International Dictionary Of Broadcasting And Film Book

As an historian who is also a film buff, I try to be lenient when faced with a movie that bends the facts more than necessary. Anyone who has ever tried to write a screenplay, even one based on a novel, much less on a real person's life or a real historical incident (and I have attempted it), knows you do indeed have to adapt a story (or real life) to the medium of film -- but there's a limit, and some flicks are just too much to take.

The authors, talented entertainment-journalists, know this, for the most part. They obviously loved Shakespeare in Love and admit that it stuck close to the exceedingly few facts that are known about Shakespeare; likewise Girl with a Pearl Earring (a gorgeous film), since almost nothing is known about Vermeer. And they'll accept the rather minor biographical changes made in Erin Brockovich and Norma Rae as being simply unavoidable. But they really rake Mel Gibson over the coals (deservedly), both for the perversion of English history committed in Braveheart (the Christ-like martyrdom of Wallace, they suggest, was practice for The Passion,, a truly horrible film) and for the equally perverted treatment of the American Revolution in The Patriot (which pissed off a lot of people on the other side of the Atlantic with its suggestion of Nazi-style behavior on the part of the British).

They come down hard on The Hurricane for claiming that Carter won fights that he actually lost, merely to reinforce the theme of racism, nor have they anything good to say about Elizabeth, the 1998 version, in which Cate Blanchett portrays a young queen so insipidly naive and trusting, "she wouldn't have lasted longer than a fortnight (or whichever ye olde calendar notation ye prefer)" -- in which they'll entirely correct. (I hated that movie.) They don't have much use for Spike Lee's egotism, either, especially in Malcolm X. They reserve real venom for the fact that Amistad not only jerks history around, the production company, Spielberg's Dreamworks, actually had the nerve to send out study guides to schools promoting wholly made-up characters as actual historical models to be emulated. In other cases, the authors simply wonder why liberties with real people were taken unnecessarily, as in Seabiscuit or The Elephant Man. Some of the biopics the pair analyze, such as American Splendor, probably don't belong here (Harvey Pekar is hardly "historical"), and some, like Communion and The Mothman Prophecies, don't belong anywhere, but they presumably had to come up with an even hundred.

However, the film that led to this book being written is Oliver Stone's JFK, the most vilified film ever made -- before it was even released. As the subsequently published "documented screenplay" demonstrates, every voiced opinion in Stone's film came out of forty years of assassination research. "To its critics, JFK was a film that offended their deeply held view of the world. Stone questioned their religion." This is an excellent book to keep at hand while browsing through your DVD collection.