I saw a piece on BBC News the other day talking about the new Frost/Nixon movie and how it had taken some liberties with the dialog between our principles as recorded in the actual interviews (as also discussed briefly here).
While I understand that some liberties must be taken from time-to-time to effectively tell a story based on actual history in movie form, I find this sort of revisionist history to be pretty sketchy. Basically, the film makers (and I assume the author of the stage play) are re-writing the events we have hard evidence for and presenting them to the audience as fact. Notwithstanding that the interviews are fairly easily reviewed online these days, I don’t think the average movie goer would be likely to verify the information as presented, which, to me, makes this type of fudging more than a little dishonest.
Again, I readily concede that the events, motivations, and talks leading up to the on-camera interviews are matters for speculation and are open to best guesses by the writers. Creative license is only way to make any of that work. But the stuff that is a matter of public record? I’m not comfortable with that being fundamentally messed with.
ANyway, I’m interested in your thoughts. Am I just overreacting? Is my inner journalist creeping out when I should just relax and enjoy the “entertainment based on a true story?” Or is this an appalling act of revisionism, putting words in the mouth of a man who is no longer around to defend himself?
Doesn’t bother me. Who’s going to go to the transcripts and compare? The key is whether the work is true to the people involved, not whether it got every word correctly.
Also, some very good drama has been made by ignoring the truth and telling a story based on the characters. Nixon’s attitude in, say The Public Burning probably didn’t fit him at all, but it was a great book.
An author has a duty to throw characters under the bus if it fits the story.
Things that are a matter of public record should be transcribed ver batim as far as I’m concerned. For example, Oliver Stone fucked with the private and personal life of Jim Morrison in the Doors movie. I do not like that type of manipulation.
From what I understand of the “liberties” taken, Ron Howard has put words in Nixon’s mouth that he never said (and would never have said), which seems to me like a liberty that crosses the line. People shouldn’t have to go to the transcripts and compare; a director should not be changing fundamental details of something as verifiable as a tv interview and representing it as what actually happened.
I’m not having any luck finding this interview; anybody else want to have a kick at it?
Just a nitpick, but unless he’s rewritten the play, it isn’t Ron Howard whose putting words in Nixon’s mouth, but the author Peter Morgan. I saw both the play & film, and the dialogue was pretty much exact as I remember it from the play.
The film does not pretend to be a documentary. It’s certainly based on something that happened in real life, but at the end of the day, it’s a Hollywood movie, not a history lecture.
No. A film’s author is the director, not the screenwriter or author of the source material. This is the case regardless of how faithful the adaptation is to its source.
And while the show was an absolute disaster in all levels, I had no problem with the idea of the portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in The Secret Life of Desmond Pfeiffer either.
Or, to pick a better example, Mel Brook’s portrayal of King Louis XVI in The History of the World, Part I.
Or the portrayal of George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Or the portrayal of Albert Einstein in IQ.
Hell, even the penguins in The March of the Penguins (no, it is not a story of love). Stick to the History Channel, then.
Or many others.
It’s fiction. If you go into it thinking it’s fact (or that it portrays fact), you’re at the wrong movie.
On the other hand, historical fiction has a large influence on people’s perceptions of history and historical figures. Put “Based on a True Story” before anything and *someone *will believe it.
In as close to a formal study of the phenomenon you can come without doing a formal study, my students over the last few years are totally outraged (at least half of them) by the historical distortions in “based on a true story” movie, even after being exposed to other such movies in the last few weeks.
This is where I take issue, particularly in a situation such as this, where there is an actual, irrefutable record of at least some of the events. The masses in my experience are much more comfortable with allowing their entertainment to inform their world and if this movie says Nixon confessed on national TV, they aren’t going to spend a bunch of time checking sources to see if it actually happened.
I’d be much more comfortable if they called this movie “Brost/Fixon,” with a couple of fictionalized characters based on some real people, in which case the author can make up whatever reality he chooses. I don’t think “Based On A True Story” is an adequate tip-off to the viewer that the writers were just making shit up.
I think I must side with Dread Pirate Jimbo. I saw Frost/Nixon honestly believing it was a faithful transcript of the real thing. We aren’t even given many clues to say that it isn’t. Especially to me, a European born in the 1980’s, it’d be hard to tell that it’s not accurate.
It’s hard to draw the line and it’s all about the presentation. I won’t mistake the cyborg Nixon in Futurama for the real thing. But a movie like this which is presented like a time-piece, centered around an important event… It becomes more difficult.
I am reminded of a book released last year or so. It was a fictional book starring Ingemar Bergman in the lead role (some six months before he passed away). Even though it was all made up, it could have been taken as a biography by an unattentive reader. Bergman himself was reported to not be able to sleep at night because of it.
On one hand I want to slap people who get their history from Hollywood movies. On the other hand we have enough ignorance in the world and we don’t need Hollywood adding to it.
I get highly annoyed by books/movies that put up a facade of historical accuracy. Don’t get me started on The Da Vinci Code.
The Cohen Brothers famously put “Based on a true story” at the beginning of their movie Fargo, and more than a few people believed it. Did it matter for a movie like Fargo? No. But for something based on an actual event, like the Frost/Nixon interviews, a great story can be told without distorting the actual exchange.
If you don’t think Hollywood can re-write history, just revisit JFK, and the flack Oliver Stone received.
You and I may not watch movies for our history lessons, but that doesn’t mean the general public has the same standard. Few will seek out the real transcripts. Nixon had enough faults… if the story wasn’t interesting without distorting the historical record, why not just make up a fictional interview with Nixon and whoever? Using Frost implies that the interview exchanges are accurate… the behind-the-scene intrigue is up for massaging, but not the interviews.
Have you met people? They think professional wrestling is real (and even more disturbing, watch it on purpose).
People are indeed going to watch this movie and think they’re getting some good old-fashioned history (in their preferred method of delivery, a movie) - they’re not going to be watching it with a critical eye to the historical inaccuracies. I think there is a significant difference between scenes in a movie that you can reasonably expect to be completely made up (fantastical happenings, private conversations, etc.), and things that you expect to stick to what actually happened (like interviews).
I don’t think Ron Howard is doing the world a favour by increasing the amount of ignorance and disinformation in the world.