As we continue to examine examples of adaptation beyond literary fiction, we turn to a cinematic representation of actual events. In addition to novels and short stories, filmmakers have long relied on recent or ancient history for their film content. These films might pay tribute to the lives of extraordinary historical figures, or expose some political or historical injustice, or chronicle a significant event. Filmmakers can portray events and people from the distant past, or they can bring contemporary stories to life to draw attention to the social issues they illustrate. This invites a key question: what responsibility do filmmakers have to tell stories about real life people and events with a high degree of accuracy?
NON FICTION AND FILM
The Coen Brothers’ 1996 film Fargo tells the true story of a particularly notorious crime that took place in the American Midwest in the 1980s. It begins with this title card, which informs the audience of its authenticity.
Fargo is about a car salesman named Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) who, for murky reasons having to do with personal debts, hires a pair of menacing kidnappers (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife so that his wealthy father-in-law will pay the ransom. After the kidnappers are involved in a homicide that leaves a state trooper and witnesses dead, Minnesota police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) begins her search for the murderers. The facts and the growing pile of dead bodies eventually lead her to Lundegaard and the kidnappers; she apprehends one of the crooks while he is disposing of his partner’s body in a woodchipper. The entire story is dark, funny, and has a stranger-than-fiction quality that only real life can possess. If you watch through the credits, however, you see this familiar notice:
Huh? “No similarity to persons living or dead?” But the film said this was based on a true story in the opening moments. The opening title card’s indication that the film was inspired by true events is a fake-out. It is a parody of the kinds of title cards that appear at the beginnings of films based on non-fiction sources, a custom common even in Classic Hollywood films during the studio period. The inclusion of this card—the first thing we see—warps our sense of what the film is about. It convinces us from its opening moments that we have no choice but to consider the absurdity of the story in light of its realistic aspects. It could not possibly be true, the film says, but it is. Except—it isn’t.
Most films based on non-fiction sources are not being quite so playful in their adaptations. The Coen Brothers are playing a joke with the opening title card of Fargo, but most films that begin with similar title cards really mean what they say. The inclusion of a “based on true events” card at the start of the film is an appeal to authenticity, a demand that you, as an audience, think about the real people and real events as you watch. I have included a pair below from Mark Sandrich’s So Proudly We Hail! (1943), a combat film about army nurses, and a plain back title card from Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon (2016), about the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Many film adaptations of non-fiction sources are designed to pay tribute to those people or bear witness to those events. However, films based on real people and real events run into the same problems of adaptation that fictional adaptations do, if not more so. They are subject to the same demands on filmmaking: narrative efficiency, the need for dramatic escalation, the compression of characters, the limitations of budget, the inability to access historical details, and so on. In addition, the film may be affected by the expectations of the people who actually lived through the events, who may have been consulted about the story and given their approval to the project. In this case, how likely is it that the film will present a critical viewpoint of those people when their involvement was essential to the production in the first place?
Many films based on non-fiction sources fall into a specific kind of film genre, often called the ‘biopic.’ The ‘bio-’ should be fairly obvious: films that purport to be biographies of the subjects they portray. According to Carolyn Anderson and John Lupo, “‘Biopic’ is a term more often used by film critics and historians than in marketing campaigns, among moviegoers or as a shelving device at rental stores. Still, the literary construct biography is understood so widely that the term biopic is easily recognizable.” Biopics can function as cinematic versions of written biographies; as written biographies claim definitive status—this is the life of this subject in its entirety—biopics make similar claims to the majority of their audiences. Films like this have long been, and remain, quite common, especially in American cinema, which has always been fascinated by important historical figures. They range from films like John Ford’s 1939 movie Young Mr. Lincoln, which stars Henry Fonda as the 16th President; however, Ford limits the scope of the movie, focusing entirely on Lincoln’s work as a lawyer in Illinois before he entered politics. Steven Spielberg’s biopic Lincoln (2012), starring Daniel Day-Lewis, by contrast, focuses on another period in his life, covering the intense negotiations as the president tries to secure the votes for passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery before the end of the Civil War. It covers the fight for the amendment through depiction of his efforts to persuade members of Congress to vote for it, and concludes with his assassination. Both films take a limited approach which demonstrates the degree to which adapting works of non-fiction or history forces concision. No one film could reasonably do justice to Lincoln’s entire life, and so both Ford and Spielberg, working nearly eighty years apart, elect to narrow their focus; tellingly, however, both films use the subject’s name in the title, with Spielberg’s even using just his last name in the fashion of many biopics that actually do attempt to cover a subject’s life from birth to death.
The images from the two adaptations demonstrate one of the conventions of biopics and other films based on non-fictional sources, which is to change the appearance of the actor to approximate the look of the historical figure he or she is playing. Taking this approach inspires audience confidence in the film’s accuracy; he sure looks like Lincoln, goes the idea. Day-Lewis’s portrayal even carries vocal echoes of Fonda’s—taken together, the two voices form a cinematic impression of what Lincoln’s voice might have sounded like, even though he was assassinated well before recording technology was invented to capture it. Because the character looks and sounds like the real person, the film approaches some degree of authenticity that encourages audiences to look at what is presented and suppress the other, less comfortable aspects of adaptation. Historical films like Ford’s and Spielberg’s have necessarily made changes to the historical record, compressed events, combined characters, and have relied on dramatic license to put dialogue in the mouths of real-life figures who may never have said those words. Such film adaptations treat their source material in much the same way that many filmmakers regard novels that they bring to the screen—take what you want and leave the rest.
In the context of history and real life, however, this raises interesting ethical questions. When adapting a work of fiction, filmmakers have only the author and some of the novel’s loyal readers to worry about offending; the characters are fictional, the situations imaginary, and the story little more than that—a story. But, adapting non-fiction seemingly requires more overt fidelity to the source material because real people with real reputations are involved. Events happened the way they actually happened, and it is inaccurate to portray them otherwise. However, there are the ever-present demands of film storytelling to consider. According to Steve Neale, “Hollywood modeled the lives it depicted according to dramatic, generic, and fictional formulae which it also used and applied to its fictions.” In other words, for most of the history of American cinema, filmmakers have made little distinction between the non-fictional and the fictional as they developed their projects; above all, source material must conform to the conventions of cinematic storytelling.
Director David Fincher’s 2010 drama The Social Network, about the founding and ensuing legal battle over the intellectual property rights to Facebook, offers a useful contemporary example of a film’s tenuous attachment to the truth. Working from a script by writer Aaron Sorkin, who is known for his hyper-verbose characters who speak in fast, intellectually stimulating dialogue, the film’s portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (played in the film by Jesse Eisenberg) contrasts mightily with the real person who appears in interviews and before Congress to testify. In real life, Zuckerberg is often halting and seems unsure of himself. Watch the YouTube clip below of Zuckerberg in 2004, appearing on television around the time of the events covered in the film.
In the clip, the real Zuckerberg seems like a kid—which he was. He uses verbal crutches like ‘you know’ and ‘um’ to lubricate the transitions between his thoughts. His description of what Facebook can be sounds naïve: we want to “hopefully make something cool,” he says. Above all, he seems eager to please the news anchors who are asking him questions.
Watch the commentary at right on Fincher’s film version of Zuckerberg in The Social Network, who is quite different, especially when his mouth is full of Sorkin’s rapid fire dialogue. Pay close attention to the ways in which Sorkin’s language and Eisenberg’s performance create an alternative version of Zuckerberg that little resembles the shy, naïve kid in the news clip above.
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Though many films rely on non-fiction sources for their material, the demands of film storytelling often get in the way of a truly faithful rendering of the real people and real events. In The Social Network, Zuckerberg becomes a compelling character because of his brilliance and his contempt for others, which ultimately leaves him isolated, refreshing his own website in a law office’s conference room—he is a victim of the very thing he has created. Fincher, Sorkin, and Eisenberg take liberties with their portrayal of Zuckerberg, but in doing so, make him into an unrepentant narcissist consumed by others’ opinions of him. A more fitting finale to the story of a man who founded Facebook I can scarcely imagine.
Clip Quiz - Non-fiction
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946, Ford)
The ending of My Darling Clementine, which dramatizes the shootout at the OK Corral, differs substantially from the historical record. Do some research about what actually happened there, and explain how this ending deviates from that. And crucially, answer this question: is it okay to take such creative liberties with the historical facts? |
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HOUR OF THE GUN (1967, Sturges)
In Hour of the Gun, director John Sturges restaged the OK Corral shootout he had previously dramatized in Gunfight at the OK Corral. How does he do it differently this time? What does he keep and what does he change? Why do you think he did it again? |
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DOC (1971, Perry)
This version of the OK Corral shootout from Doc (Holliday is the main character, not Wyatt Earp), is very different from the others. What is the mood of this final sequence? Why is it so different? |
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TOMBSTONE (1993, Cosmatos)
What are the dominant images of this version of the OK Corral shootout from Tombstone? |
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WYATT EARP (1994, Kasdan)
What is the most important idea in this OK Corral shootout from Wyatt Earp? How does the sequence emphasize that idea? |
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Fact and Fiction - Gunfight at the ok corral
For about a twenty-five year period in Hollywood, Westerns were the most popular and frequently made kind of film. Westerns are rooted in a certain vision of American mythology, serving as a kind of origin story for a very specific set of ideals that form the American character—self-reliance, violence as a tool for settling disputes, the temptations of wealth, the aspiration to empire, the weaving of a social fabric, the primacy of the individual, and more.
The Old West is itself a mythic creation, having largely been an invention of fiction writers and dime novel specialists, and, eventually, Hollywood filmmakers. The Western is the most mythic of genres, with its archetypal characters and easily recognizable iconography. Despite the Western itself having slipped into steep decline, its story conventions are all still deeply embedded in American culture and instantly readable wherever they appear. The images below, taken from classic Westerns, are easy to understand even divorced from their narrative context:
One of the Old West’s most enduring myths is the gunfight that took place at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, on Wednesday, October 26th, 1881. The participants are probably familiar to you: Wyatt Earp and his brothers Virgil and Morgan, as well as their friend Doc Holliday, who suffered from tuberculosis, were on one side of the fight; on the other, cattle rustlers and thieves Ike and Billy Clanton, along with some of their compatriots.
So what actually happened? Who shot who? How did it start? Who was the aggressor? Well, no one really knows. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts differ, which has perhaps led to the enshrinement of the gunfight at the OK Corral into the most mythological of all Old West gunfights. It can mean basically whatever we want it to mean.
This is especially clear when the OK Corral shootout is considered in light of the many times it has been brought to the screen. In John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) is a reluctant Western hero, who doesn’t want to use violence, but is forced to because the Clanton gang has killed two of his brothers. During the shootout, Wyatt kills several Clantons, and his friend Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) is shot to death—this is not how the historical Doc Holliday died. In fact, he lived six more years, finally succumbing to the tuberculosis that afflicted him for much of his adult life.
In Clementine, Wyatt is a hero who makes the town of Tombstone safe for progress; with the Clantons out of the way, the town is well-suited for the construction of a church, which is being built as Wyatt and his last surviving brother Morgan (Ward Bond) ride out of town. In the post-World War II period, this kind of optimism—foes vanquished, the world safe for democracy—made a lot of sense.
By 1971, however, in the middle of the Vietnam War era, following the assassinations of several high profile public thought leaders and politicians, the mood in the United States was far more pessimistic. Another take on the OK Corral story, Doc, directed by Frank Perry, centers the tubercular Holliday as the protagonist, played by Stacy Keach. In its version of events, Wyatt Earp (Harris Yulin) is a brutal authoritarian who uses his badge to gain wealth and power for himself. He is far from the noble hero of the 1940s, but instead acts as one of the New Hollywood period’s echoes of President Richard Nixon, who, when Doc was released, was just three years away from resigning in disgrace after his corrupt behavior was exposed by journalists and congressional committees. Doc’s vision of Wyatt Earp is much more cynical and dark. In this film’s OK Corral sequence, Wyatt and his brothers, along with Holliday, gun down the Clantons in cold blood—it’s a police execution, not a gunfight.
Few films demonstrate the fluidity of interpretation in adaptation than two competing Wyatt Earp/OK Corral projects released within a year of each other in the early 1990s: Tombstone (1993, Cosmatos), and Wyatt Earp (1994, Kasdan). Each of the OK Corral sequences, not to mention the interpretations of Wyatt and Doc as characters, are quite different, subject to their own filmmakers’ particular ideas. You can see them below--Tombstone above, Wyatt Earp on the bottom.
Right in between all of these Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday/OK Corral adaptations is 1957’s Gunfight at the OK Corral, directed by John Sturges from a screenplay by Leon Uris. In this particular film, the OK Corral is once again treated with a fair degree of historical inaccuracy. While Tombstone and Wyatt Earp feature the shootout somewhere in the middle of the narrative action, Gunfight at the OK Corral saves it for the end; it builds inexorably to the battle, as the title and the film’s theme song, which returns periodically throughout the narrative, would suggest. It is the most important event in the film, and, it implies, in the lives of the Earps and Holliday.
In its characterizations of the major players, Gunfight at the OK Corral is similarly even-tempered—it doesn’t offer the quiet nobility of Wyatt in Ford’s Clementine, but he is neither the cynical fascist who appears in Perry’s Doc. Its year of release, 1957, is basically halfway between those two films, and it shows in its treatment of Wyatt. As played by Burt Lancaster, he’s mostly a good man, but he has his own ambitions, as seen in the scene where Wyatt and his brothers look at a map and plan their takeover of cattle country in and around Tombstone.
As portrayed by Kirk Douglas, Doc Holliday is a volatile drunk, but certainly capable of tremendous charm. He’s a fatalist, convinced that he’ll die someday, a fate which is largely out of his control. While Lancaster’s Wyatt plans for a future, Holliday disregards his own. It makes him reckless, but also brave. He’s a criminal, but he’s got plenty of nobility in him.
Lancaster and Douglas made many movies together playing several different kinds of roles, but Gunfight at the OK Corral makes the most of their off-screen friendship. No doubt the two men were rivals as actors, each wanting to give great performances and not be upstaged by the other. That kind of competitiveness lends an uneasiness to their friendship that doubly informs the historical connection between their versions of Wyatt and Doc. Because Lancaster and Douglas knew each other so well off camera, they have an easy familiarity in front of it.
Historical events are always contested and subject to debate. Films made from those historical events are no different. We might say that directors working from historical events bear a responsibility to portray those events as they happened, but any cinematic exercise requires invention. In addition, their films are in many ways no different from books written about history; they argue for a particular interpretation of what happened and why it was important. All historical reflection advances an argument about what history means; film is no different.