AMISTAD IS IMPORTANT. DISCUSS

By GARRY TRUDEAU

"It is an extraordinarily important film, perhaps the most important film of my career." --Steven Spielberg on Amistad

It was not until just before the Christmas break that Henry Fassbender, shaper of ninth-grade minds at P.S. 117 in Huntington, Ind., finally found a moment to inspect the Amistad learning kit for himself. It had been sent to the school by overnight mail from DreamWorks, and the whole history department was aflutter. The graphics were compelling, the subject matter gripping, but as Henry sat in the faculty lounge carefully perusing the glossy pages, his heart began to sink. He could see his upcoming vacation unraveling with every page--victim to the unbearable lightness of a Hollywood learning kit.

"Why do they let publicists write history?" Henry demanded loudly of no one in particular. He shook his head at the chronic inability of the industry to get it right. Once again, fictional characters were being served up as actual historic figures. Theodore Joadson, the movie's heroic black abolitionist, never drew a breath, yet the DreamWorks worksheet challenged students to analyze his relationship with the conspicuously nonfictional John Quincy Adams. Moreover, the study guide was laced with inspirational Adams "quotations," all of them made up by DreamWorks screenwriters. And then there were the follow-up activities in the learning kit, including the suggestion that students discuss quotations from the movie's producer. (Sample: "The real history has been castrated.")

Henry cursed his luck. If he couldn't trust Steven Spielberg to provide responsible promotional materials, whom could he trust? Now he would have to hike on over to the Huntington library and laboriously research the episode on his own. Henry knew there were plenty of books and essays on the Amistad mutiny (although in Hollywood's view, a historical episode has been forgotten, even repressed, if a movie hasn't been made about it), but it was a colossal waste of his discretionary time to do corrective research. Henry shuddered at the memory of the week JFK opened. It had taken an entire semester to deconstruct Oliver Stone's paranoid fantasy, and even then he still lost two students who became convinced that Henry was part of the conspiracy.

The history teacher sighed and slipped the learning kit into his backpack. This had been the most trying year of Henry's career at Huntington. The movie industry had produced more than 300 films, many of which had tanked after one weekend, and planning a coherent history curriculum had taken a toll on his nerves. Although Henry had conscientiously prepared--even flying out to L.A. with other district teachers for the summer pitch meetings--he never felt he had a handle on which films would likely gross enough to be teachable. A film that couldn't open, that did only a few mil in business on its way to video, wasn't credible and could get you burned on a field trip. As one studio publicist warned the visiting teachers, better to assign an old pay-per-view Dances with Wolves than send your kids to a dead-on-arrival Welcome to Sarajevo.

But which films to choose? Many of the presentations at the majors had been shamefully devoid of any useful buzz. While Titanic seemed a no-brainer (doomed, pretty teenagers-cum-iceberg), Henry doubted that moviegoers were eager to revisit the 1970s of Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm, notwithstanding the cool clothes and music (Henry was of a certain age). It was also unclear which films the teachers could reasonably expect their students to attend. When Leona Stevens, who taught tenth-grade English, inquired about any upcoming costume dramas with responsible nudity, she was referred to a Miramax flack, who unaccountably kept changing the subject to cost overruns on Seven Years in Tibet.

Things only got worse after the teachers flew home and the fall slate went into release. Opening dates were constantly reshuffled, and movies that Henry had been counting on dropped from sight even before their learning kits arrived. The Wings of the Dove, based on the steamy Henry James novel, had proved particularly vexing. After waiting most of November for the art film to go into wide release, his ninth-graders had only one weekend to sneak into the R-rated Wings. To make matters worse, the movie's tepid per-screen numbers in Huntington set the tone for the desultory class discussion that followed, degenerating quickly from an examination of prewar European class structure to an acrimonious debate over whether or not the de-corseted Helena Bonham Carter was "babe-a-licious." The learning kit, lacking any production stills that would settle the question, was worse than useless, and Henry had been forced to send the whole class home to read the book.

A knock on the faculty-lounge door roused Henry from his funk. It was an overnight package from the makers of Titanic, containing a 793-page learning kit about the lessons of Edwardian excess, from the point of view of Leonardo DiCaprio. As the courier waited patiently for a signature, Henry carefully weighed whether he would accept delivery.