| The Julia Belle Swain, featured in Mark Twain's America, is one of only six steamboats still cruising the Mississippi. The film shows the stately riverboats that sailed the Mississippi that fascinated Twain since he was a young boy growing up in Missouri. At age twenty-one, he fulfilled his dream of becoming a steamboatman when he apprenticed himself as a riverboat pilot for 18 months and then spent the next three years on the river. The tragedy of life on the river is also shown. After four boilers exploded on The Pennsylvania in a fiery crash, Twain lost his younger brother Henry when he became badly burned and later died. |
For more information on Mark Twain, check out:
Mark Twain at the Mining Company - a very resourceful site, has links to most other Twain sites.
http://marktwain.miningco.com
Using IMAX® 3-D and conventional IMAX 2-D to provide a whole new way of looking at our past, Stephen Low's large format film "MARK TWAIN'S AMERICA" interweaves the life and times of Mark Twain with the lives of current day enthusiasts who revel in the inventions and way of life of the 19th century. Utilizing archival stereo-optic photos from The University of California-Riverside/California Museum of Photography, powerful images from the past seemingly come alive in a larger-than-life presentation that takes full advantage of the large screen format. Archival photos representative of Twain and what he saw and experienced in his time are juxtaposed against scenes of actual present day recreations of that era.
Narrated by Anne Bancroft, we find that Twain lived during an exciting period of great social, political and technological change and his life was greatly shaped by many of these developments. Amongst them was the invention of the steam engine and the effects it had on the world. Sharing in their pursuit of this time gone by, we visit with a steamtrain engineer, Mike Tackett, who rides across the western frontier with his nine-year-old son in tow and a life-long steamboat enthusiast, Captain Denis Trone, who like Twain steers up the mighty Mississippi in a steamboat that he built himself.
Twain initially set out on his successful writing career at a young age as a printer's apprentice in Hannibal, Missouri. However, it was his boyhood dream to pilot a steamboat and he worked the river until the Civil War stopped all boat traffic on the Mississippi. Twain joined the Confederate Army briefly before he decided to seek his fortunes in the silver mines of the American west. In further exploring this dramatic time, we see how every year in Antietam Maryland, 15,000 men and women passionately re-enact one of the Civil War's most famous battle scenes. In Montreal, the descendants of slaves who escaped to Canada perform in a gospel choir singing songs reminiscent of African folk songs sung by their ancestors during the Civil War.
Known for the classic novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, Twain's humorous writings developed from his observations of small town life as well as his travels around the world. In his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, a Fourth of July Parade pays tribute to many classic scenes from his novels by holding contests for the best "Tom & Becky look-a-likes" and the best "fence-painting." In Virginia City, Nevada, modern day cowboys enjoy a live guitar-strumming quartet in a saloon that also was frequented by Twain in his day. Young couples of today sway to the two-step as a brass band plays on authentic 19th century instruments, in an old-fashioned ballroom dance of yesterday.
Spanning two centuries, "MARK TWAIN'S AMERICA" presents one of the most dynamic on-screen chronicles of the human experience. Twain enjoyed enormous success but also experienced great failures and tragedy. He incurred a large debt as the result of investments in failed patents and suffered the loss of almost his entire family, with the deaths of his wife, his son and two of his three daughters. "MARK TWAIN'S AMERICA" contrasts the complexity of the human spirit and the wonders of the world in which we live, that have remained constant over time, from the 19th century to today.