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She tried. In 1984 Allen optioned Black Mutiny, a 1953 novel about the Amistad by William A. Owens, and started shopping it around Hollywood. "I was just shocked to be so blatantly rejected across the board by everyone. It was a real lesson to me," she says. "I knew there was an audience for this, but no one wanted to invest in it."

You can't exactly blame the suits: With its high-seas hazards, a slew of red-hot racial issues, and a chorus line of forgotten 19th-century bureaucrats, Amistad looked expensive, complicated, and fraught with enough controversy to keep the op-ed pages humming for weeks. Besides, Allen is known for mapping out the dance numbers on Oscar night, not for taking the statuettes home. "She lacked the credibility of a time-tested producer," Spielberg theorizes, "and that didn't open a lot of doors."

Doors weren't exactly flying open for the time-tested names, either. Among those who would try and fail to get their own versions of Amistad out of dry dock were HBO; Quincy Jones; Seven Years in Tibet director Jean-Jacques Annaud; Dustin Hoffman and Barry Levinson; and David L. Wolper, whose production of Alex Haley's Roots remains a benchmark in TV history. It was Haley who drew Wolper's attention to the mutiny. "I thought, What a terrific story," Wolper remembers. "I tried to sell it to the three networks and nobody was interested."

In the face of such indifference, Allen took a breather. "I had to let it go for awhile," she says, "because otherwise I would've just gone and balled up in a knot."

Then, in 1994, Allen waltzed into the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica to eat breakfast with Laurie MacDonald, the co-chief of development at Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg's fledgling studio, DreamWorks. MacDonald had no idea what would come up. "Our children attend the same elementary school, and we have a car pool together," MacDonald explains; at first they talked about everything but Amistad. "At the end Debbie said, 'There's one story that's closest to my heart,'" MacDonald says. "I thought the story was so remarkable. And what was even more remarkable was that I'd never heard it."

Neither, it turns out, had Spielberg.

But this is where things get confusing. Technically speaking, Spielberg should have known something about the lost world of Amistad. Why? Because Barbara Chase-Riboud had pitched it to him--or at least to his production company, Amblin--back in the spring of 1988. Chase-Riboud had written a novel called Echo of Lions--the manuscript was then called The Summer Triangle--and it had been sent to Amblin along with a rave from a prominent editor at Doubleday: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Now it's hard to imagine a liberal baby boomer like Spielberg brushing off an endorsement from Mrs. JFK. Apparently he didn't. At Amblin's invitation, Chase-Riboud caught a flight to Los Angeles from her expatriate digs in France and took a taxi to the Universal Studios lot. Spielberg wasn't there, but Chase-Riboud did get a chance to sit down with a couple of Amblin execs. Then, on April 25, 1988, Amblin sent a letter to Paris rejecting Chase-Riboud's "marvelous new book." The letter said, "Although you were rather convincing, we still see too many obstacles in adapting The Summer Triangle to a feature film."


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