MOVIES - Oct. 12, 1992

Columbus Day News: At a press conference in Spain, Ridley Scott, the director of “1492: Conquest of Paradise,” defended Christopher Columbus against charges that his voyage to the Americas in 1492 had been a curse for the continent and suggested the explorer was a social democrat. “Columbus seems to have been made responsible for everything that’s gone wrong in the past 500 years,” Scott said before the Spanish premiere of his film in Sitges, near Barcelona, on Friday. “He became a supporter of social democratic principles--that everyone should work--and this made him very unpopular with aristocracy.”