When Real World and Reel World Collide

"The Last King of Scotland" gives an African dictator a personal physician who has an affair with one of the dictator's wives and escapes during the Entebbe crisis.

"The Black Dahlia" solves a 60-year-old murder by putting two ex-boxers on the case and implicating a rich family of real-estate developers.

"Hollywoodland" looks into the mysterious death of a TV star by having a determined gumshoe named Louis Simo start looking under rocks.

"Yes, we had a fictional detective, because we felt we could make (George Reeves') story reverberate through Louis'," explains Allen Coulter, who directed the stylish "Hollywoodland." "We kept as true to the facts as we could, but the first principle was always to be true to what George was."

Still other films this year weren't content with merely imagining a narrator. They moved their subjects through events they never experienced, or made up entire worlds.

In "Fur," the photographer Diane Arbus is inspired when a strange dog-faced man moves upstairs, and introduces her to an underworld of misfits. "Bobby" told the story of the RFK assassination through the eyes of the supporters who mourned him. Both movies are almost complete fiction.

"Of all the people to do a strict A-to-B-to-C, soup-to-nuts biopic (on), Diane Arbus would be the least likely candidate," protests "Fur" director Steve Shainberg. "I didn't know how to tell the story I was interested in just from the facts. What I wanted was an inner portrait."

The year's remaining docudramas work in a more shadowy middle ground, seeming to tell true stories while using fictional tricks to do so.

"Marie Antoinette" paints a portrait of a perpetually vapid royal who spent her days slinging slangy gossip. "Flags of Our Fathers" describes a war hero driven to alcohol by post-traumatic stress. "Catch a Fire" shows one government agent's relentless pursuit of South African patriot Patrick Chamusso. "The Queen" re-creates the most intimate conversations of the British royal family.

And they're not alone. Earlier this year "Infamous," a bio of Truman Capote, used as many novelistic devices as his fiction; "The Notorious Bettie Page," a profile of the pinup model, was as posed as any of her centerfolds. Still to come is "Miss Potter," a biography of the author of "Peter Rabbit," and "Factory Girl," a look at actress Edie Sedgwick.

Many of these are admittedly stylish, compelling movies, but they raise serious questions about honesty. Can an invented detail be more trustworthy than a recorded one? Can a fictional eyewitness ever be "reliable"?

"Whether we're right or wrong doesn't matter," says Peter Morgan, the screenwriter of "The Queen." "People say `Well, how do you know she said that?' Well, I don't know. For about 90 minutes of the film, the only source is the imagination. ... But the success of the film shows that people were persuaded by it."

"You're always trying to get as close as you can to the documented truth," says Philip Noyce, the director of "Catch a Fire." "But you're also, ultimately, looking to get beyond that, to the emotional truth. And that's not in documents. That's in people's hearts and minds."

At one point, starting a film with "Based on a True Story" was enough to inspire confidence. (The Coens once confessed they put that claim at the beginning of the fictional "Fargo" so audiences would blithely accept all the coincidences that followed.) Yet a decade later, all it means is another entry in an infinitely elastic genre.

"Just repeating the facts of something isn't enough," insists Coulter. "Sure, you can track things down -- yes, on Thursday, June 9, George Reeves went to Ciro's and spent $300 -- what does that tell you about the man?"

The facts themselves are often in dispute, too, says Noyce -- a fact brought home when he was preparing "Rabbit-Proof Fence," last year's based-on-fact drama about the resettlement of aborigine children.

"The validity of that film was challenged by right-wing historians, because they had records saying the parents gave permission," he says. "Colonial authorities are wonderful at producing records. But once you spoke to the people themselves, you heard quite the opposite. And you began to realize that oral history is perhaps more valid than recorded history."

Even when the facts aren't in dispute, however, they're not always convenient, which leads dramatists to invent incidents or create composite characters.

In "Hollywoodland," when a premiere of "From Here to Eternity" is greeted with snickers, the studio decides to cut Reeves' part. In "Catch a Fire," Chamusso is so long harassed by a government agent that the two form a complicated sort of bond.

In fact, there were several previews of "From Here to Eternity" and no clear proof that Reeves' part was drastically cut afterward; several different agents interrogated Chamusso over the years and the character who appears on screen is actually a composite of four separate men.

"When you're telling a story like this you have a responsibility to history, to look at the different points of view and sift through the evidence and reach your own conclusions," says Noyce. "At the same time, you have a second responsibility, a dramatic one, to engage the audience. You're constantly trying to balance both."

Once they've figured out what they do know, and what they need to condense, even the most scrupulous dramatists are faced with what they have to invent. How did Idi Amin act in the privacy of his bedroom? What did Prime Minister Tony Blair really say to Queen Elizabeth in the heated days before Princess Diana's funeral?

Jeremy Brock, who wrote the screenplay for "The Last King of Scotland" and the 1997 Queen Victoria bio "Mrs. Brown," says all you can rely on is your own educated guesswork.

"I think we all want to imagine what it's like when our leaders close the door," he says. "And I passionately believe that if you're true to the spirit of their relationships with the people around them, you have the opportunity to be in that room. The challenge is finding a way into those intimacies."

Morgan began his research for "The Queen" with public records, "countless biographies" and, he admits, a few confidential sources. But for the private, prickly chats between sovereign and statesman, "it's the same sort of business as writing a scene between any two characters -- you have to get inside their heads and hearts."

For some, imagining the details of a private conversation aren't enough. When he developed "Fur," Shainberg insisted on imagining an entire world. Characters and events were chosen based on whether they were "right," rather than whether they were real.

"What I hate about most biopics," says Shainberg, "is that they tell you what you already know. You already know that Johnny Cash sang at Folsom, you already know that Jackson Pollock invented drip painting. ... Everything you might know about Diane Arbus happens after our movie ends."

Even when it came to casting, Shainberg chose to ignore the accepted facts, casting the tall, fair Nicole Kidman as the small, dark Arbus. It worried more than one executive.

"People were coming up to me and saying, `Well, what about Winona Ryder? She's short and dark and Jewish,"' Shainberg says, laughing. "So we're casting by religion now? But I didn't want an impersonation because, first of all, I don't think that ever works -- I don't care how much Will Smith pumps up, he's never going to be Ali."

All re-creations of the past carry a certain amount of subjectivity, but once poetic license becomes not just personal but political, audiences rise up. Just ask Oliver Stone how many angry questions he still gets about "JFK." Or listen to Norman Jewison complain how criticisms of the liberties he took with Rubin Carter's life torpedoed the Oscar chances of "The Hurricane."

That's why, even when they had to invent dialogue or guess at some events, the screenwriters of "United 93" and "World Trade Center" stayed as scrupulously apolitical as they could (with Stone, who directed "World Trade Center," working particularly hard). They knew that those details of 9/11 were still raw. They knew that any political grandstanding would bury their films in an onslaught of angry blogs and op-ed pieces.

So far Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" has escaped that kind of criticism, protected by the passage of time and its air of realism. But even its people are problematic. The character of Bud Gerber -- the political sharpie who puts the heroes on the bond tour -- is fictional (and veers perilously close to the old cliche of the wily, cigar-chomping, show-business Jew). And although the film suggests that Ira Hayes' alcoholism stems solely from his war service, he had a history of drunk-and-disorderly arrests before he ever put on a uniform.

"Flags," "JFK" and "The Hurricane" all manipulated the details to get at what their filmmakers felt were larger and inarguable points -- that the government and the media can collaborate to sell a war, that there are still questions about Dallas, that the American justice system can be racist. But this is advocacy, not drama. Like any good historian, a filmmaker dealing with real events has to start with the facts and work toward a conclusion, not begin with a preconception and then search only for the details that fit.

In "Marie Antoinette," for example, Sofia Coppola began with a vision of the French royal as a naive teenager, overwhelmed by court life and scapegoated by the establishment, the press and finally the people themselves -- a reading which seems not far from her own conception of herself. In "Bobby," director Emilio Estevez -- whose father Martin Sheen campaigned for Bobby Kennedy in '68 -- wanted to mourn a fallen idol, and decided to do it by focusing on the loss felt by his supporters.

But what Coppola leaves out is that, after she was taken off to prison, Marie Antoinette grew up -- bearing up under abuse, facing her accusers coolly, and going to the guillotine with calm dignity. What Estevez doesn't dwell on is who Kennedy had been before, and how his brother's death and the continuing war in Vietnam had transformed him from a fierce cold warrior to a progressive dreamer.

Coppola ends her film too early. Estevez starts his film too late. And because of their preconceptions, they miss the most important chapters of their subjects' lives.

There are rules to the best sort of hybrid movie histories, and they're not too hard to learn. Dramatists must begin by researching their subjects and their periods. They should keep guesswork to a minimum and avoid the merely convenient. They should shun the obviously biased, and consistently favor what-did-happen over what-must-have -- or, worse, what-should-have.

"But even the facts are no protection from controversy," wryly observes Noyce. His film of "The Quiet American" was based on a novel by Graham Greene, which was itself based on real people and documented incident. And when it was released, some emigres still attacked it for being pro-Communist propaganda.

"Fifty years after the event, and there were still people who refused to accept the facts," Noyce says. "Even though you can read them yourself in the Vintage edition of the novel! But as we all well know, people believe what they want to believe. Everything is written from an ideological starting point. Everything is told from how you see the world."

"We don't remember objectively," says Brock. "We remember subjectively. We put ourselves at the center of a disagreement when in fact we were at the periphery; we recast events to make ourselves the hero or the victim. Yes, as a writer, you make things up, but whenever we remember anything we're making something up; the very act of remembering is the beginning of fictionalizing our past."

"At least," he adds with a laugh, "that's my defense if I'm ever hauled into court."

(Stephen Whitty is film critic for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at swhitty@starledger.com.)

Just confirming that Hollywood leftist really do live in an imaginary world.

Haven't heard anything about this film before.

Why isn't "Good Night and Good Luck" listed in the article?

"Oh, you like politics? You know, you'd probably really like Good Night and Good Luck! And Syriana too!"

Owl_Eagle

If what I just wrote made you sad or angry,
it was probably just a joke.

And you began to realize that oral history is perhaps more valid than recorded history

Unless it's the bible, we all know that's just ancient fairy tales./sarc

Hollywoodland: Based on the True Story of the First Superman

They made THAT up. The FIRST screen Superman was Kirk Alyn. Lies lies lies.

Eh, "The Patriot" is another pretty egregious example of what this article is talking about, and it appears to be pretty popular with Conservatives.

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