Everyone is complaining about how Hollywood has a shortage of stories these days. Hollywood has become fairly reliant on IP. What about history? If history has anything, it has plot and characters. There are any number of historical figures and incidents that would make for excellent scripts. Some could even be loosely adapted, like we do with Shakespeare, if a studio or director did not want a period piece. In no particular order, consider the following options.
You could build an excellent film or HBO miniseries around Henry of Navarre and the French Wars of Religion. This has everything and would please the Game of Thrones crowd and the Succession crowd. France has a series of weak kings, multiple strong families are seeking to take the throne, a good percentage of those families are Protestant. France is riven by religious conflict, with nobles making life difficult or ending life for their subjects who are not in agreement with their church. The Protestant Henry of Navarre is married to the Catholic king’s sister in what seems an attempt to end conflict—but is actually the setting of a massacre of Protestants. Henry lives, but leaves Paris. Henry is continuously drawn into battle to defeat Catholic armies, but prefers to spend his time hunting and chasing women. From there the saga continues, with assassinations, wars, foreign intervention, more conversions, and Henry of Navarre’s eventual military conquest of France and establishment of the Bourbon dynasty. This can barely even be described in a paragraph, but there is so much content. If you don’t want something set in early modern France, set it in space or make it about criminal organizations.
Another story which has so much to offer is that of William Tyndale. He is religious, he wants to create a Bible in English, other people don’t want him to do it—he persists. The reasons against Tyndale doing it are neither all bad nor all good, but it leads to his being on the lamb, running around Europe in various disguises, translating and being hidden, etc. We get a worthy opponent to Tyndale in Thomas More. Tyndale gets betrayed, spends a year in prison writing, and is strangled to death by authorities after which his body is burned at the stake. Thomas More, who opposed him, is also later killed by authorities, for different reasons. Here we have two dynamic characters, debates over principles, a man on the run, prison scenes, betrayal, and a shared fate for two opponents. Don’t like the setting? Make it a dystopia. Use it for political resistors in a totalitarian state.
What if you do want a grand historical epic? And a strong female lead? I give you: Empress Theodora. For starters, the Byzantines and Constantinople are not played out, it will not just be another Roman drama. This gives you a woman starting off from relatively humble circumstances—she was a stripper—rising to be the wife and co-ruler of the empire with her husband Justinian. He is a not a filler, but a real character because of his work on the laws. You also have an empire struggling to stay together, chariot racing, and riots. You get an extremely dramatic scene where Theodora saves the empire by refusing to flee a chaotic city or let her husband. And you also have a scheming palace official, Procopius, who is writing his The Secret History—highly critical of Theodora—all along.
We love World War II films, are there some good stories left? Absolutely. Consider the kidnapping of General Kreipe in Crete. You get some extremely charismatic Englishmen, Patrick Leigh Fermor & William Stanley Moss, launching from a wild house in Cairo. You get SOE, the British Special Operations Executive. The good guys kidnap the general and then have to trek across Crete with him. They work with locals—including bandits—sometimes sleep in the open, evade the bad guys, and consume a lot of local food and drink. You get a beautiful landscape, Cretan culture and attire, vendetta stories, and a true account of a less known successful mission against the Nazis. If you add in some of the back or future stories of Moss or Fermor, you have this as merely one incident in extremely colorful lives.
The possibilities are endless. You could easily make something like The Science of Sleep with a loose basis on the life and work of the artist Henry Darger. You could do something like Life is Beautiful with the story of Tivadar Soros in Hungary during WWII. Could you not do a Shakespeare in Love-style film with Samuel Johnson? We have had a biopic of Jesse Owens, but not a good one. We are beyond overdue for a good Jim Thorpe film. And yes, I would work on a script for any of these.
Honestly, there are so many good stories out there. If you were not inclined to do a historical piece, simply use the characters and plots and transport them anywhere. Put them in fictional settings. The plots and characters are compelling enough to travel. It is also a good reminder that if Hollywood is becoming boring to you, books are always there to help you out.