From another thread:
I was fascinated by this question. What do you think of not only Howard’s decision, but the LGBT reaction described above? Is this impulse a good thing? CAN it be a good thing? How, if at all, should it be used?
I’m sorry, but why should this be the call of anyone but the director? A movie has storytelling requirements that would be hurt by strict adherence to the facts.
I am not sure about that one but any thorough movie about Einstein or Steven Hawking would have to deal with some of the same issues. I am not sure anyone needs to hear any more about that type of thing. We get enough from the tabloids. It is still just a movie and not a biography.
Movie or documentary?
These are two different animals, despite them both being in similar media.
I have no problem with distortions for the sake of the story. You do know that Richard III was not a hunchback, despite how Shakespeare had him depicted in that play?
Good Lord, when has a movie (or a play) NOT “distorted reality”?
We’ve had many threads on this Board about historical accuracy and works of art. The norm seems to be pretty large-scale changing of history and gross simplification of events.
To a large degree, of course, it’s inevitable – “God Writes Lousy Theater”, as an unnamed writer once said to Peter Stone. You condense characters and events because otherwise the story gets too confusing and diffuse. You want the audience to get the point. And, since you want to show things rather than explain them, events get created out of whole cloth (or transported from elsewhere/elsewhem) to make a point.
If someone is a philanderer, but that doesn’t affect the plot, it gets cut out – why confuse the issue. Checkhov’s Gun and all that – if it ain’t relevant, what’s it doing there?
Of course, you stil get indefensible inaccuracy and pointles whitewashing, but that’s par for the course. I think that you shouldn’t cover up sins if they’re relevant, or just to make someone a morally uplifting hero because you need a positive role model.
It is of great value to teachers, who need to know if their students got their information from actually reading the book or watching the movie.
Somewhat similar to the OP, *Yankee Doodle Dandy *distorted the truth about George M. Cohan’s life to such a degree that at a showing, Cohan remarked, “It was a good movie. Who was it about?” Not only was Cohan married twice, neither of his wives was named Mary.
Evidently a Bokononist.*
The author/director has no obligation to be accurate unless he is claiming to be accurate. A Beautiful Mind was a dramatization, not a biography, and for story reasons it was decided to ignore certain details of Nash’s life. Another director or writer may have decided to ignore other details and tell the story differently. But that’s up to the creator, who’s obligation is to make a good movie.
*Vonnegut said something similar in Cat’s Cradle: “God never wrote a good play in his life.”
My primary objection to gross distortions of known history in films, personally, is "Why did he have to call the character “John Nash’?” and claim the film was about Nash’s life?
If he wanted to make a film BASED on certain events in Nash’s life, he could buy the rights to the Nash bio, call the character Jim Mash or Joe Bash, and put him at Harvard rather than Princeton, make him straight instead of bi-, give him hallucinated humans instead of hallucinated aliens, etc. It’s exploitive, IMO, to pretend to be adhering to history yet deliberately distorting events. In particular, it seems a distortion to make a movie that, in this case, makes a wife’s steadfast love (as “Nash” claims in his Nobel Prize speech, which the real Nash never delivered) out to be the thing that pulled him through, though the couple actually divorced, he cheated on her with men and with women throughout the marriage, etc. The theme to the real Nash’s life would seem to me to be closer to “Even if you’ve got the sexual habits of a three-dicked billygoat, you can still overcome severe mental disorders.”
It won’t save you from the people who complain about your distorting history, though. People still complain about Jerome Lawrence and Robert E, Lee distorting the events of the Scopes Trial, even though they did exactly what you suggest – they changed John Scopes to Bert Cates, Clarence Darrow to Henry Drummond, to William Jennings Bryan Matthew Harrison Brady, and H.L. Mencken to E.K. Hornbeck, changed the name of the town and the date of the trial, and explicitly state it’s not supposed to be accurate. But people still think it’s supposed to be.
Focusing on the LGBT reaction, I am always troubled by the tribal reaction that “one must never portray any of our kind as having negative traits, we are only noble positive people!” It is just simply petty, immature, hyper-sensitive, etc.
I do not disagree that some people would react to seeing negative traits portrayed in individuals who are also members of a certain group as indicative of all members of the group. However, by disallowing the portrayal at all, the group is allowing the morons to frame the debate (politics, anyone?) and serving to ghetto-ize themselves into archtypes instead of fully rounded human beings.
By allowing portrayals that are rounded human beings first - with flaws and positive traits - and these human beings incidentally happen to be members of an identifiable group would IMHO be the better way to go.
Are you sure it’s not “Right now, while millions of people are organizing against us to take away our rights, is a bad time to portray our kind as having negative traits, since an entire political party and several religions are deliberately keeping the public mind focused on our supposed negative traits”?
'Cause that’s more how I see their reaction.
Or, “if the character is bi, unfaithful and schizophrenic, some people will see a causal relationship.”
I don’t think that’s a good sense of it. It’s more like, in general, “great, yet another tired gay cliche of bisexual=crazy or gays can only be noble if they die at the end, or all gays must be limp wristed lispers - this is not only kind of insulting, what’s worse is it’s boring and a bad story” - and in this case “normally the LGBT gut reaction would be to be disappointed at whitewashing his sexuality, but upon deeper reflection, associating bisexuality with mental issues is probably a more tired retread so this works out for the best”.
I can’t speak for the whole community but really what I want to see is more diversity of gay characters and just more interesting gay characters. There’s a fairly small set of gay cinematic tropes, some of which even gay filmmakers are guilty of, and I find it annoying at this point less out of concerns for prejudice than just annoyance at bad writing. It’s like if fantasy fans kept getting Dungeons and Dragons movies instead of Lord of the Rings.
When you get into real life inspired films of course you open a whole new can of worms, with sexuality just being one of many things that come into play. I guess the most important thing is to be true to the vision of the story. Is the person’s life story serving as a parable - then the life can be molded to fit and serve the needs of the parable. If it’s to illuminate a particular historical period, than the story should serve that by making the sense of period paramount over the particular person’s actual life events. On the other hand, if your purpose is to really give a sense of what a person was like, then you have more of an obligation to keep things accurate.
But even in the most true to life portrayal, with no inaccuracies, there’s just no way to get around the fact that you are distilling decades into under two hours. You’ll have to have some kind of focus, and any kind of focus is going to be editorial.
With regards to flawed bisexual historical figures, I think the Kinsey movie managed to handle this fairly well.
It’s a case by case situation. Ron Howard was wrong because he used A Beautiful Mind to put over a particular theme that was contradictory to the truth of the subject’s life. I say that as long as you’re true to the central truth, the details don’t matter.
But if you’re dishonest just to sell tickets–if you change the “meaning” of someone’s life just to make it more heartwarming, or less challenging, or whatever–then you’re a dishonest artist. Again, there can be no hard and fast formula; each case must be judged by its own truths.
(John Ford always wanted to make a movie about Ulysses S. Grant, but he couldn’t reconcile Grant the hero with Grant the alcoholic, so he never made the movie. I say if you can’t reconcile the contradictions–and you’re not willing to make the contradictions part of the story–then do what Ford did: move on.)
^
Though historians believe that Grant’s alcoholism was overstated by his enemies.
Moreover, how could it not? Even if you set out to construct a perfect biographical account, you will at least have to make a selection of what to show and what not, prompted by the simple requirement of getting a two-hour film or a 500-page book out of it. This selection amounts to a certain degree of fictionalization, which is simply inherent in the medium. Add to that the fact that generally, not all the details of somebody’s life (or some other chain of events you wish to portray) will be known to any great accuracy, and you’ll basically have to concede that all stories are, indeed, fictions. The best you can aim for is to have this fiction convey, in an honest manner, some quality present (in the opinion of the artist) in the life or events that are being portrayed; whether or not the details of the fiction coincide with the details of the actual events, in my opinion, then becomes a quite irrelevant issue.
It sounds like a social question intruding into art. Not that the two things need to be kept separate, but if the choice is between an interesting story and one that’s politically sensitive, you hope a filmmaker or storyteller will choose the former even if advocacy groups have their reasons for supporting the latter. And I don’t think the LGBT group’s reaction is a good one. They’re asking people to portray a sanitized version of reality so their group looks good. That does no one any favors.
A very good question that probably deserves its own thesis, but I suppose people find the idea of a real-life story more interesting than a fictional one - or at least that’s what people who make movies believe - so maybe people want to believe the stories they’re seeing are real. Even though they’ve been altered to the point where they are largely fictional and no more true to life than a story about a made-up math professor with problems like Nash’s. Historical accuracy in entertainment has just never been that important, I guess, so filmmakers don’t see it as very important now either.
As, indeed, I say a little further down from the part you quoted. It’s good to see we’re in agreement.
Real life is complicated. The web of experiences, relationships, traits, and ideas that comprise any one person’s existence is so massive, so entangled, that even the most comprehensive biography imaginable can only scrape the surface. When I was in college, a student famously submitted a senior thesis about the life of Charlemagne that was only 14 pages long. The general opinion around the history department (and mind you, none of us had actually read the thing) was that one could produce a 14 page paper about what Charlemagne had eaten for breakfast on (insert random date circa 800 A.D.) and make it historiologically significant.
A biopic, no matter how true to the facts, can do little more than dramatize a handful of events in someone’s life. To form a comprehensive narrative, these moments, the identities and roles of those who were present, the factors that render these events significant, and a thousand other details must be cherry-picked by the scriptwriter in order to fit into some kind of dramatic structure which is, by its very nature, artificial.
A Beautiful Mind was not intended to be an academically rigorous biography of John Nash. It was an exploration of his experiences with schizophrenia. The filmmakers could have chosen a number of avenues in telling the story. What they chose (and this is my interpretation) was to give the audience a taste of what a schizophrenic person might experience. Imagine, they say, if you woke up one day to the possibility that many of the people you have known, many of the experiences that you have made you who you are – aren’t real. How would you cope with this? How could you even begin to come to grips with such a shock? The details of John Nash’s case are used to explore this idea.
So what are the responsibilities of the filmmaker regarding The Truth? Beats me. What I can say is that anyone who expects academic rigor in a Hollywood film, whether or not it is based on a true story, is naive at best.
If the distortions are made for the sake of the narrative, they are perfectly fine. Distort all you want: pretty much anyone who actually cares about the subject will learn the truth soon enough, and beyond constant grumbling from picky historians, no-one will be concerned.
If the distortions are made for the sake of an agenda, that’s bad. Because in this case, the changes will probably be presented as fact, when in fact they are not. This will almost certainly result in a widespread misconception that will take years and years to deconstruct (if it ever happens).
Summary:
Pearl Harbor’s significant and glaring inaccuracies of the historical event are fine.
Nietzsche’s writings that were edited by his crazed Nazi half-sister (while he was right there, catatonic, no less) to look more fascist were very bad distortions.