![]() In Saint-Pierre alone nearly a thousand Indians, the largest Indian community on Martinique, died in the eruption. By 1902 four separate racial groups - Blacks, Whites, Mulattoes and Indians - shared the island, each with their own needs and ambitions. In my unyielding effort to do honor to ALL those who died that morning, I wrote one scene with a fictional East Indian family because by the turn of the century more than 75,000 indentured Indian laborers had traveled from the subcontinent to Martinique making it their new home, thus filling the void for cheap labor that was being created on the plantations when, after slavery was abolished, more and more black laborers were leaving the fields in great numbers to pursue their own businesses. EXCEPT for the families Duval and Chopra (my only exception in my pursuit of maintaining no fictionalization). ![]() And in nearly every scene there is at least one person who survived to live another day beyond to recount the scenes represented in this screenplay.Īll of the characters in Pelée are non-fictional. All fatality descriptions following the eruption are depicted as they were described in numerous corresponding factual records. The order by which ships and people were struck by the powerful nuée ardent (pyroclastic surge) is written accordingly to where the ships were anchored in the harbor and the exact locations of the people in the city at the time of the eruption. Where eyewitnesses documented these stages of pyrotechnic phenomenon associated with the eruption, it has been noted in the script. Throughout the final seven days of Saint-Pierre, Mont Pelée produced many varying stages of eruption - often times hourly or minute-by-minute. With writing Pelée I painstakingly went to great extent in my research to separate fact from myth assure that all the events and every scene are as they happened in correct chronological order to do right to the memory of the 30,000 souls who perished on that fateful morning 119 years ago and to never allow spectacle to overshadow its human drama.Īll telegrams, letters, proclamations, and newspaper articles within the script are written as they appear on record. The events in my detailed true saga of those seven tumultuous days leading up to the eruption was filled with so much political hubris, scientific misjudgment, misguided religious faith, along with the hidden agenda of a deceiving press (that actually encouraged its readers to remain or seek refuge - despite apocalyptic warning signs - in the doomed city of Saint-Pierre for predominantly political reasons during a heated election season), all worked in conjunction with sealing the fate of the 30,000 people who perished that spring morning on a date that Monseigneur Gabriel Parel, Vicar-General of Martinique is quoted as saying “This date should be written in blood…” When a story where fact truly is stranger than fiction comes along that has never before been told cinematically, that is so extraordinary, so unbelievable, so astonishing as to why 30,000 people refused to flee a city a mere 4 miles (7 kilometers) from the crater of the erupting volcano La Montagne Pelée, I realized early on in my three years of writing, research, pouring over hundreds of photos, reading through stacks of books, compiling piles of notes, and traveling to Martinique, that it was not necessary to take dramatic liberties by filling the story with a lot of irrelevant fiction. Pelée – a five-episode true story limited series about the deadliest volcanic eruption of the 20th century (3rd deadliest eruption in recorded history….Vesuvius/Pompeii ranking 10th deadliest) where the greatest number of people died more quickly than in any other volcanic eruption ever known when it obliterated the once beautiful port city of Saint-Pierre - then regarded worldwide as the “Paris of the West Indies” – on the French Colonial Caribbean island of Martinique. ![]()
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