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I don't understand why, when writing a biopic, one would choose to ignore facts in favor of making stuff up.
I understand the need to streamline things and omit unnecessary details—you're making a feature film, not a documentary—but when you start inventing people who never existed and events that never happened because the actual person's life apparently wasn't interesting enough, you probably need to rethink your subject matter. All you're doing is annoying people who know what really happened.
I understand the need to streamline things and omit unnecessary details—you're making a feature film, not a documentary—but when you start inventing people who never existed and events that never happened because the actual person's life apparently wasn't interesting enough, you probably need to rethink your subject matter. All you're doing is annoying people who know what really happened.
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"The Buster Keaton Story", for instance, is actually a pretty good film (and contains renactments of a couple of his famous stunts, which is presumably the equivalent of paying to feature a composer's best-known numbers on screen), but it's mainly an entirely fictional story about the personal life of a Hollywood actor, in the vein of other films about fame ("The Bad and the Beautiful", "What Price Hollywood?", "A Star is Born").
I imagine that it's not all that far removed from writing a historical novel (where authors are often prepared to admit in their notes that they altered a few dates for the sake of their plot, which is to say that the events referred to weren't even happening at that time!) or indeed from making a screen adaptation of a popular book. And in the latter case it's certanly not unusual to add entire scenes or subplots that weren't in the original, either to replace bits that were cut out because they didn't work on screen ('we need to show these characters bonding, but we can't send them on a fifteen-hundred-mile raft voyage as part of their backstory!') or in order to show some aspect of the character/relationship that you want to highlight. (It's hard to show a character's internal struggles on screen, short of resorting to voiceover; much easier to construct a new scene showing them *doing* something.)
Advice to the aspiring professional: Your job is to tell an engaging story in a visual way, and usually, the result will be markedly different from the book.
I strongly suspect the same ideas apply to adapting people's life stories to make a hit movie (and are probably applied by the same workers). "The number-one job is to tell an amazing story. Period."
Not to tell 'the truth' (we have books for that ;-p) To make a satisfying cinematic experience, bearing in mind that most of the people who will be coming to see it probably know very little beyond a few broad-brush impressions about the subject matter -- especially in the case of someone like Errol Flynn or Al Capone, who are effectively known in the form of urban legends.
I imagine that "people who know what really happened" almost certainly aren't the target audience :-)
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The movies I was thinking of were 1991's Mobsters (which still wouldn't have been a good movie even if it had been entirely fictional, but that's a different subject) and a recent Harriet Tubman biopic which I haven't seen, but apparently invented a person who never existed to serve as its main villain just so it could make a statement about The Patriarchy™ or something.
Mobsters purports to tell the story of how Charles "Lucky" Luciano got rid of the outdated mafia traditions in the early 1930s and established a much more democratic future for organized crime in America, but I can only describe the attitude it takes toward its heroes and villains alike as rude and dismissive. This isn't in an edgy, "deconstructionist" way, either; it tries to present its heroes as noble young revolutionaries, but what it actually does comes across almost like subtle character-bashing. It's not nearly as overt or enraging as what The Rocketeer did to Errol Flynn, but I still think turning Luciano's overthrowing the bosses into acts of petty revenge rather than pragmatism (revenge for things that never actually happened, might I add), to name one example, does the man a disservice. It's got no excuse, either; Gangster Wars did similar things with the same source material a decade earlier, but took fewer liberties and was a far more effective movie overall.
To make a satisfying cinematic experience, bearing in mind that most of the people who will be coming to see it probably know very little beyond a few broad-brush impressions about the subject matter -- especially in the case of someone like Errol Flynn or Al Capone, who are effectively known in the form of urban legends.
Al Capone is an urban legend. Errol Flynn, sad to say, is not.
I think what I'm trying to get at is that what makes a biopic good is not accuracy, but the respect with which it treats its subject. Disrespect someone like Lucky Luciano and you won't do much more than mildly annoy weirdos like me, but disrespect someone as important as Harriet Tubman and you've got me asking, "Why the fuck would you even do something like that?"
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I don't know either of those productions, but it does sound like a classic case of someone arbitrarily deciding that what the script needs is to 'personalise the conflict' (e.g. in the remake, Zorro can't just be motivated by observing manifest injustice, he has to have had his wife and child personally abducted/molested by the designated villain!) I can easily see a scriptwriters' conference deciding that Lucky Luciano would make a more relatable protagonist if we invent a few personal slights for him to avenge, as opposed to having him act against 'the system'... (remember Fatty Arbuckle saying that the average mental age of motion-picture-goers was only that of a twelve-year-old?)
'Disrespecting' gangsters is a proverbially bad idea... :-D
(As for Harriet Tubman, you're talking to someone who barely knows the difference between Harriet Tubman and Henrietta Lacks -- it depends on the target audience.)
My guess would be that most people don't know anything about Al Capone beyond a vague idea that he was a Chicago gangster who shot up a lot of people as a result of Prohibition in America (and maybe that he famously ended up getting arrested for tax evasion instead), or much about Errol Flynn beyond a general impression of someone who swung around on ropes and fought with swords, and slept with lots of women -- and maybe had a moustache ;-p
By 'urban legend' I meant that people don't know who they are, but have heard the name... much like the Phantom of the Opera, or Frankenstein's Monster.
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You're probably right.
The thing about Lucky Luciano was that he was a lot more open-minded and forward-thinking than many people of his time. He encouraged his fellow Italians to work with each other, rather than against each other, and with non-Italians. His two closest and most trusted associates were Jewish in a time when friendship and cooperation between people of different ethnicities were virtually unheard of. Essentially, he was a visionary. I respect and admire that. Take that away, and you're stripping him of perhaps the one virtue he possessed.
The difference between Harriet Tubman and Henrietta Lacks is that even elementary schoolers can probably tell you who Harriet Tubman was and what she did, whereas I doubt most adults nowadays have heard of Henrietta Lacks. :P
Even people who don't know anything about the Prohibition era have heard of Al Capone. Anyone who recognizes the name Errol Flynn probably knows at least a little bit about film history.
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In your country, possibly -- neither of them are on the curriculum over here :-D
(I happen to know about Henrietta Lacks, or at least about her cell culture, because I read the blurb of a book called "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"; when you mentioned Harriet Tubman I genuinely thought at first that was who you were talking about!)
Without looking her up, I have a vague idea that Harriet Tubman was something to do with the American 'Underground Railroad', and therefore either black or a Quaker (but probably not both). And I'm pretty well educated, and know a bit of American history.
I suspect that about as many people in England are aware of her existence as Americans are of Hannah More or Octavia Hill...
I only know that I was aware of his existence long before I started watching 'old films'; Errol Flynn as Robin Hood is, or was, one of those memes that have become part of popular culture, like the Disney classics, for people who haven't necessarily even seen the films in question and certainly wouldn't dream of watching anything else from the period. But maybe modern generations have had the 'Boys' Own adventure' ethos censored out of their existence :-(