Keeping It Real
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2006

It was Alfred Hitchcock who said, “Movies are like real life with the boring parts taken out.”  This statement rings particularly true when it comes to film biographies otherwise know as biopics.

Lately, the road to Oscar, or at least a nomination, is paved with portrayals of real people. Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles; Denzel Washington as Malcolm X, and Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter; Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina (Hotel Rwanda); Will Smith as Muhammad Ali. Most recently, there is Oscar buzz surrounding Forest Whitaker for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.

While all of these men have stories deserving of a movie, a funny thing happens on the way to the multiplex. In an effort to streamline and simplify the plot, real life often undergoes some radical changes as it’s transformed into celluloid.  A group of friends or co-workers are fused into one person; people that never existed are created to further the plot; entire years are lost, people erased and facts changed to ‘heighten the drama.’  It’s understandable from an artistic perspective, but it should serve as a warning for moviegoers: things are not as they appear on screen.

Producers have even come up with a phrase for it: ‘inspired by’ true events. The life of John Nash, the real life schizophrenic scientist who overcame his debilitating mental illness to win the Nobel Prize ‘inspired’ the Academy-Award winning A Beautiful Mind.  Although the characters carried the names of the real John Nash and his family, the fact that it was merely ‘inspired by’ his life allowed producers to ignore his bisexuality, his sometimes extreme cruelty towards loved ones, and his Anti-Semitism.  The movie also conveniently omitted the mother of his first child who had to sue him for child support.

Denzel Washington was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, a boxer who was wrongly imprisoned for murder.  It is clearly a compelling story, but it’s still the victim of artistic license.  There are a number of factual inaccuracies in the film (as well as the book it was based on).  Most notably, the sinister detective portrayed in the film as framing Carter and being his nemesis since his childhood never
 existed. Also, when Carter was released in 1985, it was because of procedural errors and not because he was falsely convicted.

After I reviewed Ray, I received an interesting e-mail from the Augusta Chronicle. The purpose of the e-mail was to set me straight on a couple of facts about the real Ray Charles and his relationship with the state of Georgia.  When the movie was released, the Chronicle did an investigation on the facts presented in the film. They found that Ray Charles was never officially banned from Georgia.

An article in the Chronicle purports to tell what really happened.  "I cannot find any indication that he was banned," said Joanne Smalley, a reference archivist with the Georgia Archives who said she checked governor's files and Georgia laws for the time after the Augusta incident.  "The only thing that shows up is in 1979 when he performed Georgia on My Mind before the State Legislature."

Like Ray and Jamie Foxx several years ago, people are predicting an Oscar nomination for Forest Whitaker for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.  The film ‘inspired by’ Amin’s reign, is told from the perspective of a fictional white Scottish doctor who comes to the African nation in search of adventure.  Told through his eyes, the extreme brutality that Amin inflicted on between 300,000 and 500,000 of his own countrymen is only shown in the film’s final act.

The bottom line is that biopics are not history lessons.  Enjoy them as entertainment, see them for the fictionalized story or the performances, but don’t come away feeling as if what you have seen is ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’  It isn’t.

The good think about biopics is that they bring the real story to the forefront of the public consciousness.  Often, when a biopic is released, cable stations like A&E, Discovery, The History Channel and even network programs like Dateline and 60 Minutes will often feature segments highlighting the more factual and accurate ‘true stories’ of the movies in question.  Ironically, those fact based accounts are often more dramatic than the movies inspired by them.

When it comes to the biopic, Hitchcock got it half right.  He should have said, “Movies are like real life with the boring parts taken out and the rest revised, reorganized and reimagined.”

 

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