What facts were changed in Blackhawk Down?
There’s already been a TV movie - I saw part of it on Hallmark. I don’t know about historical accuracy though, as I didn’t see enough of it to judge.
Well, considering the fact that Caligula was financed by Penthouse, I don’t think historical accuracy was the ultimate goal. It probably was a bit more historically accurate when Gore Vidal was on the project (how much I can’t say), but when he left they threw his script away. But yeah, I agree that it’s sad that people think THAT movie is a good basis for ancient history.
I once posted an April Fool’s Day joke on Usenet describing the "upcoming Disney version of Animal Farm.
I got at least three replies from people who didn’t realize that I was joking.
I wasn’t there, but one of my instructors in ROTC in college was with the 101st ABN in Vietnam and he told me that Hamburger Hill was the most realistic Vietnam movie he’d seen to that point (late 80s).
Not much, and most of what was was done for the sake of the narrative, not knuckling under to the Pentagon. The only thing they could have shown but didn’t that would have shown the military in a bad light was the fact that the Somali gunmen were using women and children for cover and, eventually (after taking some casualties from this tactic), the US troops began shooting through the women and children to get the gunmen.
Kevin Smith has a real funny story about that in his DVD An Evening With … . Seems that the producer, Jon Peters, talked to Smith about wanting a giant spider in the third reel of the Superman movie he was making. But that never got off the ground, and Peters went on to produce WWW. And so the spider was included, Smith says, because Peters wanted to see a big spider in a movie.
I had forgotten about the Alamo.
Oh come on - someone had to say it.
There’s also the question of how accurate Suetonius was in the first place. Picture future historians forming a picture of turn-of-the-21st-century American politics from *The Clinton Chronicles{/I] and Farenheit 911.
I was really shocked when my father-in-law (who lived through it!) asked me if the events in Apollo 13 really happened because I’m an amateur astronomy buff. :eek:
I really like the little things in A Lion in Winter, that seem to my very untrained eye to be accurate. Peter O’Toole breaks the ice in the basin to wash his face, the dogs in the castle, Katharine Hepburn wrapping presents in cloths. I tire of Hollywood depictions of midieval castles where everyone’s perfectly clean and the castle’s immaculate and such.
Timeline, tho’ not a great movie, also had dirty castles and sorta-grimy nobles.
They didn’t tell you very much - remember that this was one very small segment of a one hour show which covered Hollywood/pentagon collaberation since WW2. I haven’t actually seen ‘Black Hawk Down’ so my info comes only from this documentary.
One of the main characters in the real story was a guy called John Stebbins - who was imprisoned a couple of years later for rape and child molestation. He was written out of the story and Ewan Mcgregor’s character was manufactured to replace him [with a different name - the Pentagon said that they didn’t want to ‘glorify’ this Stebbins guy].
Some important scenes were also cut out - the ones they mentioned were ones that showed conflict between different army units and soldiers going off against orders to act the hero.
I found the documentary very interesting - they said right out that their role was propaganda - they didn’t back Forrest Gump because they didn’t want an American soldier to look so stupid. A lot of the movies that they didn’t back were ones that showed soldiers having doubts about what they were doing - they only back movies that show the forces in the best possible light - even if they have to twist the truth to do it. Judging by what was said, this Jessica Lynch flick should be a mine of disinformation - but, as they said, many americans get their image of the armed forces from the movies - and really believe that this is a true image.
Funny, they didn’t mention this in the documentary, they just said that not much was shown of the Somali.
I’d just like to see a movie with a medieval castle that looks right. Often filmmakers will shoot at an actual castle for the sake of “authenticity” – the problem is that even a well-preserved castle today looks hundreds of years old, with exposed, weathered stone. In its heyday, a decent castle had its walls plastered and whitewashed, presenting a smooth surface, sometimes gaily painted. You could build a castle out of concrete and it would actually look more authentic.
Read the book.
Wow - two years, and no one’s mentioned JFK!
I thought I would because it is the only kind of inaccurate movie that I object to - one that claims to be accurate but isn’t.
Regards,
Shodan
The book, as implied by RikWriter, does cover both sides very well. The movie is centered from the American point of view. I doubt it would have been possible to get a Western audience to connect to or understand what to them would be a very alien culture.
I guess Mel Gibson just didn’t want to make a controversial historical movie. 
Actually, Brother Cadfael did. But he only beat you to the punch by a few hours and it’s a glaring omission.
I haven’t seen a lot of the movies listed here, but I was trying to think of the best one. I think JFK is it. Aside from relying on a bunch of ridiculous theories and lame sources, Stone also changed a lot of things to ‘sex it up.’ Even the conspiracy theorists can’t have been very happy with it, since he made it look like they believed some things they’d long ago rejected. The most famous scene in the movie didn’t happen at all, and he had to change and erase a ton of things about his hero (Garrison) because he was really a sketchy and not altogether sane character. Aside from Kennedy and Oswald getting shot, it’s almost pure fiction. 
If there’s a Lifetime Achievement award, I think Gibson should get it. (Hey, that might be fun- a Historical Society of some sort could do their equivalent of the Razzies or those Bad-Movie-Physics awards.)
I think it’s already been mentioned once or twice in this thread. Probably deserves a thread of its own.
UGH! This burns me, too. Even in fiction (Blade Runner / DADoES, to name one). On the upside, my -hatred- for Disney’s ‘sweet-i-fi-cation’ of movies did inspire me to read Hunchback, which I found to be an absolutely -outstanding- book.
Heh. This is true, of course, but it might also bear saying that among Elizabethan English history plays I’ve read, Shakespeare’s are probably the most accurate. I find that rather amusing. 
(And of course a lot of what we would call inaccuracies are picked up from his sources, too…)
Elizabeth- this movie had everything going for it- Cate Blanchett could have been a perfect Elizabeth, there was a hefty budget, Joseph Fiennes is talented and could pass for Dudley, but they LITERALLY hired a director who had never even HEARD of Elizabeth I.
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I had a prof once who occasionally, on the final for his “Age of Elizabeth” seminar, asked “What did Elizabeth get wrong?” as an essay question.
But he wasn’t really bumbling or naive in the book/mini either, just acting like he was in order to stay alive! Which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of liberties taken (for instance, the historical Claudius was almost certainly no republican…)
Down here in Finland, and many other parts of Europe as well, I guess, there’s a serious love going on for Donald Duck. Not only is there a high-circulation Donald Duck magazine with comics from Don Rosa, Carl Barks and other masters, there are also cheap Donald Duck pocketbooks with (usually rather sub-par) comics by mostly-Italian drawers. Italians love to make duck versions of literature classics, and one of these stories was a duck version of Les Miz. I’ve also seen a duck version of, of all things, 1984.
What I’d really like to see is a duck version of Atlas Shrugged. Or, even better, a Disney film with the theme.