Reason or Treason

The

Alcalde The Longhorn Life

Reason or Treason?

a violent abolitionist who led a daring raid on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859, was captured, tried, and hanged for treason. Brown was also a central player in the Bleeding Kansas saga, especially the Pottawatomie Massacre, where he and four of his sons dragged five pro-slavery men out of their tents and slaughtered them. Many scholars believe that no one single person contributed more to the South’s seceding than John Brown.

What Sweitzer found in Brown’s tale was a man “who saw a wrong and decided to do whatever it took to make a change,” he says. His mental cameras rolling, Sweitzer saw scenes playing out before him: Brown’s first encounter with slavery, witnessing a U.S. marshal slam in the back with a shovel a slave boy Brown had befriended; Brown’s own severe upbringing by his devoutly Calvinist father, Owen Brown; his marriage; his

A shared fascination with John Brown has brought a professor and his former student together in a collaboration that’s getting bigger all the time

battles; his dramatic trial and hanging.

Then there’s Brown’s family legacy: his grandfather and namesake Captain John Brown fought in the Revolutionary War with George Washington, and his ancestor Peter Brown was one of the original Plymouth Rock pilgrims. His father operated one of the first stations on the Underground Railroad. Could there be a more quintessentially American family?

Yet Brown struck Sweitzer as a complicated character: neither devil, nor angel, lunatic nor genius, martyr nor terrorist, yet perhaps, somehow, all of the above. He would leave the final verdict to the audience. Through Brown’s story, Sweitzer could tread some sticky big-ticket issues, like ends justifying means and where one draws the line between patriotism and treason. Then, the elephant in the theater: has America today lived up to its stated promise of all men created equal?

Over the course of the semester, Sweitzer grew steadily more interested in Brown’s story, though no fit of scholarship ever seized him. He made it through to graduation, completing his English degree and finishing with a not-failing grade in Carton’s class. While crossing the stage at commencement, he even shook Carton’s hand. A few days later, Sweitzer took off for a few months of bumming around the beaches of Costa Rica before catching a flight to L.A. When he landed at LAX, he had no car, no place to live, and no job leads.

For the next year or so, Sweitzer ventured out every morning from whatever friend’s couch he’d slept on the night before and hustled for a job. Finally, he got one — as a receptionist at a production company. It was a start, which was all he needed.

Articulate and engaging, Sweitzer rap-

Above: John Brown, 1856. Photo courtesy of the National Archives. Below: Keith Sweitzer, left, former student of Evan Carton (right).

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was set to go until he visited and changed his mind. At the very last minute, he applied to UT and was accepted.

Sweitzer admitted early on to Carton that his energies were elsewhere and that he was taking the class mostly to fulfill a graduation requirement. Carton admired his honesty. He sensed that Sweitzer had found his passion, that stepping onto a movie set brought Keith the same thrill that he himself felt when he flipped open Emerson or Thoreau. Sweitzer longed for a movie life because “he did not ever want a job that made him wonder why he was doing what he was doing.”

Carton could

understand that.

Yet Sweitzer will tell you that everything’s a catalyst for something, whether intentional or not, and it was in Carton’s class that he stumbled onto the story he’d been looking for since he first decided he wanted to make movies.

History best remembers John Brown as

PHOTO COURTESY OF FABRIZIO PHOTOGRAPHY

I

t would not be accurate to say that as a second-semester senior Keith Sweitzer, BA ’00, was looking forward to Evan Carton’s “Representations of John Brown in American Literature and Culture” class. Looking forward to being finished with it — yes.

Eager to don the cap and gown — yes.

Psyched about moving to Hollywood and chasing his dream of making movies, absolutely. But as Professor Carton handed out syllabuses on the first day of Sweitzer’s last semester, Keith felt more antsy than enthused. What would he get out of this class?

For Robert Keith Sweitzer, the Forty Acres was a stepping stone on his pilgrimage from Stephen F. Austin University, where he began his collegiate studies and discovered his passion for cinema, to the mecca of moviemaking, Los Angeles. He had enrolled at SFA thinking he would eventually transfer to a more prestigious college to get his degree. After three years, he was accepted to UC Santa Barbara and

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idly made friends and developed contacts in the film world. He was a natural. In short time, he was reading through stacks of film treatments, vetting the redeemable ones from those doomed to the recycling bin. Many of the treatments were for historical movies, but, in his view, none possessed the relevance, the drama, or the gravitas that the story of John Brown did.

In the spring of 2002, Carton received an unexpected phone call from Sweitzer.

Would he work up a 30ish-page film treatment for a movie about John Brown?

If Carton would write it, Sweitzer said he would shop it around in Hollywood.

Sweitzer sent his former professor a few sample outlines as guides, and, after some deliberation, Carton agreed to give it a shot. Several weeks later, Carton sent Sweitzer a draft, and Keith went to work pitching it to the big Hollywood studios.

Sweitzer spent the next year or so finagling 90-second audiences with pro-

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ducers, directors, actors, and anyone else who would listen to him. It was an uphill fight, no doubt — an unknown producer pitching an unknown writer’s treatment.

In truth, Carton admits, “It was always kind of a lark.” But Sweitzer soldiered on.

One day, a film agent offered him a bit of advice: when moviemakers aren’t familiar with a writer, they tend to feel more comfortable adapting books rather than scripts into movies. He should see if he could get a book on Brown published, a book that might lend itself to adaptation As it turns out, Sweitzer had just changed jobs and was now working for a company called — really — The Firm. It had a book department. Sweitzer got the treatment onto the desks of the right people, and before long, Carton found himself at the center of a bidding war between publishers. As the director of the Humanities Institute at UT, Carton hesitated at first because he doubted whether he

could get time off to write the book. But the momentum was too great. He signed a contract and set to work.

Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America, published in September 2006, reads with both a scholarly attention to detail and a cinematic sensitivity to drama. The mix bears both the professor’s and the student’s intentions: Sweitzer’s interest in a Braveheart-style epic, Carton’s fascination with Brown’s connection to Northeastern intellectuals; Sweitzer’s intrigue at Brown’s conviction to right a wrong, Carton’s with competing historical interpretations of Brown.

The first sentence of the author’s note and the first two of the prologue illustrate. Author’s note: “For drama, controversy, and historical impact, the life of John Brown exceeds that of any other private citizen of the United States.”

Now, the prologue: “Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart of the First United States Cavalry

crossed the yard of the Harper’s Ferry armory and approached the thick oak door of the engine house under a flag of truce. He felt eyes on his back.” The former offers a thesis; the latter, intrigue.

The first speaks to historians; the second whispers to directors.

The 346 pages that follow engage a question W.E.B. Dubois asked in the 19th century: “Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth?”

It is a question that Carton and Sweitzer believe gets to the very heart of American history. Brown’s life runs right up to and almost singlehandedly sets in motion the most painful and dramatic episode of American history. From the very first scene of the book, where J.E.B. Stuart and Robert E. Lee, eventual heroes of the soon-to-be-formed Confederacy, ride at the head of column of federal troops to put down an attack on a U.S. weapons facility by a band of Northerners, Brown’s story steers an ironic course toward the generations-incoming conflict between the North and South. The context being so pregnant with hindsight, the narrative unfolds with a sense of tragic inevitability.

Since the publication of Patriotic Treason, Sweitzer has been back on the gilded trail, pitching the book for adaptation into a movie. Marveling at his efforts, Carton calls Sweitzer “a shameless bulldog.” Sweitzer has found to his surprise — and delight — that the Hollywood folk most interested in making the movie are the ones he’d always dreamed would be. He declined our invitation to name-drop, due to the fickle nature of the industry and the risk of a jinx, but he’s confident he’ll get it made. “It can’t not work,” he says, “if you just keep trying.”

As for his former professor… Carton still directs the Humanities Institute, but he’s no longer teaching his class on John Brown. He hopes the book winds up being made into a film, not for his own sake, but for Keith’s.

On the acknowledgments page of Patriotic Treason, Carton devotes the first paragraph to Sweitzer, without whom, he writes, “this book would not have been written.” Perhaps someday Sweitzer will get the chance to return the attribution. When the movie ends, be sure to stay for the credits.

—Tim Taliaferro M a r c h / A p r i l 2 0 0 7 Th e A l c a l d e 71