The Buddy Holly Story, in which they couldn’t get even one song lyric right, not to mention playing fast and loose with historic fact.
In Biblical stories, Jews often have a British accent instead of sounding like Fran Drescher or Gilbert Gottfried, which would be much closer to the truth. Same with Romans, who probably would have sounded more like Snooki or The Situation.
I think he was skinny when he was young.
Henry VIII was a redhead.
BRUTUS??? Like…WTF yo!!! 
You want maybe I should lead you out of Egypt? Oy! What a shlep!
These are not the Jews you are looking for.
These are not the Jews we are looking for.
They can go back to Judea.
They can go back to Judea.
Muscular and athletic, certainly - he thought nothing of spending days jousting, hunting or playing tennis (real tennis, obviously, not lawn tennis) for much of his life, and was an accomplished dancer too. He didn’t give up jousting until he was well into his forties, so it was only the last fifth of his life that saw him really bulk up.
Pearl Harbor has many inaccuracies:
-None of the pilots in the air on Dec. 7 were involved in the “30 Seconds over Tokyo”
-The naval nurses at Pearl Harbor and most other bases were damned near like novices- they weren’t allowed to date non-officers and when they dated officers or civilians the date was heavily chaperoned and curfews were rigidly enforced
-The brass did NOT ignore several warnings (including discovery of a submarine) as they did in the movie, nor were they on a golf course when the attack occurred
-It was no surprise to anybody on his cabinet that FDR could stand up from his wheelchair- he stood up for most of his speeches. (It was walking he couldn’t do without any aid from canes or others.)
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The Patriot is not based on an actual person (the hero was ‘inspired by’ Francis Marion and the villain by Banastre Tarleton, but not enough to use their names) but there are still many inaccuracies.
Cornwallis, one of the real characters in the film, is referred to by Gibson’s character as a “military genius” (this based on Gibson getting to read his journal for about 3 seconds). Cornwallis wouldn’t be on the list of the greatest military incompetents in history but I doubt anybody outside his descendants perhaps would call him a genius.
Early in the movie one of the black men working on Gibson’s plantation is referred to as a slave and indignantly answers “we are free workers, not slaves”. Supposedly this is to show that Gibson’s character is so nice he doesn’t hold with slavery because heroes have no moral nuance, but in fact South Carolina had experienced a couple of minor uprisings and had draconian Black Laws; free blacks were basically relegated to domestic positions and sailors in Charleston and outside the cities they reverted to slavery if they did not leave the state within a year of manumission, besides which anybody who had much of an ethical problem with slavery would hardly have been a South Carolina planter to begin with. Francis Marion, on whom as mentioned the character is loosely based, had a reputation as a particularly cruel slave owner.
Charleston is the largest city in America built with no bedrock- it is literally famous for the lack of rock- and yet when Mel ambushes the British soldiers (and somehow manages to take down about twenty using single-shot muskets) he finds some Granite-of-Requirement to hide among
In the same scene the English are shown as near incapable of fighting in an ambush situation; this was in fact something they were trained for and they would never have stood in the open like they did, especially when they had a hostage. This seems to buy into the “Americans won because they fired from behind trees while Brits stood in the open” nonsense; by this time they had fought one major war in North America (the Seven Years War) and had been fighting the Revolution for several years. (It’s true that the retreat from Concord was a disaster and they were fired at constantly, but staying to the road was probably the best course, especially since they had no idea if an epic ambush awaited them should they leave- charging into the woods in terra incognita is historically a very very very bad idea, but unlike The Patriot they certainly would have known to take cover.)
In the series he’s divorced Anne of Cleves and started banging Katherine Howard and he still looks like a 30 year old ‘nice abs/buns of steel’ Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Katherine Howard was in fact physically repulsed by him and he was nearly impotent from obesity and health problems by this time (his impotence while married to Anne of Cleves was probably physiological rather than non-attraction as he claimed [the bit about him claiming he wasn’t impotent because he’d had nocturnal emissions which he did in the series actually is true) and while his 5th marriage was probably consummated she was more nurse to him than lover.
The Sound of Music is so loosely based on the real von Trapps that if they changed the names of the characters they’d probably not be identified. The real couple had a 25 year age difference, they were not in love when they married (Maria admitted this in her autobiography- it was more of a marriage of convenience), she was not governess to his children but caregiver to a special needs daughter who’d had scarlet fever (I forget who the counterpart to the daughter is in the play- one of the younger ones), they remained in Austria for several years after their marriage (unlike in the play when they leave at the end of their honeymoon). The family turned to singing in public not for fun but for money- they were hit very hard in the Depression and the Baron essentially refused to work because he found the jobs he was offered to be beneath his station (a lot of aristocratic baggage- surprising since he was relatively new to it, the fortune having been his English first wife’s and the title having been awarded for his WW1 U-boat service). The music they sang wasn’t remotely like the music from the movie but a particular type of acapella religious Austrian folk music more similar to the Sacred Harp of the Appalachians. When they did flee the Nazis she was pregnant with a third child and they didn’t disappear from a music festival but left on several trains.
The King and I is about two real people but is almost total fiction. The real King Rama IV probably barely knew Anna Leonowens- as an English instructor for some of his children she may have helped with his correspondence even this is far from certain because he had other English speaking people in his employ, some Siamese and some English, and he was conversant in the language himself. The notion that she was his most trusted advisor and confident and they were in love with each other are all inventions; he probably met her a handful of times.
Later in life when she was in need of money she wrote her memoirs in which she undoubtedly- and understandably from the standpoint of a writer hoping for book sales- embellished her importance a bit. Books on polygamy (Mormon and Asian and other) were big in the late 19th century and most of her book was about the harem anyway, not the king. Later it was novelized and her relationship with the king increased yet more, and then more in the play/movies.
An accuracy is that the king really was a scholar and extremely interested in science and technology; he had been a voracious reader during the quarter century he spent in a Buddhist monastery before becoming king.
Anna was nowhere near him when he died, and unlike the Tuptim plotline he passed a law giving all of his concubines permission to leave whenever they liked; one was abducted by a boatman and when it was learned she went willingly the boatman was jailed for trespassing but pardoned save for a fine.
Anna’s son Louis, however, did become a very good friend of the Crown Prince from the movie after he became king and probably did meet him initially in his mother’s classes. He later became a military adviser in the Siamese cavalry (he remained a British citizen) and became a very successful businessman in Bangkok.
I love the movie 1776 and the number He Plays the Violin is one of my favorite segments, but it is purely a dramatic device: Martha Jefferson never came to Philadelphia. She had recently had a difficult pregnancy that resulted in a stillbirth and Jefferson went to see her. (I forgive this one though because otherwise it’s a pretty reliable story and most productions print “what is and isn’t so” notes.)
I was a bit confused by the quasi-Viking funeral scene in the movie. In addition to being unfashionable in the Middle Ages cremation in England would have been extraordinarily expensive- it takes a whole lot of wood to reduce a body to bone. (Think how much charcoal it takes just to roast meat on a grill before it’s done, then imagine having to burn away all the meat.)
Henry wasn’t a big huge guy until a severe jousting injury in his 40s which kept him off his feet, off his horse, out of the tennis court and out of his various mistresses’ beds. The show was drawing to a close right at the period of his life where he was starting to feel the effects of that injury and the incapacitation that followed, including the weight gain.
Something Peter Stone admits in his foreword to the printed edition (they used to print copies of the popular plays in popular editions – something they don’t do anymore that I miss). But 1776 is pretty accurate, overall. Stone spent a lot of time in research for the play, and many of the lines are actual quotes. There are several cases where the characterization is completely off – Thompson, the Congressional Secretary. Or most notably, Joseph Wilson of Pennsylvania, who wasn’t the nonentity the play suggests. And they changed Caesar Rodney to an older individual. and, no matter how we’d like Franklin to be the way he’s portrayed in the play, in reality he seems to have been much more detached, apolitical in public, yet immensely popular. But, in the main, the story shows the way things did happen, with real individuals struggling and compromising the Declaration into existence. It was the first case I can think of where the Founders were de-mythologized and shown as human in a popular venue that I encountered.
David McCullouch seems to have an unspoken obsession with 1776. He never mentions it by name among other works on the period in either John Adams or his own 1776, but he frequently uses the same quotes (which are often relatively obscure. It would, in my opinion, be remarkable if so many showed up coincidentally in both McCullouch and in Stone) in their real context, as if to say “see – Stone wasn’t being historically accurate!” And his naming the book "1776’ seems another provocation.
Romans with British Accents comes from the Brits, who have an obsession with the Romans.
So…NEW RULE: In any American production set in the Roman Era, all actors have to use a New Jersey accent.
In Spartacus they made a deliberate choice to have the Romans generally speak with British accents. The slaves generally spoke with American accents, especially Tony “Yonda lies da castle of my fadda” Curtis*.The main exception was Jeam Simmons, who was supposed to be a teacher, and thus had an excuse for a cultured accent.
One of the more interesting things about the Hallmark TV adaptation of The Odyssey is that they explicitly avoided giving all the gods British accents (as is still generally done – look at the recent films Clash of the Titans and the Lightning Thief). Aeolus as played by Michael J. Pollard is about as far as you can get from upper crusty British, and it serves to reduce that distance we usually get from The Gods, emphasizing that Odysseus is very much at ease dealing with these beings.
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I’ve seen it more than once, though: people who marry into a family of higher social status (not necessarily of better financial means) and proceed to behave as if their farts smelled of roses - unlike their born-to-the-name inlaws. It’s like being noveau-high-class instead of nouveau-riche or something.
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Re Henry VIII, I think some people here are conflating “big” with “fat”, an euphemism which is common in current American English but which was not common in that time and place. Henry VIII was a large guy way before he got fat. Large as in “please tell me you play rugby!”, you know?
Hey now!
Was the movie watching the actual battle?..or was the movie some dude telling a story psyching up the Spartan troups with a story of victory before a major battle?
Also: In the musical, Anna Leonowens is baffled and astonished by Siamese culture and customs, as if she were right off the boat from England. In fact she was an Anglo-Indian, had grown up in Asia, and nothing about Siam would have been very surprising to her.
It doesn’t matter – it’s over-the-top preposterous either way.
And it’s not all just "The Spartans look GREAT the Persians look BAD – You’ve got the goddammed leprous Ephors living atop their absurdly hard-to-get-up rock (they must be in really Terrific shape! Not to mention the Persian, who climbed up there with all that gold. Or maybe there was an easy way up, by Leonidas just has to do things the Hard Way). Or Ephialtes the Hunchback with a hunch big enough to store a spare Hunchback in ([Crocodile Dundee] That’s not a hunchback----that’s a hunchback![/Crocodile Dundee]).
I know that they threw up the “it’s just the way they told the story” defense in response to protests from Iran, but it still doesn’t eliminate the fact that the story’s absurdly overblown, and that this affects every aspect of the story.
In regards to Amadeus, Shaffer, et al, have been very open about the fact that the play/movie is not at all historical, other than the fact that there was a Mozart and a Salieri, and that Mozart is considered to be the better composer.