I wish Hollywood would stop making movies about things that actually happened.
For one thing, the screenwriters are incapable of telling the truth without embellishing it in some bizarre way.
Take Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” for instance. The climax of the movie is Congress voting to pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. The vote opens with Connecticut voting not to pass the amendment, which is a terrible slander on a free state. When questioned, the writer said it added to the drama.
Sports movies are the worst, often taking stories that would stand up very well on their own and adding silliness to them. In “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” a movie about the 1913 U.S. Open golf tournament, the longshot player wins against an all-time great by sinking a putt on the last hole of an 18-hole playoff. Actually, he won the playoff by five strokes.
In “42,” the story of Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers win the pennant when Robinson hits a game-winning home run against a vicious racist. Great, huh? Except it never happened. Brooklyn clinched the pennant on an off-day when the team chasing them lost.
In “The Pride of the Yankees,” the story of Lou Gehrig, it is at least implied that Gehrig met his wife Eleanor during his rookie season in 1925 on a trip to Chicago. They actually met in 1932 after he had been a star player for years. One thing omitted completely from the story is that Gehrig’s mother traveled with the team for many years.
Worst of all is “Remember the Titans.” which took a story that had nothing to do with racism and turned it into a story about race. Disney made Alexandria, Va., a close-in suburb of Washington, D.C., look like rural Alabama. Other schools hated playing against the Titans, but it was because Alexandria combined its three high schools — all of which were already integrated — into one super school for sports.
The climax of the movie has a white player lateraling to a black player for the winning touchdown in the state finals. Cute, but in the real world, the Titans won that game, 35-0.
Most dishonest sports movie I ever saw. To equal it, “Rudy” would have had to win the Heisman Trophy.
One “based on a true story” movie I really liked was “Hoosiers,” the story of a tiny Indiana high school that won the state championship in 1952. Very nice, but even “Hoosiers” hoked it up a little. Hickory High was based on the Milan Indians, who won in 1954. But there were several things about Milan that made the truth a little less dramatic.
In the movie, Hickory was a school of 64 students that beat a school of 2,800.
In real life, Milan had 164 students and beat a team with 1,600.
In real life, it wasn’t a big surprise that Milan was a good team. In 1953, the Indians reached the state semifinals and had all their players back the next year. When they reached the finals, it was with a record of 19-2.
Still a heck of a story, but not so much David and Goliath. The movie team had only seven boys on the team. Milan had 58 boys try out and had a full roster of 12 players.
Probably less dishonest than any of the earlier movies I mentioned, but still sort of hokey.
That’s entertainment.