Wow...can you imagine, if this hypothetical film were made, just how long the thread about it here would get? 
Gene Roddenberry and The Making Of Star Trek....
- Thread starter Warped9
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That would be a major bummer and would elicit much snickering.
Yeah.
I disagree.
VEHEMENTLY.
Since I've already stated my position and I have a feeling we're about to go in circles, I'll chalk this one up to "agree to disagree".
Unless, of course, you have something else you want to add?
I think there's a pretty big distinction between what is clearly fiction (Star Trek) and what purports to have some grounding is reality (Dragon). "Based on a true story" does rather implicitly suggest some factual basis. And, sadly, lots of people do accept that what a biopic shows them actually did happen. That said, I'm not advocating for biopics to unswervingly stick to the historical record.
Except that it says "Based on a true story." It doesn't say "A true story." That's the key distinction. It makes no pretense of being anything but a derivative of actual events.
There have always been works of fiction that took liberties with the lives of real people. Shakespeare's plays are a prime example. A lot of figures from myth and legend are probably loosely based on real people. This is just how stories work. They always have and they always will.
Then that's their mistake, not the storyteller's. You can lead a person to knowledge, but you can't make them think. There are people who believe that outer space is really like the way it's shown in sci-fi, or that cars really blow up like in action movies. For any category of fiction, there are going to be people who don't know better. You can try to make your fiction plausible and informative, in hopes of minimizing that damage, but the bottom line is that fiction isn't meant to take the place of educational materials. At best, it complements them, gives people enough of a taste of reality that they'll be curious to seek out the real thing. But if they can't be bothered to make that effort, there's nothing the storyteller can do about that.
Even history is not a strictly truthful account of the past. Nobody can ever have a truly objective understanding of past events; even our own personal memories are fallible. History is a constructed narrative, a model we create to explain and interpret what we think we know about the past. Different accounts of history can and do differ from each other. So even "true" history is a subjective thing and must be approached with a critical eye. The first thing any student of history learns is never to assume that any single source is absolutely reliable. Every source needs to be questioned and balanced with other sources. No claim should be trusted unless it's backed up by multiple sources. So if it's unwise to trust even a nonfiction historical work as absolute truth, it goes without saying that a work of historical fiction should not be embraced as definitive.
History and fiction are both ways that we try to understand the past, present, and future. History has more emphasis on understanding the facts and underlying causes and processes, but fiction can be a way of trying to understand the more abstract aspects of history -- to let us imagine what it would've been like to live in the past, to think about what it might've felt like to make some critical decision, to try to get some sense of who a historical figure was beyond the surface facts. Like I said, I felt the movie Ed Wood gave me a better insight into its subject than the movie Chaplin, because while it took more factual liberties, it made its subject come alive more as a person, let me feel more that I was getting inside his head rather than just watching him do stuff. And the movie needed to take liberties with the facts in order to achieve that, to feel like a coherent narrative with understandable cause and effect. Metaphor is important. Facts are just data. Understanding is a construct.
Christopher;1070829Like I said said:
Christopher, I have genuinely enjoyed, and agreed with, all of your comments thus far. However, I feel I must pull you on this comment - you've fallen into the trap of believing you were getting inside Chaplin's head - you weren't! You were in the head of the writer that wrote those scenes and are merely viewing his (and the actor's) interpretation of what was going on in Chaplin's head!
FWIW I would love to see a dramatisation of Roddenberry's life. There is so much juicy material there!
I was going to mention Doctor Who's Adventure In Time And Space. Definitely my highlight of the 50th celebrations. A TOS TV movie in the same vein would be very welcome.
I do love the way these things re-create the old sets etc. Seeing the Hartnell era TARDIS control room recreated so perfectly in that special was absolutely amazing, as was seeing the Batcave sets and the costumes from the 1960s show recreated for the Batman special I mentioned.
That said...
... I do express some empathy towards this point-of-view too.
Invariably, the worst thing about 'biopics' is that they can't be 100% accurate and be entertaining as well, and most of the time they'll deliberately allow the odd embellishment here and there to stand, even though the facts dispute the event having really taken place that way, and biopics will do this simply because the embellished version is more 'fun' than the reality. Even the Doctor Who special mentioned above was guilty of this. The danger comes when the audience accept the chronology of events in a biopic at a face value, and in many cases that's exactly what people would do.But IMO that doesn't nullify that I'd *love* to see such a biopic happen. Just because I think, it would be fun to watch.
Christopher, I have genuinely enjoyed, and agreed with, all of your comments thus far. However, I feel I must pull you on this comment - you've fallen into the trap of believing you were getting inside Chaplin's head - you weren't! You were in the head of the writer that wrote those scenes and are merely viewing his (and the actor's) interpretation of what was going on in Chaplin's head!
Wow, you've completely missed the point of everything I've been saying. Of course I don't believe that the movie is showing me the truth. That's what I've been saying all along -- that no sensible person would be foolish enough to confuse fiction with fact. A story does not pretend to be the objective, factual truth. Its goal is to convey a set of feelings and impressions, to inspire the imagination. Of course it's all an interpretation, but interpretations can be worth listening to and thinking about, as long as one has the basic common sense to listen to them critically and be aware of the source. Listening to an idea, thinking about it, is not the same thing as blindly and unquestioningly believing it.
Everyone here who thinks that a work of fiction is trying to make people believe it's the truth is incredibly wrong. That's misunderstanding the entire purpose of fiction on a profound level. It's not about belief -- it's about the willing suspension of disbelief. It's about knowing that something is unreal but allowing yourself to pretend, for the duration of the experience, that it's real. No sane and intelligent person is going to mistake a convincing fantasy for reality, but that doesn't mean a convincing fantasy can't give you something worthwhile to think about.
I understood your point, and agreed with, everything you were saying until...
You weren't getting inside his head. You were getting inside the writer's head. And if I have misinterpreted the intent in this part of your post (it does seem to contradict the rest of your argument), I would debate that was the mistake of the writer rather than the reader. Apologies for pulling you on it.
You weren't getting inside his head. You were getting inside the writer's head. And if I have misinterpreted the intent in this part of your post (it does seem to contradict the rest of your argument), I would debate that was the mistake of the writer rather than the reader. Apologies for pulling you on it.
Christopher means well but he doesn't get it. He can't get out of his own head as a writer and see the bigger picture.
Take your typical docu-drama. "Based on a true story" makes people think "true story."
When the vast majority of the audience is misled by a work, it isn't their fault. Period. It can't be, because the artist is directing his work toward common humans, who have known characteristics he should take into account. They don't register nuance as well as he does.
Just anecdotally, in a related matter but where it kind of is the audience's fault:
In 1997, I knew a smart twenty-something girl where I worked. She came away from Titanic believing that Jack and Rose were real, historical people aboard the ship. And their highly-athletic ordeal below decks, fighting their way through flooded passageways, really happened too.
I knew a guy who swore up and down that there had never been a real Titanic, it was just a movie. I was a long-time Titanic rivet-counter who had read everything about it. This was before most of us had the Internet, so disagreements would drag on a little longer. At least the girl believed me when I set her straight.
Again: It let me feel that I was getting into his head. Of course I know I wasn't really doing so, because I am a functional adult. For the fifty millionth time, fiction is not about making people actually believe anything, because the storyteller is completely forthright about the fact that the work is fictional and expects the audience to understand what the word "fiction" means. Suspension of disbelief is not the same as belief. Allowing yourself to engage with an illusion is not the same thing as being deceived. Why can't you understand that?
And of course I would not be so stupid as to mistake Ed Wood for a documentary. As I've already stated clearly, I did seek out more factual information about the man. I did not expect the movie to be the complete story in and of itself, but seeing it made me interested in learning more about the real thing. It's because I know the nonfiction account of Ed Wood's life that I feel the movie did a good job of distilling the essence of Wood's personality and career even while fictionalizing the details. As I've said over and over, historical fiction is a complement to history, not a substitute for it. It's not pretending to represent the objective facts, but it can be a useful metaphor for thinking about the more abstract aspects of history.
And yes, of course any movie is just the filmmaker's interpretation of what's going on in another person's head, but guess what -- so is any nonfiction history book. So is any person's understanding of any other person, ever. We can't really get into anyone's head; all we can do is formulate a theory in our own minds of how we think their mind worked. A historian does that no less than a storyteller. Of course none of it, not even a "factual" history, should be blindly believed without critical analysis. But that doesn't mean it's useless.
I understood the difference between fiction and reality long before I was a writer. Any child knows that make-believe isn't real; indeed, children know that better than many adults, because too many adults stop using their imaginations and forget how to think about imaginary things.
It makes some people think that, and only because they're ignoring the "Based on." There are always going to be people who misunderstand things, but that doesn't mean we should let them ruin it for the rest of us. What exactly are you proposing? That writers should be forbidden to write historical fiction just out of fear that some people will misunderstand its intent? That's obscene and ridiculous. No matter what you write, there will always be people who misunderstand it. That's no excuse for censorship.
Writers shouldn't be asked to coddle their readers or pander to the lowest common denominator. Good stories are ones that challenge their audiences to think and question and go beyond their preexisting assumptions.
And where are you getting "the vast majority?" I refuse to believe the vast majority of the population is so stupid that they don't understand something as basic as the definition of fiction. I have more faith in people than that.
Exactly right, which is why if a true story is good enough to challenge its audience and perhaps teach it something, it should be a good enough story to pass on the truth. Not a Hollywood writer's embellishments.
If we're "basing on a true story", then we should change all the character's names.
Otherwise, I have to assume you're using real names to SELL SOMETHING.
(Sorry, I had to.)
On the flip side, I think there are several good movies "based on true stories", like Schindler's List, Ed Wood, American Sniper.
However, I know almost nothing about those people, which makes the embellishments harder to notice.
However, I know a good deal about Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali, and yes I know a bit about Gene Roddenberry, so that makes the embellishments easier to notice and distracting.
So basically you're denouncing all of Shakespeare's histories, Dumas's The Three Musketeers, I, Claudius, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and basically the majority of all human literature throughout history.
Sometimes that serves the story, sometimes it doesn't. Stories are built on symbols, as I said. Real people can be used symbolically.
Here's a recent column giving examples of comic book portrayals of sitting US presidents. Using the actual president rather than a fictional one can help create the illusion of verisimilitude. And whenever there's a war going on in real life, the same war is usually happening in the comics as well. Magneto was in a Nazi concentration camp, and Tony Stark was originally injured in Vietnam (later retconned to Afghanistan). Of course no one is expected to believe that stories about superheroes take place in the real world, but using real people and events is helpful at creating the illusion of reality, and that can enhance the experience. Again, it's not about belief, it's about the willing suspension of disbelief.
Of course you are -- to sell an illusion. The illusion of reality can enhance a story, but of course it's still just a story.
Good grief, even if you change all the character names, stories are still set in familiar cities like Washington or London or Paris or Los Angeles. Even stories set in fictional cities reference real things.
But that doesn't mean anyone's trying to lie to you, because it doesn't claim to be anything other than fiction. There's no narrator talking over source photos, no interviews with real people -- there are actors standing on sets and playing roles. Why would you expect that to be anything other than a fictionalized account?
To support Christopher in a point I would have thought too obvious to need defending: remember Apollo 13? Great movie, you should go see it. Remember there's this scene where Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell is doing some calculations, right after the Service Module explodes and the Lunar Module is being warmed up to serve as lifeboat, and he admits that he's not too sure about his arithmetic and asks the guys on the ground to double-check his work? And a row of guys working slide rules re-do the work and confirm he got it right? Great scene and even drawn from real life: Lovell did ask for a double-check of his arithmetic.
Here's the thing, though: the calculation Lovell was doing there was not one you'd use slide rules for. It was some relative-angle-difference work, all done by addition and subtraction, and while you technically can use a slide rule for that, it's daft to. Nobody would except as a stunt, and would never use it for work that actually mattered.
So is the scene a lie?
Well, it's not a lie that Lovell needed to do these calculations and asked for a double-check. And it's not a lie that a stunningly large portion of the calculations done for Apollo program work were done with mechanical devices like slide rules.
It is amazing that work good enough for the task of going to the Moon and back can be done on slide rules; showing that, first of all, respects the work done by techniques we'd now regard as hopelessly primitive. We should see amazing things in a movie about (the attempt at) going to the Moon. And it is part of the culture in which the people who flew the actual Apollo 13 lived that they were doing a lot of critical calculations with slide rule and logarithm table and paper. It would leave out an important part of the culture in which they lived not to show it.
But it would be a dramatically poor choice to include a scene of some calculations being done if it failed to advance the story, if the audience has no reason to see the scene other than ``well, it happened, so we have to show it''. Thus the little fib: a scene of clear dramatic importance --- the rush of work done to get the Lunar Module up and ready for operations as a lifeboat, something the audience can understand needing to be done, with obvious stakes if it's done wrong --- includes a bit of work that wasn't done that way, so that the audience can also see what life was generally like.
The slide rules in that scene are a lie that tells a truth. In turning reality into a story there must be times one lies to tell truth; that is what makes a story based on true events hard.
How much fidelity to truth I expect in a biopic varies depending on the subject and what the filmmakers assert about how close to the truth the film is.
If the filmmakers put up a caption that implies that what happens is true and a major event is made up out of whole cloth, then I'm going to give the film major demerits for that.
Even in the absence of any caption, there are certain things you just can't get wrong and get a pass. A biopic of Eleanor Roosevelt that has FDR celebrating V-J Day would be an example there. There's simply no narrative of history that I'm remotely interested in, in which that occurs.
On the other hand, there are great films that are biographical but that lack fidelity to the truth. Patton is a pretty good example. It's wrong in many details, and it doesn't paint an accurate view of history, but it's a great film and I love it.
So, when it comes to biopics I'm more than open to skewed narratives when there's a dramatic point or a point-of-view and to other deviations from actual history, but there are limits to what I'm willing to put up with just the same. As long as the filmmakers strike a balance that's right for me, I haven't got a problem.
If the filmmakers put up a caption that implies that what happens is true and a major event is made up out of whole cloth, then I'm going to give the film major demerits for that.
Even in the absence of any caption, there are certain things you just can't get wrong and get a pass. A biopic of Eleanor Roosevelt that has FDR celebrating V-J Day would be an example there. There's simply no narrative of history that I'm remotely interested in, in which that occurs.
On the other hand, there are great films that are biographical but that lack fidelity to the truth. Patton is a pretty good example. It's wrong in many details, and it doesn't paint an accurate view of history, but it's a great film and I love it.
So, when it comes to biopics I'm more than open to skewed narratives when there's a dramatic point or a point-of-view and to other deviations from actual history, but there are limits to what I'm willing to put up with just the same. As long as the filmmakers strike a balance that's right for me, I haven't got a problem.
A fictionalized account of historical events is pretty much standard fare in filmmaking, and always has been. There's no way to tell someone's entire life story in two hours without fudging some facts, rearranging things, or adding events that didn't really happen, to keep the story moving. Some characters might have never existed, some might be composites of two or more people, and obviously most dialog is made up.
It's all about the drama.
"Based on a true story" means exactly what it says, that not necessarily everything onscreen actually happened.
If I want "historical documents" I'll watch Galaxy Quest.
It's all about the drama.
"Based on a true story" means exactly what it says, that not necessarily everything onscreen actually happened.
If I want "historical documents" I'll watch Galaxy Quest.
Thanks for the lecture. You must have missed the part where I said I understand and agree with everything you were trying to say. You also appear to be attributing those latter quotes to me - I did not say those things.
Remind me never to read any of your books lest I misinterpret what you wish to preach to your audience.
I don't know if anybody's ever actually tried.
Would be a nice change!
That's all a lot of us in this thread are saying, I think.
Sadly, the Quote function here sometimes malfunctions. In my attempt to quote the full message above, note that one of the nested quotes ("Based on a true story" makes people think "true story.") simply failed to show up in the edit window or in my post. Grrrr....
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