ARCHIVE Historical accuracy: film vs. books

In books, authors usually have to either take great pains to make sure the story is accurate or get sued by the families or survivors. Films take a less rigorous view, which for example with Titanic has ended up with idiots looking for Rose and Jack's grave and Cameron apologising to Murdoch's family.

Films claim to be entertainment, but is this a valid claim when people believe they are accurate? Should film makers have to do more to ensure viewers know they are fiction, or be responsible if viewers don't realise they are?

Opinions?

 

This just pisses me off. Just take the real names off if you're pulling everything else.

Cameron's Titanic was as true to history as Avatar. After what he said about Murdoch and Lightoller, I'm not watching his crap any more. It pretty much slanders men like Lightoller who picked up a DSC and bar in the First World War, and took his personal boat to the Dunkirk rescue in his late sixties.

 

Sometimes it isn't just the film that makes unfortunate assumptions. Take Sarah Jessica Parker talking about the film Ed Wood, and in so doing allegedly maligning Dolores Fuller, Ed Wood's girlfriend and Elvis' songwriter, because she didn't research the person she was playing, or meet with her, once in all the time they were filming.

Dolores Fuller commenting on it (from 3:50):

 

I keep hearing this but I've never seen any sign that SJP would say something like that for her own mouth. Do you have a cite?

 

I'd forgotten where you lived.

So how would you prevent this? Could there be a rule about accuracy, and how would you enforce it. At the moment we have the phrase "Based on a true story" which now is so diluted it means someone with the same name as one of the characters was possibly a real person once.

 

From 3:40. Her statement makes it quite clear what research was and was not done.

 

Ouch. Her comment seems unnecessarily hurtful, and particularly annoys me because it isn't just rude, it breaks one of the rules of reviewing. Commentary is about the work, not the person: you don't attack the author, you review the book. You hear about people who can't separate actors from the parts, but I'd expect better from someone actually in the profession.

Historical inaccuracies do annoy me, because it then takes so long correcting all the misapprehensions, but it is not just films that do this. I've recently been asked to review the book version of a biopic. It takes a brave, well-known, real-life woman, discards all of her actions and decisions and makes her the pawn of a government conspiracy, as well as contradicting the known historical records. It may be a ripping yarn, but it isn't something I can recommend as it could actually result in students failing GCSEs due to inaccuracies.

It is the other reason I have nothing to do with Doctor Who, after that awful Elizabethan episode.

 

Make libel and slander laws much stricter regarding film and television portrayals - equivalent to books - and have a government department that can sue on behalf of the dead, or give legal aid to the families to sue. It evens up the problem of studios having better lawyers and more money.

Or make a rule that the film must be viewed and judged by the living relatives/people depicted and fined per inaccuracy. Filmmakers can get round it as Orson Welles did with Citizen Kane, but just as with Citizen Kane future generations may well miss who is being depicted, putting an expiry date on any libel.

Either way the government gets a fresh income stream and the films stop being so inaccurate and might be more watchable.

 

Just to update this thread, there have been quite a few recently.

• The Revenant takes an incredible story of survival, invents a son who never existed, and turns the lead and two other real people into murderers.
• The Danish girl invents a lover and has the wife cheat instead of admitting she was bisexual.

 

I think its a great argument for real-people fanfic. If an actor wants to change sexuality in a film, they shouldn't complain when someone does it to them in writing.

 

Just read the actual story. Youch.

Look, director, pal, mate, if you can't keep an audience through a thirty mile crawl through hostile territory without adding drama and slandering the dead, maybe film-making isn't the career for you. Just saying.

 

Have you seen many war movies at all - they go from being fairly accurate as possible to the Yanks won the war on their own. I know the USA has to make it self look good, but can they honestly cannot get a story straight without screwing it up.

Yes U-571 I'm looking at you.

 

I honestly think there should be a disclaimer that it is based on true events but is a fictional retelling and as such things have been changed. I certainly do think that if you are making a film about a set of real events the least you can do is to try and be as accurate as possible.

But when you have people who will ignore messages like that and still believe a film to be real because they saw it, well I despair about what can be done.

There is always a need to slim down and refine a story so that it fits within the bounds of the medium and so perhaps you have to merge some characters but when you go and make wholesale changes, you may as well sign yourself up to being done under the Trades and Descriptions Act.

 

Can you do something about American tourists screaming "Freedom"?

 

Offer to re-enact the last moments of William Wallace on them?

 

If I wanted to mention the number or war movies that appeared to forget the Russian Front existed, or being told by a US tourist that they were so proud the US were the only country to have a Monuments Men squad, I could have done so (in real life they were among 350 or so soldiers from 13 countries).

I think standards need to be established for films, and if a film is made only for entertainment there needs to be comeback on filmmakers if it is not made clear enough just as there are for books.

 

Your biggest problem is always going to be that the Director will consider their "artistic vision", to be the one true thing and that the story will only be of interest if they can add their own personal touch to it, otherwise it would be just dull history.

Not to mention managers with focus groups demanding that it must have certain elements to capture the right demographics even if it doesn't belong anywhere near the story.

Sometimes, the truth is far better than fiction and adding in the extra details detracts from the movie.

 

Yeah, but Netflix have just gone the wrong way with "Making a murderer". They alleged corruption and the audience went out and harrassed the real people. Told a guy to go die of cancer when he's suffering Leukeamia. Classy.

 

I'm guessing that no-one is going to be able to take it up with Netflix and get some compensation out of it. They'll probably just go with Freedom of Speech or the Press or something.

Wonder how accurate they were, or should that be, how accurate they weren't.

 

If they're going to dump what happened anyway, why keep the real people's names on it? Does "based on a true story" sell seats or something?