A few months back I finally got around to seeing “Hollywoodland”, a sort of biopic from 2006 about George Reeves, who starred in the Superman TV show in the 1950s. Ben Affleck is excellent in the lead role, and the movie is quite stylish and entertaining.<\/p>\n
However, even a cursory investigation reveals that some of the most important points of the film are simply made up — they make for good movie making, but they never actually happened. The net effect is that we are given a fictional version of George Reeves, which is presented as fact.<\/p>\n
Is it really ok for a movie to do something like this? To me, it all comes down to the implied contract with the audience. In a film like “Being John Malkovich”, writer Charlie Kaufman never expects us to believe that we are seeing the actual John Malkovich.<\/p>\n
Rather, we are being shown a deeply fictional version of the man. In a clever ironic twist, this make-believe John Malkovich is played by the real one. Because we are in on the joke, no implied contract has been violated.<\/p>\n
But sometimes the contract is not so clear. Oliver Stone’s “JFK” manages to replace any plausible reality about the assassination of our 35th president with some sort of whacked out gay conspiracy.<\/p>\n
Do the makers of a Hollywood film that purports to reveal truth have any obligation to actual truth? Or is this a case of caveat emptor<\/I>? Maybe the audience is simply supposed to know, despite all signifiers to the contrary, that “It’s only a movie.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few months back I finally got around to seeing “Hollywoodland”, a sort of biopic from 2006 about George Reeves, who starred in the Superman TV show in the 1950s. Ben Affleck is excellent in the lead role, and the movie is quite stylish and entertaining. However, even a cursory investigation reveals that some of … Continue reading “Hollywoodland”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13889"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13889"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13900,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13889\/revisions\/13900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}