iannucci would be in London working for the BBC and would have seen Cox and Glen’s Macbeth London performance at the Royal National Theatre. Cox of course has done Shakespearean plays before in OTL and TTL and Iannucci seeing him on stage with Glen is catalyst for the Scottish Play getting adapted to the silver screen in ‘96.
[10] Since Alien 3 is directed by Scott, 1492: Conquest of Paradise is never made and his career isn’t derailed for a while.
[11] As Loncraine is busy with Lear and A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Branagh gets to direct an adaptation of the play set during the Wars of the Roses as opposed to an alternate 1930s Britain in OTL’s 1995 film.
[12] Ledger already has some recognition from X-Men and Blackadder in the Fifth Form but this film will launch his career as a leading man.
[13] O was pushed back to 2001 IOTL due to the Columbine shooting. Since that event will have gone a different way, it will be released in 1999. Also, Ricci and Prinze Jr. who were (apparently) considered for O will actually be in the film.
[14] The film replaces American Pie, since the tween sex comedy boom has been butterflied in the post-Anita Hill era. That said, some cast members from that movie will appear in this film.
Chapter 8 - Blockbusters
By Steven Ratford of the University of Waterloo, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature
Guest post by @Plateosaurus and Mr. Harris Syed with assistance from @Ogrebear and @MNM041
“What is past is prologue.” - The Tempest, Act 2, Scene I
In the 1990's, there was a renewed interest in adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays with an uptick in movie adaptations being produced on both sides of the Atlantic. However, not all adaptations of the folios were so straightforward. Many would go in different directions, whether by recontextualising it in new settings or deconstructing the story and values of Elizebethan England they were written in. The last part deserves special mention: coming in the Information Age, the knowledge of the most problematic parts of Shakespeare’s plays were increasingly being diffused to newcomers who had never seen or read the Bard’s works before, as well as the stereotypes of the plays being dusty and stale, so innovation and reinterpretation was needed to attract more public interest.
The most high-profile of the Shakespeare adapters of course being Northern Irish director and actor Kenneth Branagh. Continuing his streak after Henry V, Branagh continued to adapt Shakespeare's work for a then-contemporary audience, starting with Much Ado About Nothing in 1993 which had a cast of notable British and American actors such as Emma Thompson, Keanu Reeves, and Michael Keaton. The next would be 1994's Hamlet in which he would direct and star as the titular character in the 19th century[1].
The same year, just a few years after US Judge Clarence Thomas was disqualified for his post because of sexual assault allegations, American director Nancy Meyers wrote and directed a very irreverent and cynical adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew simply titled The Shrew. The film was set in ‘70s New York with the Minolas reimagined as an Italian-American family living the high life with Baptiste Roger (Baptista’s counterpart, here very similar to Rudy Giuliani) running for the the office of governor, but the outspoken nature of Katherine is seen as a potential dealbreaker, so the patriarchs hire Peter Richford (Petruchio’s counterpart) to make her behave, while he uses the opportunity to climb his way up the social ladder. Unlike the original play (or at least classic interpretations), the film examined the more uncomfortable aspects of the story, ultimately ending with it being shown that misogyny has left both sides hurt and deeply unhappy, with Katherine broken and traumatised by the abuse and unable to do what she could without her previous attitude, the Minolas getting away with their abusive behaviour, and Peter regretting his methods. Marshall and Meyers assembled the likes of Annabella Sciorra (Katherine Minola), Marisa Tomei (Bianca Minola), Robert De Niro (Baptiste Roger Minola) and Cary Elwes (Peter Richford) in this retelling of one of Shakespeare’s more controversial plays. Although the film would perform well amongst critics, it bombed at the box office to more successful tentpole and indie films, and the rather pessimistic atmosphere and the cast of unlikeable characters turned many people away from watching it[2]. Such a thing is actually the case for some Shakespearean adaptations of the time, due to the different societal standards of the England that he lived in. Nonetheless, The Shrew would become a masterpiece with not just critics but third-wave feminists along with Donna Deitch’s socially conscious Sexual Advances and Penny Marshall’s controversial NC-rated porn drama Kandi.
One year after The Shrew, The Tempest would be adapted to the silver screen in 1994 by the legendary Terry Gilliam (written by Neil Gaiman), and took influence from the goth subculture of the time, already one that would know Shakespeare better then others. While the prose was retained, the film emphasised the visual side.
Othello was the next to be given the major cinematic treatment in 1995 by legendary actor and director Sidney Poitier (written by Oliver Parker)[3]. Poitier changed the setting from Renaissance era Venice to 19th century colonial Jamaica and included a lot of racial subtext with the now-black Othello (Delroy Lindo) falling in love with the white Desdemona (Helena Bonham-Carter) and attracting the jealousy of Iago (Tim Curry), who views her as his bride and plots to kill Othello because he assumes he has stolen what he sees as rightfully his in a clear echo of discrimination such as the dehumanization of Africans and the self-entitlement of white supremacy.
Later that year, director Richard Lonclaire would make a modern adaptation of King Lear simply titled Lear with Ian McKellen as the titular character, who previously played King Lear in a 1990 stage production[4]. This version took place in Victorian Britain and reimagined the plot of the original play as a corporate power struggle between Goneril/Gail (Judi Dench), Regan/Reagan (Helen Mirren) and Cordelia (Natascha McElhone) for control of Rayburn Steel rounded out with a stacked ensemble cast comprised of Tim Roth (Edmund Gloucester), Rowan Atkinson (George Gloucester), Sean Bean (Edgar Gloucester), Michael Gambon (Richard Kent), Jean Reno (François), John Cleese (Duke Albans), Pierce Brosnan (Michael Cornish) and Gerard Depardieu (Bartholome) with a then-unknown Daniel Craig playing the Fool. Aside from the new setting, the film preserved much of the plot and themes of King Lear right down to the tragic, downbeat ending with Duke inheriting Rayburn from his competitors paralleling the folio version of the ending.
On the complete opposite scale of the seriousness/silliness scale that year was Fail Caesar! (dir. Rik Mayall; written by Mayall and Adrian Edmondson), which used Julius Caesar to lampoon Jacobean tragedy in general but in an affectionate manner like his previous works. As you would expect from a then-contemporary reinterpretation of a Shakespearian play, the plot sees Julius Caesar (played by Mayall himself) as the Consul of the Roman Republic who is later assassinated by sixty senators in a deliberately anachronistic and darkly comedic take on one of the most important events in European and world history.
1996 would see a modernised, contemporary takes on the classic Shakespeare play Macbeth with an almost all-Scottish cast comprised of Ian Glen as the titular character (renamed Macbeth Menzies), Brian Cox as Duncan McDonagal, David Tennant as Malcolm McDonagal, Tommy Flanagan as Donalbain McDonagal, Tilda Swinton as Rose Menzies, Dougray Scott as Banquo, James McAvoy as Fleance, Craig Ferguson as Michael Macduff, Emma Thompson as Elizabeth Macduff, Iain Robertson as John Macduff, Annette Crosbie as Hectate, Phyllis Logan, Lindsay Duncan and Laura Fraser as the Wayward Sisters, Peter Mullan as Sifton, Jared Harris as George Steward and Natalie Cassidy as Shelley Steward (a genderbent version of Siward’s son). The 1996 retelling of the Scottish Play was the brainchild of satirist Armando Iannucci, a writer for the BBC’s The Day Today. Iannucci had seen a 1991 London production of Macbeth with Cox and Glen and had written a script as early as 1993 with the intent of producing it for television[9]. However, BBC executives wanted Iannucci to direct and produce a big screen adaptation of the play, Iannucci complied with BBC’s request and got to work on updating Macbeth to a new audience. This Macbeth took place in modern Scotland with Macbeth Menzies running for the position of MP in the county of Fife by resorting to all kinds of treachery as in the original play up to killing Duncan and hiring a group of gangsters to kill his opponents all filtered through the lens of Iannucci’s dryly bleak satire. The BBC produced film would be distributed overseas by Disney’s Hyperion Pictures and made a modest profit at the box office, nevertheless helping establish Iannucci’s credentials as a director and writer.
The latter half of the 1990s saw lavish, big-budget epic adaptations of Shakespeare's most famous plays which included Ridley Scott's The Merchant of Venice (1997; written by Howard Franklin)[5], Branagh's Richard III (1998; written by David Mamet)[6], and Lonclraine's A Midsummer's Night Dream (1999; also written by Loncraine). Unlike the other Shakespeare adaptations, these films were mostly straight translations of the original plays which kept the settings as they were but with some changes to make them palatable to contemporary audiences. Much like their updated counterparts, these films brought together some of the finest actors from both sides of the Atlantic in major or minor roles such as Leonard Nimoy’s Shylock, Christopher Plummer’s Richard III, and Cate Blanchett’s Hippolyta. The films performed moderately or very well with critics and audiences and won or were nominated at awards ceremonies like the Oscars and BAFTAs.
1998 sae a retelling of Romeo and Juliet titled Crossed (dir. Spike Lee; written by Lee and Tupac Shakur), described by some as West Side Story meets Boyz n the Hood. Like West Side Story, Crossed would retell the Shakespeare classic with ethnic street gangs rather than Italian merchant clans, but featuring a mostly black cast and set in LA in the present, with the gangs being the Monarchs and the Caps, fictional stand-ins for the Bloods and the Crips respectively[7], thus being a crossover between the Shakespearean play and the Hood genre of films popular at the time. Chris Kelly of Kris-Kross fame, would play the Romeo-esque Rolls while Aaliyah was tapped for the Juliet role, Jewel[6]. Tupac himself would play the Mercutio-type mentor role of Mercury, backed by Biggie as the violent, sociopathic Tybalt-type character of Baller[8]. With an all-star cast of of rap and R&B singers[9] and an acclaimed soundtrack from Lee collaborator Terrence Blanchard, the film was a box office hit and was nominated or won multiple awards, notably at the MTV Movie and TV Awards (which even they acknowledge was not usually something they do) drawing in a rather diverse audience of different races and genders. It also helped build up the acting credentials of Kelly, Aaliyah and Tupac.
Another breed of Shakespeare adaptations would emerge en vogue in a place different yet familiar: high school. Many teen drama and comedy films of the 90’s into the 2000’s would re-imagine the plot of classic English literature as a whole as happening in the faculties where teenagers often learn and perform them in English and Drama classes, and the Folio was no exception. The most notable of these high school Shakespeare adaptations being 1998’s Ruthless, another retelling of The Taming of the Shrew set at a Chicago high school and directed by Tommy O’Haver with Natalie Portman as Catherine “Kathy” Staley, Heath Ledger as Perry Truman[10], Kirsten Dunst as Bianca Staley and Josh Hartnett as Cameron Jackson. Unlike Nancy Meyers’ take, Ruthless ended on a much more hopeful note, with Kathy reconciling with Bianca and begins dating Perry. Another was 1999’s "O" (dir. Tim Blake Nelson; written by Brad Kaaya)[11], which retold the story of Othello with a racial subtext as common as Sidney Poitier's 1995 version set at a Charleston high school with Mekhi Phifer as Odin Jones, Christina Ricci as Desi Brable and Freddie Prinze Jr. as Hugo Goulding. In the same year, there was As You Would Really Like It (directed by Weitz brothers, written by Adam Herz) which turned the play into a raunchy sex comedy[12]. Finally, another classic Shakespeare play adapted for a tween audience was 2001’s Summer Night, Summer Fright (a retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream; directed by Gil Junger; written by R. Lee Fleming Jr), which brought a violent horror-comedy take on the play in the vein of George Romero and Joss Whedon’s Final Girl, with a wedding being in the path of succubiand the protagonists Alison Woodward (Julia Stiles) and Bertram “Bertie” Sanders (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) fighting said succubi. As in the original play, Puck has a large role, here played as a puppet and voiced by Patrick Stewart.
All in all, Shakespeare adaptations experienced a great renaissance within cinematic circles, sparking creative interpretations that helped reach audiences that otherwise weren’t interested in the classics. However, at the same time these Shakesperian films were in theatres, television was also making its own forays into the Bard’s plays outside of televised recording, and even the golden age of interactive fiction would dip its toes too.
[1] No Frankenstein for Kenneth Branagh to direct and star in means his schedule is freed up in 1994.
[2] On TV Tropes, this would be called Too Bleak, Stopped Caring (formerly known as Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy).
[3] Concerning what happened to Sidney Poitier’s directing career, he did not direct Ghost Dad with Bill Cosby in 1990 as that movie would be a John Badham-directed Steve Martin star vehicle as originally intended due to butterflies affecting it’s production and the careers of the people involved.
[4] Ian McKellen said that he had no interest in playing Richard III because he saw the play as not suited for a modern audience and only changed his mind after playing Iago in a 1989 production of Othello. Ten years worth of butterflies means that McKellen does King Lear on stage which leads to Loncraine writing an adaptation of the play, six years later.
[5] Definitely not to be confused with the unnecessarily excessive torture porn, rape-filled zombie comic by Garth Ennis and Avatar Press from OTL which will have a different name if it still exists. Additionally, Lee’s Crossed replaces William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet as the modern 90s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet since Baz Luhrmann doesn’t make the film. And the idea of Lee doing a Romeo and Juliet is from none other than @Geekhis Khan himself.
[6] As confirmed by the Great Khan, Aaliyah’s tragic plane crash in the Bahamas has been completely butterflied. Because of this, she will get to have a long-lasting acting career.
[7] As films like Justice: The Bass Reeves Story and Star Wars Episode I: A Darkness Rising can attest, Tupac Shakur has a thriving film career and with his death being completely averted expect him to appear in more films or even TV shows whether as a leading man or in a supporting role.
[8] Other hip-hop artists and R&B singers starring in the film are Ice T as Rolls’ father Theodore (Lord Montague), Whitney Houston as Rolls’ mother Regina (Lady Montague), Snoop Dogg as Rolls’ oldest cousin Benji (Benovilo), Big Pun as Rolls’ second cousin Barker (Balthasar), Tevin Campbell as Rolls’ third cousin Georgie (Gregory), Usher as Rolls’ youngest cousin Sammy (Sampson), Luther Vandross as Jewel’s father Philip (Lord Capulet), Anita Baker as Jewel’s mother Diamond (Lady Capulet), Mary J. Blige as a gender-flipped version of Abra, Biz Markie as Pete (Peter), Queen Latifah as Rosie (Rosa), Big Daddy Kane as Vick (Valentine), Toni Braxton as Jenny (Nurse), James Brown as Mayor Prince (Prince Escalus), Ice Cube as David (Count Paris), Chris Smith (the other half of Kriss-Kross) as Antonio (Anthony and the other Capulet servants) and Barry White as The Dealer (Apothecary). Tupac and Biggie’s friends Freddie Mercury and Kurt Cobain would have small roles as gay businessmen, the film’s analogues to the friars.
[9] Iannucci would be in London working for the BBC and would have seen Cox and Glen’s Macbeth London performance at the Royal National Theatre. Cox of course has done Shakespearean plays before in OTL and TTL and Iannucci seeing him on stage with Glen is catalyst for the Scottish Play getting adapted to the silver screen in ‘96.
[10] Since Alien 3 is directed by Scott, 1492: Conquest of Paradise is never made and his career isn’t derailed for a while.
[11] As Loncraine is busy with Lear and A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Branagh gets to direct an adaptation of the play set during the Wars of the Roses as opposed to an alternate 1930s Britain in OTL’s 1995 film.
[12] Ledger already has some recognition from X-Men and Blackadder in the Fifth Form but this film will launch his career as a leading man.
[13] O was pushed back to 2001 IOTL due to the Columbine shooting. Since that event will have gone a different way, it will be released in 1999. Also, Ricci and Prinze Jr. who were (apparently) considered for O will actually be in the film.
[14] The film replaces American Pie, since the tween sex comedy boom has been butterflied in the post-Anita Hill era. That said, some cast members from that movie will appear in this film.
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Ok… I have been having this idea in my mind for a while, but I just need to check on if it is ok
Sioux Sue for SUE
SUE: Life, Death, Legacy, and A Tale of Two Institutes
By Riley Black of Smithsonian Magazine Netsite, September 2015
Guest post by @Plateosaurus with assistance from Mr. Harris Syed and @Nathanoraptor
Recently, the miniseries Sue debuted on HBO, starring Wes Studi as Native American rancher Maurice Williams and Karl Urban as fossil entrepreneur Peter Larson, based off the book by writer Daniel Thor-Diggs[1]. The story adapts the real life legal battle over one of the largest specimens of T. rex ever found, between the Williams and the Sioux tribe, Larson’s private collectors at the Black Hills Institute, and the US government over who truly owned it. Many have deemed the legal affair around SUE that inspired the series as making it one of the most significant fossils in history for the legal precedent about fossils they[2] had set. With the 25th anniversary of the specimen’s discovery approaching, let’s explore the history of SUE and their place in American history.
The story of SUE naturally began 67 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, albiet with very few details confirmed. All we knoew so far is that an adult Tyrannosaurus died in the swamplands of mid-western North America after living a long and dangerous life, before becoming covered in mud over time. The conditions were just right for the three to be fossilized, and as with all fossils, seeping water brought minerals into their body and replaced it to stone.
Palaeontologists Sue Hendrickson and Pete Larson at the site of SUE’s discovery (from American Chemical Society)
We then flash forward millions of years to August 1990 to the American Midwest now dubbed South Dakota, specifically the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation, where members Maurice Williams and his wife Darlene had a cattle ranch. He had given permission from the private Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, which dealt in fossil preparation and excavation since its formation in 1974 by Peter Larson. Having already found several of the duckbilled herbivore Edmontosaurus, prospecting one section of the badlands led to the infamous find[3]. They were magnificent specimens: SUE in particular was 90% complete, 12 meters long, and by their estimate 14 tons which held records for the genus. In addition to them, they even found two smaller theropods; either they were juvenile T. rexes, who even could possibly be SUE’s own offspring or simply different ones from a different time[4], or even new specimens of the genus Nanotyrannus, an exciting prospect either way. The excavation was long and arduous in the midwest heat, but weeks later it would be sent to their labs in Hill City to be further prepared for selling. Larson planned to make the family of T. rexes they had found the centerpiece of a new museum for the Institute, both a major hub for scientific activity and tourism for both the region and South Dakota as a whole.
However, all those plans were marred when a litigator entered the fray and sued the institution: Maurice Williams. He believed that since he owned the land the three rexes were found in, he, along with his own tribe, was the owner of SUE and the other two. He would ask the Department of the Interior to hand it over back to him, and that the BHI did not even have his permission to take the fossils. His insistence was understandable: his people have long been subject to having their culture and land stolen by private groups and the government alike since the 1700s, and fossils were no exception, given they were venerated as the giant ancestors of modern animals as were not to be deserved in their beliefs. The same year SUE was discovered, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was signed into law, which forbade the selling and buying of cultural objects from native and federally-owned land, to prevent exactly that. Ironically, the Smithsonian would get involved in similar affairs in the same period with the human specimen known as Kennewick Man, which while not truly part of modern day indiegenous tribes, was picketed by protestors from the Umatilla tribe over it being returned and reburied as one of them rather than being studied by Smithsinian personnel.
The pressure was bad enough for Black Hills. Then came a raid in May 1992. Government agencies had already sent warnings to the institute for unauthorised digs and takings (including for the dig itself), but the BHI did not budge. Via tips from the National Park Service, the South Dakota National Guard and FBI agents came in the morning of the 12th, seizing the three tyrannosaurs, despite Larson’s protests they were all BHI’s property. The specimens were to be transferred to the South Dakota Museum of Geology at the School of Mines in nearby Rapid City for the time being until the affair could be sorted out.
Not everyone agreed with the action. The town of Hill City was particularly furious, seeing SUE and the two juveniles as part of their community and demanding it be returned, with local residents initially chasing the truck (some children crying tears while doing so), but then some resorted to using logging trucks to stop it from bringing SUE to the government[5]. Even Pete and Neal Larson would become staunch opponents of the fossil being owned by anyone else other than themselves, the BHI, or Hill City. Unfortunately, the logging truck quickly spiralled into a riot that left four injured. Soon, SUE was known nationwide for all the wrong reasons; they even became a moderately-sized flashpoint in the growing debate on the government vs. people angle conservative politicians and pundits were pushing.
As the civil case subsequently began between the BHI, the Sioux and the federal government over ownership of SUE presided over by Judge Richard Battey, and while fairly small all things considered, the media hype and circus around it would blow up immensely to the point where many were seeing it more as a proxy for the debate over how much power the government had over its citizens and private groups. Eventually, the Supreme Court made its verdict and upheld it: Maurice Williams owned SUE, not Black Hills and so SUE would be handed back to the Williams family. Peter meanwhile, facing further scrutiny for previous illicit acts, was sentenced on separate charges in 1996, perhaps because the SUE affair had blown him up and into further scrutiny. The Black Hills Institute for Geological Research would be thrown into turmoil for the next decade, and in 2005 it would shut down entirely due to mounting debt and shrinking profits and support, its specimens donated to other museums, universities, and institutions and its staff going around the nation.
With SUE now back in his possession, Maurice would make the fateful decision to put it up for auction, hoping to make money for the Sioux tribe. Many would criticize the auction as exploitative and greedy, with both scientists, government officials, and even celebrities and other private groups voicing their displeasure over SUE being sold to a private collector, where they would be rendered borderline inaccessible to palaeontologists seeking to study her. Jurassic Park star Pierce Brosnan was among those who spoke out, saying that “Sue is among the most complete - and the largest - Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever found and her remains could provide an unprecedented insight into how her species lived. It would be a travesty for such a remarkable specimen to end up hoarded by some private collector when she could be in a museum where the world can study, learn from and enjoy her. Whilst I understand the Sioux need money to help sustain themselves, selling this invaluable specimen to some fossil hoarder is not the right way to go about obtaining it.” An unsuccessful petition was even started for the government to seize SUE once again and keep her under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, letting the specimen be donated wherever they pleased. On the other hand, the private sector was curious about SUE and pondered if they could get their hands on the fossil. Meanwhile, the Sioux tribe fired back at the critics, saying they had every right to choose what to do with it and accused authorities and pundits (who go without saying are mostly white) of trying to police them.
Still, many museums decided to make the direct choice to try and bid for SUE, in the hopes of acquiring it for study and preventing it from going into the wrong hands. Such a choice was controversial: many felt purchasing fossils from private collectors and finding them just to sell them legitimized a damaging industry run by people who had no rigorous training in the fields of the sciences that broke and sent away valuable specimens. However, the private institutes and commercial palaeontologists fired back, saying that they were merely honest, hard-working individuals unbound by bureaucracy trying to make a living, and there were enough fossils to go around for both sides. But as far as museum directors were concerned, the risk of entering such ethical quagmires were worth saving a specimen like SUE from, as one put it, “a potential life in some rich twat’s mansion”.
Among the museums wanting to make the purchase was the Smithsonian Institution, partially owned and operated by the US government. At the time it was going through an upheaval to modernize itself, and some believed that getting the T. rex would provide the revenue and clout to help the museum grow[6]. It was going to be an uphill battle, but the Smithsonian had the backing of two other big ones. Naturally, the first was the government, but the second was the Walt Disney Company. The entertainment juggernaut already had a working relationship with the Institution, having collaborated on restoring both the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose for Port Disney, and they were jointly setting up Smithsonian’s nascent cable network Smithsonian TV. Many members of Disney, already supporters for environmental rights and reform, would agree that the specimen should not belong to a private collector and risk being lost to science and the public but they decided it would have been a hypocritical PR nightmare to directly buy it themselves. However, after a meeting between Smithsonian members and park manager Bob Lamb during construction of the new Disney park, Disney Animal Kingdom, they agreed to merely help provide the money for the Smithsonian. They also made some other agreements concerning the specimen. Joining Disney would be its partner in the Bass Brothers, However, not everyone at the company was on board with this proposal, with some wishing to allocate the money away from the Smithsonian into building the already high-budgeted Animal Kingdom and other projects, with one even resigning over the Institution’s agreement with Disney, going instead to Warner Bros. to work at their theme parks.
From the documentary Dinosaur 13, copyright CNN Films and Lionsgate
Ultimately, the auction on October 6, 1997 would last just nine fateful minutes and balloon from a mere $500,000 into the millions, but the Smithsonian was the one who bought SUE, for over $9.08 million, a record holder for any fossil ever bought (with most of it going to the Sioux Tribe and reservation’s healthcare and infrastructure). The second highest was Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History at a barely close $7 million (joined by McDonald’s)[7], and in third place was Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Nevertheless, no hard feelings were lost between all three institutions. Both Field and NC became affiliates of the institution, and the FMNH got to organise an expedition to the site and got to keep the two juveniles, who’d be come to be nicknamed Reese and Thunderbird, as a play on the name of Maurice and a mythical bird in his tribe’s mythology respectively as an ode to the Bird-Dinosaur connection.
Although the purchase of SUE was the highest-priced dinosaur at auction, it would be the last. In 1999, a new piece of legislation from Colorado Representative David E. Skaggs ould be introduced known as the Fossil Excavation and Preservation Act which prevented any private individual or group outside of universities/colleges or museums from purchasing vertebrate fossils and exporting them or be taken outside the US without permission, and more broadly classified them as artifacts, and placing a cap on privately owned specimens. The legislation would be signed into law by President Gore after it was approved in the Senate. It was not flawless - fossils could still be traded around US soil and into Canada, and as the fossils were still classified as minerals, people could still purchase fossils without repercussions.
The staff of the National Museum of Natural History saw the acquisition as a godsend. The Natural History Museum was undergoing a large renovation at the time, receiving over $40 million in donations from donors to refurbish the aging exhibits and galleries, and SUE, in addition to shaping up to be a trove of palaeobiological knowledge, would be a perfect centrepiece for the new fossil life gallery. For the next two years, SUE would be extracted from the rocks live on the internet at one of the museum’s prep labs. In the early winter of 1999, SUE would begin being mounted in the museum. Initially SUE was in the museum’s fossil gallery, Fossils: History of Life. Eventually in 2006, they were taken on tour across the nation and even into Canada during the creation of the museum’s new fossil gallery, the Bass Hall of Fossils and Evolution. SUE’s travelling exhibit, focused primarily on the palaeontology and ecology, with little in the way of discussing the history of her discovery and ownership, although inasiders confirm future runs could adress this.
In both the first and current versions of the Fossil gallery, they also stand opposite Rex’s iconic rival Triceratops, the museum’s famous “Hatcher” specimen. The second iteration stands out, for he is posed thrusting up his horns to show he is not to be messed with as he walks by and SUE snarls at him. SUE themself, unlike most other Rex mounts posed standing up roaring or mid-stride, was uniquely sat down around a replica clutch of T. rex eggs so as to be seen at visitors eye level, allowing people to observe their feature more closely. The new gallery opened in May 2009 for $100 million[8], and was attended by over a thousand guests. They would prove to be one of the museum’s major draws over the years, with one report suggesting SUE alone brings over four million visitors per year, and becoming one of the museum’s mascots.
SUE would even get several documentaries about her both on Smithsonian TV and other networks. The first was T. Rex Live!, which documented the preparation and mounting of SUE in the late 90’s, simulcasted on NBC. The second came in 2002 titled Sue: A Dinosaur’s Story, which in the style of a nature documentary showed a week in the life of the T. rex, culminating in a battle with a full grown Triceratops.
Disney has also gotten several things out of the partnership: as part of a deal made prior to the auction, a bronze cast of SUE would go on display at Disney Animal Kingdom in its dinosaur-themed section. Unlike the Smithsonian counterpart, they would remain unchanged over the years, such as no gastralia and remaining standing. There would also be a video game published by the institution’s game publisher Jefferson Drive Studios called Regina, in which players control a T rex from birth to death to survive in the harsh world of the Cretaceous period, only revealing it to be SUE at the end. The game itself, a departure from the usually puzzle and point and click games it dealt in, was evidently fiction, with stylized gore galore, and major scientific inaccuracies throughout it, not the least being anachronisms like the Campanian Parasaurolophus and Gorgosaurus in the Maastrichtian.
All the while, SUE was revealing so much about T. rex, tyrannosaurs and dinosaurs as a whole. Their massive size and bone structure has fascinated paleontologists for years since it’s discovery and revealed how it could support its massive bulk. Peering into the skull has uncovered much about the brain and senses of T. rex. Even analysis of holes on their jaws reveals that one ailment they faced was a parasite found in modern birds[9]. Reese and Thunderbird meanwhile have revealed much about the growth of T. rex from fast, slender forms to the robust adult and the disparate predatory niches they had, and in 2009 helped solve the mystery of whether the infamous gracile genus Nanotyrannus even existed, turning out to be growth stages of Tyrannosaurus. However, just as much through the legal debacle, SUE has also revealed much about ourselves in the way the government, private sector, and indigenous communities interact and our own troubled relations with nature where capitalism is concerned as many treat it as little more than commodities to be sold. Overall, SUE still has much to tell about the history of life on Earth, just as they already told us a great variety about the nature of dinosaurs.
[1] He’s also written his fair share of netlog posts, so don’t be surprised if the next dinosaur related post is by him.
[2] The Field Museum labels SUE as nonbinary due to no evidence for the specimen being either a male or female. Their Twitter account even is such.
[3] In our timeline, the discovery came on August 12, only because the truck sprang a tire, and Sue Henderson found it by chance while passing the time walking around. ITTL, its excavated during it, due to third order butterflies searching in the vicinity earlier.
[4] These two are real (and credit to members of Paleo Media Central Discord server for notifying me about it), although there’s next to no information the writers can find about them online, and its possible they were deposited at a different time and place from it. The public and media will spread the assumption they are SUE’s own offspring and by extension SUE is female.
[5] Didn’t happen in OTL due to safety concerns, but it does here thanks to a stronger reactionary movement because of the progressive politics of TTL’s decade. Such a thing turns things real ugly, and turns the debate over SUE into a much, much bigger fight and in hindsight will be seen as one of the first outbursts of big political violence that would characterize the latter half of the decade.
[6] The museum did not have a genuine T. rex IOTL until 2013 with the Wankel Rex specimen transferred from the Museum of the Rockies in Montana, having to settle for a cast of the Stan specimen installed in 2000, also from the Black Hills Institute. ITTL subsequently, the Field Museum got a cast of Stan.
[7] Lower than IOTL due to the absence of Disney providing the bid.
[8] IOTL, no renovation took place until 2014 before opening under the name of the David Koch Hall of Fossils - Deep Time. For comparison, it cost $110 million IOTL.
[9] No really, take a read for yourself for what I mean - although do keep in mind some other studies suggest its facial biting from another T. rex instead.
By Riley Black of Smithsonian Magazine Netsite, September 2015
Guest post by @Plateosaurus with assistance from Mr. Harris Syed and @Nathanoraptor
Recently, the miniseries Sue debuted on HBO, starring Wes Studi as Native American rancher Maurice Williams and Karl Urban as fossil entrepreneur Peter Larson, based off the book by writer Daniel Thor-Diggs[1]. The story adapts the real life legal battle over one of the largest specimens of T. rex ever found, between the Williams and the Sioux tribe, Larson’s private collectors at the Black Hills Institute, and the US government over who truly owned it. Many have deemed the legal affair around SUE that inspired the series as making it one of the most significant fossils in history for the legal precedent about fossils they[2] had set. With the 25th anniversary of the specimen’s discovery approaching, let’s explore the history of SUE and their place in American history.
The story of SUE naturally began 67 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, albiet with very few details confirmed. All we knoew so far is that an adult Tyrannosaurus died in the swamplands of mid-western North America after living a long and dangerous life, before becoming covered in mud over time. The conditions were just right for the three to be fossilized, and as with all fossils, seeping water brought minerals into their body and replaced it to stone.
Palaeontologists Sue Hendrickson and Pete Larson at the site of SUE’s discovery (from American Chemical Society)
We then flash forward millions of years to August 1990 to the American Midwest now dubbed South Dakota, specifically the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation, where members Maurice Williams and his wife Darlene had a cattle ranch. He had given permission from the private Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, which dealt in fossil preparation and excavation since its formation in 1974 by Peter Larson. Having already found several of the duckbilled herbivore Edmontosaurus, prospecting one section of the badlands led to the infamous find[3]. They were magnificent specimens: SUE in particular was 90% complete, 12 meters long, and by their estimate 14 tons which held records for the genus. In addition to them, they even found two smaller theropods; either they were juvenile T. rexes, who even could possibly be SUE’s own offspring or simply different ones from a different time[4], or even new specimens of the genus Nanotyrannus, an exciting prospect either way. The excavation was long and arduous in the midwest heat, but weeks later it would be sent to their labs in Hill City to be further prepared for selling. Larson planned to make the family of T. rexes they had found the centerpiece of a new museum for the Institute, both a major hub for scientific activity and tourism for both the region and South Dakota as a whole.
However, all those plans were marred when a litigator entered the fray and sued the institution: Maurice Williams. He believed that since he owned the land the three rexes were found in, he, along with his own tribe, was the owner of SUE and the other two. He would ask the Department of the Interior to hand it over back to him, and that the BHI did not even have his permission to take the fossils. His insistence was understandable: his people have long been subject to having their culture and land stolen by private groups and the government alike since the 1700s, and fossils were no exception, given they were venerated as the giant ancestors of modern animals as were not to be deserved in their beliefs. The same year SUE was discovered, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was signed into law, which forbade the selling and buying of cultural objects from native and federally-owned land, to prevent exactly that. Ironically, the Smithsonian would get involved in similar affairs in the same period with the human specimen known as Kennewick Man, which while not truly part of modern day indiegenous tribes, was picketed by protestors from the Umatilla tribe over it being returned and reburied as one of them rather than being studied by Smithsinian personnel.
The pressure was bad enough for Black Hills. Then came a raid in May 1992. Government agencies had already sent warnings to the institute for unauthorised digs and takings (including for the dig itself), but the BHI did not budge. Via tips from the National Park Service, the South Dakota National Guard and FBI agents came in the morning of the 12th, seizing the three tyrannosaurs, despite Larson’s protests they were all BHI’s property. The specimens were to be transferred to the South Dakota Museum of Geology at the School of Mines in nearby Rapid City for the time being until the affair could be sorted out.
Not everyone agreed with the action. The town of Hill City was particularly furious, seeing SUE and the two juveniles as part of their community and demanding it be returned, with local residents initially chasing the truck (some children crying tears while doing so), but then some resorted to using logging trucks to stop it from bringing SUE to the government[5]. Even Pete and Neal Larson would become staunch opponents of the fossil being owned by anyone else other than themselves, the BHI, or Hill City. Unfortunately, the logging truck quickly spiralled into a riot that left four injured. Soon, SUE was known nationwide for all the wrong reasons; they even became a moderately-sized flashpoint in the growing debate on the government vs. people angle conservative politicians and pundits were pushing.
As the civil case subsequently began between the BHI, the Sioux and the federal government over ownership of SUE presided over by Judge Richard Battey, and while fairly small all things considered, the media hype and circus around it would blow up immensely to the point where many were seeing it more as a proxy for the debate over how much power the government had over its citizens and private groups. Eventually, the Supreme Court made its verdict and upheld it: Maurice Williams owned SUE, not Black Hills and so SUE would be handed back to the Williams family. Peter meanwhile, facing further scrutiny for previous illicit acts, was sentenced on separate charges in 1996, perhaps because the SUE affair had blown him up and into further scrutiny. The Black Hills Institute for Geological Research would be thrown into turmoil for the next decade, and in 2005 it would shut down entirely due to mounting debt and shrinking profits and support, its specimens donated to other museums, universities, and institutions and its staff going around the nation.
With SUE now back in his possession, Maurice would make the fateful decision to put it up for auction, hoping to make money for the Sioux tribe. Many would criticize the auction as exploitative and greedy, with both scientists, government officials, and even celebrities and other private groups voicing their displeasure over SUE being sold to a private collector, where they would be rendered borderline inaccessible to palaeontologists seeking to study her. Jurassic Park star Pierce Brosnan was among those who spoke out, saying that “Sue is among the most complete - and the largest - Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever found and her remains could provide an unprecedented insight into how her species lived. It would be a travesty for such a remarkable specimen to end up hoarded by some private collector when she could be in a museum where the world can study, learn from and enjoy her. Whilst I understand the Sioux need money to help sustain themselves, selling this invaluable specimen to some fossil hoarder is not the right way to go about obtaining it.” An unsuccessful petition was even started for the government to seize SUE once again and keep her under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, letting the specimen be donated wherever they pleased. On the other hand, the private sector was curious about SUE and pondered if they could get their hands on the fossil. Meanwhile, the Sioux tribe fired back at the critics, saying they had every right to choose what to do with it and accused authorities and pundits (who go without saying are mostly white) of trying to police them.
Still, many museums decided to make the direct choice to try and bid for SUE, in the hopes of acquiring it for study and preventing it from going into the wrong hands. Such a choice was controversial: many felt purchasing fossils from private collectors and finding them just to sell them legitimized a damaging industry run by people who had no rigorous training in the fields of the sciences that broke and sent away valuable specimens. However, the private institutes and commercial palaeontologists fired back, saying that they were merely honest, hard-working individuals unbound by bureaucracy trying to make a living, and there were enough fossils to go around for both sides. But as far as museum directors were concerned, the risk of entering such ethical quagmires were worth saving a specimen like SUE from, as one put it, “a potential life in some rich twat’s mansion”.
Among the museums wanting to make the purchase was the Smithsonian Institution, partially owned and operated by the US government. At the time it was going through an upheaval to modernize itself, and some believed that getting the T. rex would provide the revenue and clout to help the museum grow[6]. It was going to be an uphill battle, but the Smithsonian had the backing of two other big ones. Naturally, the first was the government, but the second was the Walt Disney Company. The entertainment juggernaut already had a working relationship with the Institution, having collaborated on restoring both the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose for Port Disney, and they were jointly setting up Smithsonian’s nascent cable network Smithsonian TV. Many members of Disney, already supporters for environmental rights and reform, would agree that the specimen should not belong to a private collector and risk being lost to science and the public but they decided it would have been a hypocritical PR nightmare to directly buy it themselves. However, after a meeting between Smithsonian members and park manager Bob Lamb during construction of the new Disney park, Disney Animal Kingdom, they agreed to merely help provide the money for the Smithsonian. They also made some other agreements concerning the specimen. Joining Disney would be its partner in the Bass Brothers, However, not everyone at the company was on board with this proposal, with some wishing to allocate the money away from the Smithsonian into building the already high-budgeted Animal Kingdom and other projects, with one even resigning over the Institution’s agreement with Disney, going instead to Warner Bros. to work at their theme parks.
From the documentary Dinosaur 13, copyright CNN Films and Lionsgate
Ultimately, the auction on October 6, 1997 would last just nine fateful minutes and balloon from a mere $500,000 into the millions, but the Smithsonian was the one who bought SUE, for over $9.08 million, a record holder for any fossil ever bought (with most of it going to the Sioux Tribe and reservation’s healthcare and infrastructure). The second highest was Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History at a barely close $7 million (joined by McDonald’s)[7], and in third place was Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Nevertheless, no hard feelings were lost between all three institutions. Both Field and NC became affiliates of the institution, and the FMNH got to organise an expedition to the site and got to keep the two juveniles, who’d be come to be nicknamed Reese and Thunderbird, as a play on the name of Maurice and a mythical bird in his tribe’s mythology respectively as an ode to the Bird-Dinosaur connection.
Although the purchase of SUE was the highest-priced dinosaur at auction, it would be the last. In 1999, a new piece of legislation from Colorado Representative David E. Skaggs ould be introduced known as the Fossil Excavation and Preservation Act which prevented any private individual or group outside of universities/colleges or museums from purchasing vertebrate fossils and exporting them or be taken outside the US without permission, and more broadly classified them as artifacts, and placing a cap on privately owned specimens. The legislation would be signed into law by President Gore after it was approved in the Senate. It was not flawless - fossils could still be traded around US soil and into Canada, and as the fossils were still classified as minerals, people could still purchase fossils without repercussions.
The staff of the National Museum of Natural History saw the acquisition as a godsend. The Natural History Museum was undergoing a large renovation at the time, receiving over $40 million in donations from donors to refurbish the aging exhibits and galleries, and SUE, in addition to shaping up to be a trove of palaeobiological knowledge, would be a perfect centrepiece for the new fossil life gallery. For the next two years, SUE would be extracted from the rocks live on the internet at one of the museum’s prep labs. In the early winter of 1999, SUE would begin being mounted in the museum. Initially SUE was in the museum’s fossil gallery, Fossils: History of Life. Eventually in 2006, they were taken on tour across the nation and even into Canada during the creation of the museum’s new fossil gallery, the Bass Hall of Fossils and Evolution. SUE’s travelling exhibit, focused primarily on the palaeontology and ecology, with little in the way of discussing the history of her discovery and ownership, although inasiders confirm future runs could adress this.
In both the first and current versions of the Fossil gallery, they also stand opposite Rex’s iconic rival Triceratops, the museum’s famous “Hatcher” specimen. The second iteration stands out, for he is posed thrusting up his horns to show he is not to be messed with as he walks by and SUE snarls at him. SUE themself, unlike most other Rex mounts posed standing up roaring or mid-stride, was uniquely sat down around a replica clutch of T. rex eggs so as to be seen at visitors eye level, allowing people to observe their feature more closely. The new gallery opened in May 2009 for $100 million[8], and was attended by over a thousand guests. They would prove to be one of the museum’s major draws over the years, with one report suggesting SUE alone brings over four million visitors per year, and becoming one of the museum’s mascots.
SUE would even get several documentaries about her both on Smithsonian TV and other networks. The first was T. Rex Live!, which documented the preparation and mounting of SUE in the late 90’s, simulcasted on NBC. The second came in 2002 titled Sue: A Dinosaur’s Story, which in the style of a nature documentary showed a week in the life of the T. rex, culminating in a battle with a full grown Triceratops.
Disney has also gotten several things out of the partnership: as part of a deal made prior to the auction, a bronze cast of SUE would go on display at Disney Animal Kingdom in its dinosaur-themed section. Unlike the Smithsonian counterpart, they would remain unchanged over the years, such as no gastralia and remaining standing. There would also be a video game published by the institution’s game publisher Jefferson Drive Studios called Regina, in which players control a T rex from birth to death to survive in the harsh world of the Cretaceous period, only revealing it to be SUE at the end. The game itself, a departure from the usually puzzle and point and click games it dealt in, was evidently fiction, with stylized gore galore, and major scientific inaccuracies throughout it, not the least being anachronisms like the Campanian Parasaurolophus and Gorgosaurus in the Maastrichtian.
All the while, SUE was revealing so much about T. rex, tyrannosaurs and dinosaurs as a whole. Their massive size and bone structure has fascinated paleontologists for years since it’s discovery and revealed how it could support its massive bulk. Peering into the skull has uncovered much about the brain and senses of T. rex. Even analysis of holes on their jaws reveals that one ailment they faced was a parasite found in modern birds[9]. Reese and Thunderbird meanwhile have revealed much about the growth of T. rex from fast, slender forms to the robust adult and the disparate predatory niches they had, and in 2009 helped solve the mystery of whether the infamous gracile genus Nanotyrannus even existed, turning out to be growth stages of Tyrannosaurus. However, just as much through the legal debacle, SUE has also revealed much about ourselves in the way the government, private sector, and indigenous communities interact and our own troubled relations with nature where capitalism is concerned as many treat it as little more than commodities to be sold. Overall, SUE still has much to tell about the history of life on Earth, just as they already told us a great variety about the nature of dinosaurs.
[1] He’s also written his fair share of netlog posts, so don’t be surprised if the next dinosaur related post is by him.
[2] The Field Museum labels SUE as nonbinary due to no evidence for the specimen being either a male or female. Their Twitter account even is such.
[3] In our timeline, the discovery came on August 12, only because the truck sprang a tire, and Sue Henderson found it by chance while passing the time walking around. ITTL, its excavated during it, due to third order butterflies searching in the vicinity earlier.
[4] These two are real (and credit to members of Paleo Media Central Discord server for notifying me about it), although there’s next to no information the writers can find about them online, and its possible they were deposited at a different time and place from it. The public and media will spread the assumption they are SUE’s own offspring and by extension SUE is female.
[5] Didn’t happen in OTL due to safety concerns, but it does here thanks to a stronger reactionary movement because of the progressive politics of TTL’s decade. Such a thing turns things real ugly, and turns the debate over SUE into a much, much bigger fight and in hindsight will be seen as one of the first outbursts of big political violence that would characterize the latter half of the decade.
[6] The museum did not have a genuine T. rex IOTL until 2013 with the Wankel Rex specimen transferred from the Museum of the Rockies in Montana, having to settle for a cast of the Stan specimen installed in 2000, also from the Black Hills Institute. ITTL subsequently, the Field Museum got a cast of Stan.
[7] Lower than IOTL due to the absence of Disney providing the bid.
[8] IOTL, no renovation took place until 2014 before opening under the name of the David Koch Hall of Fossils - Deep Time. For comparison, it cost $110 million IOTL.
[9] No really, take a read for yourself for what I mean - although do keep in mind some other studies suggest its facial biting from another T. rex instead.
I absolutely love Paleontology and all the politics surrounding it are so fascinating to me, so it's really cool to see SUE turn up here.
Excellent work @Plateosaurus and others!
Excellent work @Plateosaurus and others!
What, the SUE game? They're nothing alike nor are connnected.
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So it's basically a carbon copy of OTL That 70s Show with all of the same actors and characters and plot lines and catch phrases (even the exact same car) just with a slight name change and a more successful sequel. We're pretty far into the Butterfly Zone and on the edge of the fiction zone. Are you sure that this is the direction that you wanted to go with this?
