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Re: History and the Movies



From: Andrea Leigh [mailto:aleigh@LIBRARY.UCLA.EDU]

>...Is it really that the movie industry *ignores* advice or is it more
>that in being a collaborative artform, other aspects weigh in? ...

That certainly is the case.  In dramaturgy and fiction writing, it is
emphasized again and again that the characters, while they need to be made
believable as human beings, are in the final analysis representations of
attitudes, emotions or ideas, and the drama is the interplay of those
attitudes.  The details of those characters, therefore, may have to be
modified to serve the core ideas and movement of the drama; historical
details about real characters may have to be altered if they distract from
the dramatic movement.  This is why it's probably better if the characters
are explicitly not historical -- as in "Inherit the Wind," where characters
clearly representing Darrow, Bryan and Mencken are given fictional names,
roman-a-clef style, so that they no longer represent those individuals but
rather the factions they stand for.

On the other hand, sometimes the creators DO take advice.  Last year, a
regular client was doing the sets for a TV movie involving illegal
immigrants and asked for pictures of Thai refugees.  After some unsuccessful
digging, I was able to show her that Thailand (while not exactly paradise)
is generally a country people flee TO, not FROM -- we could show Burmese and
Cambodian refugees in camps in Thailand, but not Thai refugees in some other
country.  She went back to the writers and they actually changed the script
to reflect reality.

Misha Schutt
Warner Research Collection
Burbank Public Library

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