ha. movie? multi-part series ala band of brothers. Obviously the Centralia episode installment would be stylistically identical to the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan. Begin it with a long sweeping shot moving into tight zoom into Bill Anderson's eyes, then morph to A.V.E. Johnston's eyes and a long reverse zoom to long high overhead shot with the guerrillas swarming like so-many hundreds of tiny ants out of the treeline on three sides of Johnston while his men begin breaking ranks....fade to black.... lol....
I do need to figure out something to do with this body of research--thousands of pages in eight linear feet (so far) of folders focusing specifically on how the fates of Bill Anderson, A.V.E. Johnston, Sam Cox intertwined in a 100-day death struggle where only one man came out alive....including unpublished in-depth primary source biographies and vast vast amounts of other militia vs guerrilla military, skirmish and battle details, sometimes very graphic, which haven't seen the light of day since they occurred.
I have the big picture together--where I seem to be picking up these fascinating new details is by going back and scooping in small needle in haystack-type blurbs hidden in hundreds of sources. I have a list of to-do research, thinking I'm going to make it down it on a given day. However one small item often opens floodgates that takes a week to look into.
Like the Hendley thing the past few days. I had no idea of his significance. Nor did anybody else, it appears. Which is suprising given his import regarding the Bill Anderson story. For me he was just one more name (and a wrong name to boot!) among many names I've been turning up. A name of an obscure man an obscure little boy saw in town and mentioned in passing while talking about his own father a half century later. 'Hmmm, that's another nobody, but I better check him and see who he is....' so he ended up on my to-do list. Once John Russell helped crack that little nut it opened an important new historical aspect that, as it turns out, the final chapter of Bill Anderson hinges upon.