W David Lichty
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
You make some good points and I can understand your argument. On the one hand. On the other hand, I understand that movies are movies and not documentaries, and if I want to learn about history, movies aren’t the best place.
My guess is that many of us agree broadly: On one hand, movies aren’t the best place to learn history. On the other hand, if you’re going to tell your own story, then why not just make up your own story. Those are far ends of the spectrum, and we may be at different positions in between them. My specific issue is that “It’s a movie” isn’t a broad umbrella, a free-for-all, or good enough to be a default. And we know that many, especially kids just learning history, have no reason to expect someone to be fabricating critical events when they claim to tell a true story. “Caveat emptor” is a flag waving mostly over those who want to dupe us, and it’s not a good social compact. Diversions beyond, as I think I said above, some necessary things like filling in gaps of unrecorded dialogue, should be warranted by the film making case, rather than the tendency’s ubiquity and the reliably offered excuses.
Do a little work and either:
1. Make the actual scene or story as interesting as it was to those who lived it or told it. Find the drama rather than fabricating it. Just do the work.
2. If you simply want to make a big romp, then extract the contra-historical elements altogether and tell your story. If Raiders was about the spy who kept the D-Day plans from falling into the hands of Hitler, rather than an archaeologist rescuing the Lost Ark of the Covenant, which presents not an unhistorical object, but an easily discernible unhistorical quest, the same movie (minus melting faces) could be as good. But since there was no need to return the stolen D-Day plans from the princess before June 6th, it would also be dinged for being needlessly historically preposterous, and every other historical inaccuracy would be noticed, and would join it on a bunch of lists. It would be an “I enjoy it, but…” movie.
A great example of just that, U-571, didn’t need to be about The Enigma, which the Brits obtained, not the Americans. It’s a MacGuffin, so pick another one, like Notorious did. Invent something, you storyteller you. Make the movie about trying to find Atlantis before Hitler can claim their giant heat rays and warrior dinosaurs, film the same film, and then listen to reviews saying, “This fantasy action picture actually gets a lot of details about submarine warfare in the 1940s right, and what a romp!” By being honest, it would be championed for the things it nailed, rather than given caveats at every turn because of a needless deception, which I think is a fair word to use for these, whatever the motivation. It’s still a knowing lie.
And if you can’t do either of those things, dear film maker, be straight.
3. Start with “Loosely based on the true events of …” or some such.
That’s my issue, the blanket excuse, and those rarely work well in general. Historical movies can get the feel of a time across in a way textbooks can’t, certainly the look, the sounds, music, allowing us to be immersed in that time and place. That’s the kind of useful (and enjoyable) thing that can anchor events into memory, so why not get them right? To put your stamp on it, Mr. Producer? “I can’t just tell it like it was, anyone could do that, I need to bring something, make it my own, otherwise why was I here?” Maybe. Honestly, I think it’s just done because it’s done. Often, each new person who enters the writing process on a picture looks at the existing story not as a nearly finished sculpture, but as raw material, whether it’s a Gremlins or a Bohemian Rhapsody. “I’ve got to turn what I’ve been given into something, or I’ll be replaced next” all but necessitates diverging.
But some oversight wouldn’t hurt. “You’re not here to change the story, but to make this one work. Or to tell us there’s no way to do it without boring people into disconnection, so we can chuck it and really make the movie we want to see.”
It can happen, the fabrication, but it’s hard to excuse its being de rigueur.
Finally got around to Idiocracy. Younger me would have loved this. But, uhhh, yeah, no thanks.
I don’t align much with the article, but Idiocracy is pretty messy. I haven’t seen it since it got its Office Space-like second life, but it was a Movie Night choice when it hit home video. I knew its reputation as an unfinished feeling movie, but you can get away with a lot of film making ineptness in comedies if they’re really funny. It was mildly amusing at times, in that once you’ve laughed at the premise, you can pre-write each next scene in your head way. I’ve thought to rewatch it, given how often it’s been referenced over, really the last 20 years, not just the last ten, but I feel like I’ll relive the earlier experience of wishing it was better.
…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.
$75 for the Varese Club The Burbs, back in the late ’90s, when the idea of anything on CD coming back in print was unheard of. Music unavailable for life? That’s how it seemed. I’m happy to’ve been proven wrong (many times over, Inchon and The Blue Max), and yes, some box sets represented a bigger single output, but $120 for six discs or $200 for eight isn’t my answer.
$75 (plus shipping) for a 30 minute, only okay sounding, The Burbs is mine.
Good review. By which I meant the reviewing itself is good. You don’t sound like you took much bias into the auditorium, and I have a decent sense of the film. Thanks, Thor.
I channeled everything I knew about this series at the time into that episode that Malte linked to.
Yes, I listened to those a while ago, and I knew you’d covered it, but I couldn’t recall where.
Off-hand, I can’t really remember what I said about “Of This Time, Of This Place”, in particular, but I do remember there was no Jerry Goldsmith credit for this, or anything else in the series (of the episodes I found).
That tracks. It was such a weird credit, an isolated mention, in only this one, late in the run, episode’s entry, of Goldsmith’s having scored a theme for the pilot?
But of course I could be wrong. Early US television music is a quagmire, information-wise.
You aren’t kidding.
My references have been Savorer or Sampler. The latter sounds reductive or facile, but I mean it more in the adventurous sense (and it comes from approaches to food). In food, I am a savorer. I will eat the things I love anytime, every day. They do not dull, but deepen. I will know my favorites richly, every lovely leaf on each tree.
Samplers know so much of what’s out there. They can map the world, and know right where to go for anything. My aunt is a sampler. She loves what she’s having, and it doesn’t lose flavor the next time, but she so enjoyed the fresh experience, and knows that something else, just as great, is out there too, and she doesn’t want to miss out on the discoveries.
…I’m a savorer with music, too, it seems. Some of that is self-protection; I will dive deeply if I love a thing, I haven’t the freedom of time and costs to deep dive into very many things, and I want the freedom to fall in love.
I just saw Flow, and after it, immediately watched Gints Zilbalodis’s first feature, Away, which is a thematic and structural dry run for Flow, in a way that’s interesting. I was playing it for my father, intending to work in the background, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It’s serene, but matters. It has nowhere near the level of drama implied in the trailer, and that’s a positive. The image rendering is not at 2024 levels, yet it remains visually sumptuous.
Very glad to see you here, David. Welcome!
I thank you! It seems like a cheery, smart place. Do you moderate? If so, I can already see the benefits.
Yes, this board is very simple and old-school (especially the whole quoting ordeal), but once you get the hang of it, it works okay.
It seems fine to me. New-school can have needlessly complex methods to do should-be-simple things.
Glad to see Amer mention it; I wish he posted here more frequently too.
Well, it’s clear to me that he reads, because he talked about how much he liked it here, the feel, “Like the best times at FSM.” He described it as an oasis, without using that word, so maybe he’s just being a wallflower for the moment, soaking in the nice atmosphere, but he’s definitely around.
A question: Are any of you a completist of any composer or artist?
I think I have ~107% of Goldsmith’s output. It’s an occupational thing. Given the many things affecting availability these days, such as whether a work was ever released, whether it’s still available, whether the release was complete itself and so on, I think you could think of yourself as a completist if everything from a certain composer is an automatic buy, heard or blind. That makes me a Goldsmith and Williams completist, though only with Goldsmith am I a successful completist, I guess. Oh, and The Beatles. I’m good with them, too.
when John David Towner Williams turned 88 five years ago
Where did that ‘David’ come from? I didn’t know that was there.
…that makes me a little happy.
– have to get nother harddisc –
Probably get it now. Hard drives are going to escalate in price, as the (global!) supply of one of the chips they need has been gobbled up by data centers built for the AI competitors.
Does anyone have any tips on how to attract more members?
Send out Amer. Great salesman; he got me here.
Also, before reading this, I used the B-QUOTE function improperly. I pushed the button, and the first part of the code popped into the reply (looks sort of like >blockquote<), then I pated in some text, then above, the B-QUOTE button had changed to look like this: /B-QUOTE
I pushed it, and it filled in the end code (looks sort of like >/blockquote<)!
What an astonishingly helpful way it works for those who don’t know how it actually works.
