“The shot heard round the world:” The Coming of the Revolution, Colonial America to 1775 is Under Production

The first film in the “Pageant of America” series, “The shot heard round the world:” The Coming of the Revolution, Colonial America to 1775, is now in production.  The script is nearly complete; and, already, still images of the principle personalities in the story, period news journals, hand-written documents, letters, and official papers are being collected, along with great paintings of events for use in the film production.  Beyond that, footage of colonial governors and their councils, colonial legislators, mobs harassing tax collectors, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the lanterns in Old North Church, Paul Revere’s Ride, and the fighting at Lexington and Concord is being obtained.

The Coming of the American Revolution will start with the year 1754, the year young Major George Washington was forced to surrender his small command of Virginia Militia, British regulars, and a band of Native Americans, to the French in western Pennsylvania, touching off a world war between England and its allies and France and its allies, a war that was fought across five continents for seven years.  That war cost England dearly.  Its debts due to the conflict nearly reached, in modern day pounds, twenty-six trillion pounds.  It was that debt, and England’s attempts to collect much of it from the American Colonies, that brought about the war.  The film will end with the outbreak of war on the village green at Lexington and then at Concord Bridge on April 19, 1775.  As the British regulars are being fired upon by militias from all around the countryside during their dismal retreat back to Boston, the viewer will be reminded that the actions taken by the American Colonists that day will plunge them into a war with the most powerful nation on earth, a war that will last for seven years.

Stay tuned.