Clanranald Trust for Scotland and Charlie Allan in particular are our partners in The Brus movie project. One of their entities is Combat International that is a great army of actors who have been active in the movie business for quite a while as evidenced by this Youtube video. We are proud to have these entities in our corner as we push on in the funding stages.  

Duncarron Update

Another super week and weekend! At Duncarron the crew have reached a good 40 meters of new lower palisade and build 19 type 2 supports! Only 20 meters to go, and then we start the Chieftains palisade. HQ staff have spent Sunday visiting Rob Eves Willow Farm and discovered that willow drink enough water every day to dry out Duncarron -happy days indeed!

Last Updated on Monday, 14 November 2011 13:25

   
Hello, my name is Charlie Allan, Chief Executive of the Clanranald Trust for Scotland and I would like to say thank you for showing an interest in our organisation. I hope that as you read through our website you will see we have a lot of opportunities to offer people from all walks of life and that we have a varied range of services to offer, from a medieval re-enactment to living history events providing displays for schools and corporate organisations, Film and TV companies, to major cultural events, etc.
What you will see in this site is just a taste of what we can do please do not hesitate to enquire further.

Note from the editor:
The Clanranald Trust for Scotland and Charlie Allan are connected to our "The Brus" movie project consisting of three movies based on our three Rebel King novels. You can check out the Duncarron Fort building program on the trust's site
-crb
http://clanranald.org

Charlie Allan and Russell Crowe

One of our partners in the Brus film is Charlie Allan, who is CEO of the Clanranald Trust for Scotland. The article was taken from his web site (clanranald.org)

 Gladiator star Russell Crowe checks out his Scottish roots - and a medieval fort

Charlie Allan in his role as a Barbarian chief in Gladiator

Published Date: 30 May 2011

By Susan Smith

HOLLYWOOD star Russell Crowe is making his first trip to Scotland this Sunday - to get a glimpse of what the country was like in the middle ages.

The Oscar-winning star of Gladiator will visit Duncarron Fort in Stirlingshire where history enthusiasts are building a painstaking recreation of a medieval Scottish fort and village.

The project, which will cost around £1 million to complete, has been underaken by the Clanranald Trust, a volunteer group set up to promote Scottish history.

Announcing his visit on Twitter, Crowe said: "On June 5 I'll be at Duncarron to view the Clanranald Trust Medieval Fort. Scottish heritage in my family, first time in Scotland, special."

The star has been a long-term supporter of the project, and earlier this month used Twitter to highlight it to his 200,000 followers as well as tweeting First Minister Alex Salmond urging him to show support for it.

On 14 May, he tweeted: "How many folk on here from Scotland? Just saw some awesome photographs of the Clanranald Trust Duncarron project."

Last year Crowe also helped raise awareness of the trust after he persuaded Universal Pictures to donate a £60,000 battling ram from the Ridley Scott film Robin Hood, in which Crowe starred, and paid for it to be transported from Pinewood Studios to Scotland.

Charlie Allan, who runs the Clanranald Trust, met Crowe on the set of Gladiator, where the pair met during the filming of a battle scene.

Speaking from Germany, where the Clanranald Trust's pipe and drum band Saor Patrol were performing this weekend, Mr Allan said: "He's basically coming to see me but he wants to see the fort too and consider whether it could be used for films. I'll show him around and he'll meet some of the volunteers and see what progress we've made."

The trust is now recognised as a world leader in battle re-enactment, and its volunteers have featured in films such as Gladiator, King Arthur, Robin Hood, and, most recently, Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle.

Mr Allan appeared as the chief of the Barbarian hordes in the opening scene of Gladiator. He and Crowe bonded over their mutual love of Harley Davidson motor bikes and have stayed in touch ever since.

"When we arrived on the set, he galloped across the beach to meet the crew," said Mr Allan. "We spent a lot of time together over the next few weeks. There was a lot of singing and music on that set."

Mr Allan says the actor is a genuine and generous supporter of the trust.

"He's a really nice guy," he added.

"We'll be getting together and doing the usual, having a few beers and going out for some nice food. We talk about Harleys and music and tell funny stories - he's got some crackers."

The Clanranald Trust started work on the fort in 2008 and since then the 50 regular volunteers have created earthworks, a palisade, paths and an office.

They are about to start work on the first of four long-houses, which, along with four roundhouses, a tower and a smithy, will make up the village.

MORE than 15 years ago a group of history buffs decided they wanted to build a living museum without glass display cabinets that would allow Scots to interact with their history.

Now Duncarron fortified village in the Carron Valley is set to do just that.

The group have consulted archaeologists, historians and architects and have created a new career for themselves as specialists film and television extras in a bid to fund the project. The building work is being done by volunteers and offenders on community service.

Russell Crowe gave the group a £60,000 battering ram from his film Robin Hood.

The Script, The Script...

The script wouldn’t accept defeat. It kept calling out from the drawer into which it had been flung and whispering in Robert’s name, “Grandson, mine is too great a story for you to leave it untold!”

For years it remained in its solitude, interrupted only by its demand to become an epic motion picture, until one day in 1999, Charles Randolph Bruce found himself alone with the story and time to devote to its telling. His partner in life and in business was away for an extended period of time and Charles telephoned her to discuss his yearning to pick up the script and forward the project. Without contacts within the motion picture industry, the couple knew there was little chance of having the script read, much less produced.

“Why don’t you write a novel instead of a movie?”

“There are already books about King Robert.”

“But none like the one you would tell.”

He agreed to think about it, and within days he called to tell her that he had written a chapter or two. Would she read what he had and tell him what she thought?

Carolyn Hale Bruce would, and did, and told him she thought it was very well done, and would he like for her to edit it for him?

“If it’s so good, why does it need to be edited?” he asked.

They laugh about it, now, having together written three novels about the Scots hero, covering his reign from its beginning in early 1306 through the great battle at Bannok Burn in June 1314. Since publishing the first book, Rebel King, Hammer of the Scots in 2002, the couple have traveled all over the country except the Far West, meeting fans and signing their books at Scottish and Celtic events in the states of Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Via their journeys and the Internet, their books have been purchased by tens of thousands of readers in all fifty states and several foreign countries… including Scotland.

Still… there was the lingering notion of a movie, over the years grown to a series of movies, to tell the story of the noble medieval king and his countrymen as they struggled against impossible strength while fighting to reclaim their nation’s freedom from its grasping southern neighbor. 

We contracted with Ian Alexander Bruce to write a screenplay based on our first book. You can’t sell a movie without a viable script to present to the powers that be. So Ian went to work to produce what we consider a well-written screenplay of the story told in the first novel in the Rebel King series.

Then one day, a man called to say how much he enjoyed the books and that he wanted to help get more attention for them, and we found that the guy could call anybody on the phone and actually get through to people in high places! After a relatively short while, we were amazed at his ability to contact decision makers. We decided this might be the way to get our initial introduction to filmmakers.

“Warner Bros.,” he called and said, “likes the script. They want to know which actor you think would be good to play the king.”

Well, we had thought about that for years, even running a poll on the RebelKing.com website to see which of a half dozen actors our readers most liked in the role. The overwhelming percentage voted for Gerard Butler, a native Scot with the right physical build and a beautiful Scottish accent.

So, we said Gerard Butler would be our first choice.

Well, came back the word, Gerard Butler was at the time so popular, and he was so busy, and so expensive… would we consider a lesser known but up-and-coming actor of about the right build whose name was Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

To which we said, “Who?”

So we did some research and found out that Jeffrey Dean Morgan was an American actor who had done several Hollywood movies, like Watchmen, and P.S. I Love You, and had performed in a continuing role on Grey’s Anatomy television series.

Well, we couldn’t get Butler, and Warner Bros seemed to want Morgan…

Great! We were told we would soon receive a contract for a twelve-month option on “the property” (that’s Hollywoodspeak for the screenplay… and some other stuff), which would entail a nice sum of money to keep the author funded for a while, and for one year the screenplay would await action by them.

Then the paperwork didn’t arrive, and it didn’t arrive, and it was getting later in the year, and we were told it would be sent after the holidays, which meant a wait of at least another six or so weeks… for free, of course.

After the holidays the contract still didn’t come and our “agent” was calling regularly to see what the holdup was, until one day they said, “We are not interested in this project and don’t call us anymore!”

At this point, we had to drop back and punt…

To be continued…

The Beginning

Mythologist and author Joseph Campbell once said, “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

Earlier this year, we determined that we would throw caution to the wind and commit ourselves to following our “bliss”. For a number of years our bliss has concerned the idea of restoring the reputation of Robert the Bruce as the greatest warrior king in the history of Scotland by telling the historically factual story of his heroic and successful effort to make his country an independent nation again.

But the origins of our determination to honor King Robert started decades earlier, when a small boy sat playing on the floor of the family’s home in West Virginia. His grandfather, sitting nearby, called the boy to his knee and told him that he should always remember that he descended from the great King of Scotland, Robert the Bruce. Not yet of school age, the child had no idea what it all meant, but he remembered.

In the early 1990s, by then a husband and father of grown children, Charles Randolph Bruce came upon a book by Gordon Donaldson entitled Scottish Kings. Of course, one of the kings “bioed“ in the work was Robert de Brus (Robert the Bruce), King of Scots from 1306 to 1329. So taken was Charles by the dramatic history of Brus’ struggles that he wrote a screenplay based on the story, and in 1992 traveled to California to convince others of its merit as a feature film… but to no avail.

Then in 1995 the Mel Gibson production of Braveheart debuted.

Braveheart, exciting and successful as it was, depicted Robert as diminutive and weak in character, and falsely charged that Robert’s father betrayed to the English the movie’s central character, the Scots patriot Sir William Wallace, resulting in his horrific execution on orders of Edward I (“Longshanks”).

Where was the great Scots warrior king that history books call the best military tactician in medieval Europe? Where was the story of valor and constancy told to Charles by his grandfather?

(In truth, Robert actively supported Sir William Wallace to the point that King Edward demanded that the widowed Brus turn over his infant daughter, Marjorie, as a hostage to guarantee his “good” behavior in future. And as for the rest, Robert’s father was dead, possibly while on Crusade, definitely not from leprosy, but at least by April 4, 1304, over fifteen months before Wallace was captured and killed in August 1305.)

All of these discrepancies and disparagements of Brus and his father lessened the enjoyment of the film by the family of Bruce.  But there was naught to be done but put aside the unsold script and accept defeat.

To be continued…