I saw the movie a few weeks ago, and was curious enough about the story to get the book. What struck me was that virtually none of the incidents depicted in the film are found in the book. Thanks to the History vs. Hollywood link above, I now know why: the book had not been finished when the script was written. The film was based on a 55-page treatment that author Margot Lee Shetterly had submitted to the publisher. Shooting was already under way when the book was released.
From my (increasingly unreliable) memory, here are a few things that the movie either invented or took from sources other than Shetterly’s book:
[ul]
[li]The opening incident of the women being stopped by a cop on their way to Langley. [/li]
[li]The three women being particularly close friends and regularly commuting together. [/li]
[li]The whole business about Katherine having to run to another building to use the colored bathroom. By the mid-1950s, there were no colored bathrooms at Langley.[/li]
[li]Therefore Kevin Costner’s character (a fictional composite) never tore down a “colored” sign.[/li]
[li]Mary Jackson had to get special permission to take night engineering classes in the white high school, but the book says nothing about her going to court and persuading a racist judge with her powerful rhetoric. [/li]
[li]Katherine did calculate the re-entry formulas for Glenn’s mission to check them against the IBM’s results, but there was no last minute discrepancy and he didn’t refuse to get into the capsule until she okayed them. The book doesn’t even say that he specifically asked for her to check them, although other sources apparently do. [/li]
[li]Dorothy Vaughan was one of the first women, black or otherwise, to learn FORTRAN and to learn to use the early IBM computers, but she didn’t do it by slipping into the computer room at night and reading the manuals, thereby stumping the dumb guys who had installed it. Particularly egregious (IMHO) is the scene in which she grabs a meter probe, clips it to the one right wire in a rat’s nest of wires to get the thing to work right, and says something like, “It helps that my daddy was an electrical engineer.” Complete balderdash. [/li][/ul]And that’s just a few things I can recall off the top of my head. Of course, not all of them are particularly important.
This is not a historical anachronism or fictionalized incident, but the most ludicrous scene for me was the one in which Jim Parsons’ engineer character explains how Glenn’s capsule, unlike the previous sub-orbital missions, is going to orbit the earth. He uses the standard, “it’s falling, but the earth is also curving away under it, so it keeps on going” explanation that is typically given to grade-schoolers. But he’s talking to a roomful of NASA engineers! Okay, I get that the audience needs to have a basic understanding of what’s happening, but couldn’t he, or Katherine, have been shown explaining it too some kids or civilians instead? The idea that these engineers would need this dumbed-down pap completely took me out of the story.
So I’m somewhat torn about the movie. Not knowing anything about these women, I was as impressed and moved by the film as many others. The story of these women, and hundreds of others who worked with them, is incredible and has been hidden far too long. It is an important part of U.S. history that should be told.
But the film has made up so much of it from whole cloth that one has to be concerned that too many people will take every fictional detail as gospel. This is always the problem when Hollywood makes movies based on “true stories,” but after reading the book I was really troubled by how little correspondence there was between the “true story” as presented there and the film.
Now, since they didn’t have the finished book to work with, they have some excuse. And it makes sense, to a certain extent, to present dramatized accounts of the kind of prejudice and discrimination that all blacks experienced at that time, even successful, well-educated professionals.
Even if they had had the finished book, it is a work of history that covers much more than the primary three characters, and is not presented with the flowing narrative of a novel or screenplay. So some liberties would have been expected.
But after reading the book, I felt I had been deceived and manipulated by the film. It just went too far in overdramatizing the story, IMHO.
One final note. I am a writer and copy editor by profession. I have edited non-fiction writing from dozens of writers, and have, like most of us here, also read quite widely. Rarely have I read prose as well-written as Margot Lee Shetterly’s. Barely a page or two into the introduction, I was saying to myself, 'This is an amazing writer!"
I think most of us here understand the challenges of combining clarity, style, elegance, and accuracy in our writing, and Shetterly’s work has a grace and originality that is strikingly beautiful. Her expressions often verge on poetry, but always in service of the narrative, without being flashy, distracting, or self-indulgent. I frequently thought about some turn of phrase, “I’ve never thought of it that way, or heard anyone else put it like that.”
Her research also appears to have been extremely thorough. She worked for five years on it, interviewing hundreds of people. In the Kindle edition, the epilogue ends at 66%. The remaining one-third is notes.
And this is her first book! Needless to say, I *highly *recommend it. The film is good. The book is excellent.
