I guess my take is that, if you are just out to tell a good story, then I won’t sweat the small stuff.
BUT if you are out to make some kind of point a la JFK (The evil – somebody – killed JFK and American Democracy!) – or even Pocahantus (The white man is evil! Except for the cute one!) )then you DAMN well better get your facts straight!
How about Barry Lyndon for accuracy? From what I’ve read, Kubrick went so far for accuracy that he used actual clothing from that era for costumes (and, of course, shot indoor scenes lit entirely by candlelight).
I would suspect a lot of people think these movies are at least somewhat accurate. Maybe they’re fools, but then, there are plenty of fools.
Actually, I’m quite guilty of this, when I watch a historical movie about something/someone I’ve never heard about. Yes, I’m probably a fool.
Just wondering…If an historical movie uses the real names of people involved, couldn’t they (or their children) sue for libel or something like that if their portrayal is grossly innacurate?
Personnally, I found Blade Runner so much better than DADoES (and I used to like K. Dick a lot) that I was pretty happy they changed everything.
Didn’t know this. I guess thats why the funniest lines in the play and movie are about New Brunswick.
I am not sure why people think that the military should help with films that make them look bad. If you were making a film about me I wouldn’t help you either if it showed me negatively.
I hope you are exagerating for effect. No one has to knuckle under. They don’t pressure anyone. They lay out their terms, take it or leave it. Its not a secret. If a director goes to the Pentagon for help he already knows there may be compromises. If you want their help then they have the right to set terms. If the director doesn’t like it then they can find another way to do the movie.It is not a constitutional right to have the military help you with your movie.
Your examples don’t make sense. Not too many film makers are looking to the Pentagon for help with their WWII movies. The Army does not have that many Sherman tanks in its inventory anymore. For that matter they can’t help with any Viet Nam movies any more. Even the national Guard doesn’t have equipment from Viet Nam these days. This does effect films that want to use modern equipment.
The Pentagon will turn down films also for portraying incorrect tactics or doctrine. In Clear and Present Danger they would not cooperate because the ending showed a helicopter crew going against doctrine to mount a rescue operation. The ending would show the military in a heroic positive light but the Pentagon would not support it. The director changed the ending. Instead we get a lame ending with a drunk civilian pilot in an old Huey(IIRC). The Pentagon cooperated with the movie after that even though the government as a whole and several high ranking military people were shown as bad guys.(I know its not a historical movie but it is one that I know the facts about Pentagon cooperation)
Of course, as a certain recent movie has shown, just because a movie is called a documentary doesn’t mean it’s accurate.
How accurate was “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum” in terms of architecture and costumes?
Everything you ever wanted to know about the classical world but were afraid to ask…
clothing
Sort of an hommage to a roman villa architecture assorted stuff about daily roman life
Actually, I understand that there are warehouses of old military equipment going back… well way far. I get this impression from watching the gun show on the History channel. (“Way of the Gun” “Weapons at War” “Guns & Ammo, the sitcom”? I’m not sure what it’s called.) Anyway, they always have this guy who’s head looks like a bullet and he goes on about how they just have scads of equipment in storage. For… I’m not sure why.
As far as going to the Pentagon for help with movies about older wars, I believe that one of the major things is “Military Consultants” or whatever they’re called. The guy who hangs out next to the director and says “Uh… actually that’s not how we do it.” or works with the stunt crew, etc. As I understand it, if the Pentagon likes your movie, or what they can make your movie into, they will help you out getting one of these guys hired. Otherwise, good luck with that, buddy, you’re on your own. And none of our guys will help you.
But this is all hearsay and make-believe, I’m sure…
Compared to flights of fantasy like Gladiator and the like, the 1979 Caligula actually impressed me. It’s completely based on the (very greatly exaggerated) stories from Caligula’s enemies, but at least it mostly sticks to the lies it’s based on, and also includes lots of neato details, like Caligula’s terror of the dark. Besides, it was produced by Penthouse. Those people weren’t interested in historical accuracy.
I almost pitted this movie when I saw it two months ago for the first time. And even though it doesn’t really make an effort at historical accuracy, I feel it deserves to be mentioned here anyway.
First of all, someone was doing some kind of research. The theatre is fairly accurate (though, IMHO, far too clean), and so are the costumes, but that only serves to hammer home what they didn’t get right.
What annoys me most about this film is how far out of their way they went to avoid anything remotely queer. In an age when males typically played the roles of women (and there is one such boy actor in the story), they make sure that two men never kiss in the story (the boy in a dress only kisses the woman pretending to be a boy). And lest anyone think our boy in a dress is gay, they make sure to have a scene where he’s flirting with a female prostitute. The delightful Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…”) is now written for a woman instead of a man. One of the few characters whose romantic life is totally unimportant is Christopher Marlowe, and I can guess why that is.
This skittishness over even the vaguest, most oblique hint of the possibility of homosexuality is very 20th Century – circa 1955. It made me squirm the whole movie (when I wasn’t skirming over Shakespeare’s Elizabethan psychiatrist, or the fact that Romeo and Juliet was not an original production, but a cribbing from an earlier work).
Just one movie wouldn’t be a problem – if Shakespeare in Love were the only example, wouldn’t upset me so much. But this is just one particularly loathsome part in a general pattern: in biopics of people who were sexually ambiguous, or known to be homosexual or bisexual, their love lives will be totally erased or reivented. When I try to come up with true stories – or fictional stories inspired by true stories – that feature queer people, I come up with murderers (Heavenly Creatures, and Rope was inspired by Leopold and Loeb)
Yeah, yeah, I know – now come the usual complaints of, “It’s just Hollywood, and nobody expects historical accuracy.” But as Eats_Crayons said, there are people who get their understanding of history from films like Gladiator. Movies have become such a powerful medium in our culture – so much more than documentaries or history books – that I think this constant erasure from all but the worst roles in history is dangerous.
Sorry for the rant.
While you have a point about movies overall, it bugs me that theories Shakespeare was gay have gotten so popular as to be presumed to be true.
You’re reaching here. Marlowe is a plot device in this story. Giving him a love interest of either sex would have been pointless, since we in the audience don’t give a crap about him except as he relates to Shakespeare.
Well, he did adapt it from a poem.
Well then, I guess you better look out for the documentary on the history channel and watch it yourself. Most of the people talking on it were either Military representatives whose sole job was working on movies, or film makers themselves - so I would have thought they knew what they were talking about - they have a whole department at the pentagon devoted to this - and they do have the equipment from earlier wars - as another poster has also pointed out.
Also Jerry Bruckheimer had a team that made propaganda films for them of the war in Afghanistan, and that was what led to the idea of ‘embedded reporters’ in the Iraq war.
That wasn’t the impression I got - they specifically said about the JAG series that the situations shown in the programmes would never happen IRL, but they backed the show anyway because it increased recruitment in the marines and the JAG corps and shows the military in a good light.
Definitely not the children. Only living persons can sue for libel. And at least in the U.S., actual injury must be shown.
Who presumes them to be true? I have a hard enough time convincing people that it’s even a possibility.
What irks me is that if you read “Sonnet 18” to someone, and don’t provide a context, they’ll think it’s a beautiful love poem. Mention it’s written to another guy, and they’ll say, “That’s just how guys talked back then.”
Then if you point out “Sonnet 20,” in which the poet laments he was born a man because his beloved was made “for women’s pleasure,” that’s when people start bringing out the “Shakespeare’s sonnets probably aren’t autobiographical” theory.
It’s a knee-jerk reaction – it’s not just in movies, either. You find it in historical analysis, literary analysis. And the whole thing is frustrating – one gets the impression, sometimes, that homosexuality sprang into existance sometime after 1950. Or, at best, that it existed among the Ancient Greeks, then vanished for a couple of millennia. No other aspect of human existance is so automatically denied.
Movies, along with television, have become our stories now. And our stories are the glue of our culture. Part of the pleasure of movies is the joy of suspending disbelief, and sometimes people have a hard time leaving the suspension of disbelief in the theatre. I’ve heard someone who should know better – a highly intelligent woman with a bachelor’s in Classics – try to defend the historical accuracy of Gladiator. There are probably people out there who believe that The English Patient is an accurate portrayal of that Count’s life, or that there might even be some truth to Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy.
Our stories and our histories (and in many languages, these are the same word) are the air that we breathe. To deny a person a place in the greater story is to deny them oxygen. To wilfully cut them out, to edit them out of both fiction and non-fiction, is to strangle them.
You’re probably right, although we do see an awful lot of the background characters either falling in love or having sex with someone. Marlowe, as I recall, walks in on a pair of very minor characters having sex.
That was what I was trying to say. I worded it a bit awkwardly.
That’s right, the dead have no reputation to defame legally. Living people who are public figures (public officials, celebrities, etc.) also have to show ‘actual malice’ - meaning either that the broadcaster knew the information was false or was reckless and didn’t care if it was true or false. There are some big defenses, like satire and opinion. The bar is intentionally set quite high. For people who aren’t famous, it’s a little easier.
Not in serious literary analysis. Assuming it’s recent, anyway.
If you look at the credits you will see that most of the military consultants have a ret after their name. For historical films there is no need to go to the government for consultants, there are plenty of retired guys around willing to pick up a buck. Dale Dye is a former Marine Viet Nam vet who runs a consulting company that specializes in military movies.
If there is a Department of Old Equipment for Movies I would love to see it. I have seen no evidence of it. The only old equipment I have seen is on static display in front of HQ buildings or in military museums. I know there is a movie liason department somewhere. My point is that when a film maker goes to the government for military cooperation he already knows that his script may have to be modified to meet the requirements of the military. If he has a problem with that then he doesn’t have to go to them for help. I see nothing wrong with that. Its the DODs money equipment and time they should have a say as to how it is used.
My point about tactics and doctrine was simply to say that they sometimes use different criteria (other than whether the military is shown as good guys) for whether they cooperate such as the true example I gave about Clear and Present Danger. Sometimes they do work with movies that aren’t very accurate when it comes to the situations they portray. In the execrable movie Firebirds they had the full cooperation of the Army and the Apache Training BDE at Fort Hood. The movie was terrible with incredible inaccuracies in training, doctrine, tactics, military life, etc,etc etc… Somebody should have pulled any cooperation from that movie until a decent script was made.
Actaully, my problem with those movies was that the average Civil War soldier was not an overweight, 40-50 year old male. Never use average reenactors for theatrical productions, kids.