The Alamo Tree is the first episode of a new television series scripted by Ernest Brawley and based on his novel of the same name published by Simon & Schuster.
The story involves two intertwined families, the güero Kellies and the mestizo Carrizos through six decades of 20th century Mexico’s explosive social and political changes.
THE ALAMO TREE begins when the revolutionary Mexican government abolished the ancient entitlements of the Roman Catholic Church in 1926. The country rapidly polarized with the privileged classes siding with the Church and the exploited classes with the government. A violent, brutal war between Right and Left, Church and State, ensued. It is known to history as the Cristero Rebellion.
In the first episode, an American-born Catholic priest named James is hunted down by right-wing Cristero revolutionaries and feels compelled to commit grievous sins to survive. One of his greatest sins is coupling with a beautiful redhead named Fiona Kelly and impregnating her with a girl child named Chris. The indestructible heart of the Murphy clan is Fiona, a relentless, resourceful expatriate widow who owns a hotel in a Mexican province which her demonically willful daughter, Chris, ultimately develops into an internationally famous resort. Fiona’s son, Brian, supervisor of an American-owned railroad, is derailed from his dreams of power and wealth when he collides with, and falls madly in love with, a young woman named Ramona Carrizo who has defied her father to cast her lot with a Leftist people’s rebellion. Presiding over the Carrizos is the father, Gallo. Amestizo of prodigious guile and rapacity, Gallo rises from Cristero hitman to railroad policeman to flunky to Brian Kelly and worms his way upward until he grows into a financial and political giant. His son, Merle, mesmerized since childhood by Chris Murphy – to him a mixture of the profane and the sacred – is faced as an adult with the clashing demands of love, honor and family.
Abounding in a rich variety of characters – Yankee imperialists and corrupt revolutionary generals, middle-class reformers and peasant activists, narcotics smugglers and wheeling-dealing entrepreneurs of both Mexican and American origin, THE ALAMO TREE is both an epic historical drama and a family saga.
Read the full screenplay below:
