Paul Revere, Spy

The LA Times' 24 Frames movie blog (via Dark Horizons) reports that the production company behind Robert Redford's new Lincoln assassination movie, The Conspirator, is developing a Paul Revere movie next.  Why is that news on a spy blog?  Well... Paul Revere was essentially a spy, and according to the blog, this movie "will concentrate on the espionage elements of the event; while almost any schoolchild can tell you about Revere's ride, few of us know how he knew what he did, and the challenges he and [fellow rider William] Dawes faced in obtaining that information. 'For people who grew up mainly with the [Longfellow] poem, it's a far more interesting story,' said the [producer] Rob Stone."  The production company's mission statement is to make movies about American history, and to that end they've optioned the book Paul Revere’s Ride by Pulitzer Prize winner David Hackett Fischer. Intolerable Cruelty screenwriters Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone will pen the script, but change the title to Midnight Riders. Producer Brian Falk describes the film project to the LA Times as "a historically accurate swashbuckler about the spark of the American Revolution, with horses, gunfights, swords and a little bawdiness." Sounds good to me! I've long been interested in Paul Revere's spy career, and even wrote a script on the subject myself quite a while ago. (Obviously, this project is entirely unrelated to that one, which, needless to say, went nowhere.)