[W David Lichty]

…I understand that historical epics ‘now and then’ have always played fast and loose with the truth, in order to fund the story, but it still rankles…

I’m on board with this. The default smart opinion for some film critics regarding faithfulness to an account is “That’s not what I go to the movies for,” which is my exact reaction to what I usually see as a needless dismissal of truthfulness. I don’t go to the movies to see not the story, and I’m increasingly tired of having to fact check before or after a thing. I’m not impressed when critics use the phrase “slavishly faithful,” which often excuses lazy solutions to solvable narrative problems.

Embellishing unheard or unrecorded dialogue is inescapable. 1776 did this by raiding the letters our historical figures had exchanged in their day. Selma, disallowed from using any of Martin Luther King jr.’s actual speeches, had to come up with its own ‘Kingy’ stuff, apparently doing that very well. In these forced digressions, we can see faithfulness in the work.

There are other acceptable trade-offs, like protecting identities. Shattered Glass, one of the best movies of this century so far, was meticulously factual except for the supporting cast’s characters, representing journalists who were then still working, and still early in their careers, whose words and actions all happened, but were shuffled around among the renamed characters for the film. I suppose economy is also okay. Rudy amalgamated a lot of helpful people into one guy, played by Charles S. Dutton. Malcolm X did the same thing because Malcolm himself did that in narrating his story to Alex Haley, and while Haley’s account has come under some reasonable suspicions, at the time, when it hadn’t yet, Spike Lee was extreme in his faithfulness to it, and I hold it as his best movie, and one of the best — as in most watchable, most entertaining — historical films ever made.

I even get the cases where it’s almost necessary to change something to get the main idea across. A Beautiful Mind replaced hallucinating a UFO conspiracy with a Soviet one, because as viewers, we needed to believe what John Nash believed, and in 2001 we would not believe that there had been an actual UFO invasion in the ’50s, and the real story – this is what it was like to be him in this way – would not come across. We’d just think, “Man, this otherwise bright guy is nuts about flying saucers.”

I think what bothers me is avoiding even the attempt. The most likely thing is that at its incept, any such project began with someone fascinated by the actual historical account. It grabbed them enough that they wanted to spend months or years re-conveying it. See Malcolm X again (and again and again, as I have). If it interested you, dear film maker, why won’t it interest me? Why not do the work to make the engaging stuff salient to the film? It’s what brought you to the project, why can’t it keep me in my seat? Why all the hokum? While he shepherded All the President’s Men, did anyone tell Robert Redford, “You know what would make this event more interesting? A high speed car chase with some gunplay,” or “What if Carl Bernstein were Carol Bernstein? Then we can have romance and get the ladies in, or even some sex and get the kids in. Look, Mack, if Hawks did it with His Girl Friday, why can’t we?”

The Front Page was a play, not a real event. History isn’t Shakespeare, or The Odyssey, so go ahead and make Romeo + Juliet, and capture all of the youthful spirit of the thing while retaining the language, and getting people to remember what a great storyteller Shakespeare was. Go ahead and give us O Brother Where Art Thou, and reintroduce the culture to a long set aside style of music, in a pretty delightful film. Unlike much history, many of those such works are well known, so no harm done, and even if I’ve never read The Odyssey, who cares if you’ve mauled it? It’s fiction, and I enjoyed your work.

It amazes me that what George Lucas did to Star Wars is more widely regarded as egregious than what film makers, usually needlessly, do to real events.