In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

154 11. Print the Legend? When challenged about the veracity of an incident in one of his films, the director John Ford is reputed to have said something like, “When it’s fact against legend, print the legend.” If questioned about truth and fiction in docudrama today, one suspects he would also have said, “To hell with the truth, go for the drama.” Can drama and reality make a happy marriage? Well, as Hamlet might have said, if he’d been around today, that’s the $64,000 question. While docudrama is tremendously popular, it has also drawn in the wrath of a number of critics. Thus Jerry Kuehl, one of the most serious opponents of the form, wrote this for the English magazine Vision. Most docudramas are produced with little regard for historical truth, or psychological plausibility, but with every regard for pecuniary advantage. To see the names of real people with public reputations attached to characters drawn from the stockpile of drama stereotypes . . . is enough to alert the viewer that he or she is in the presence of a program which intends to exploit but not satisfy an audience’s curiosity. At the end of season 1 of TV’s popular series Mad Men, the boss of the advertising firm hears a devastating revelation about Don Draper. His reaction is, Who cares? Similarly, we might ask, Should we take Kuehl’s remarks seriously? I personally believe it is useful for the writer to listen to the critics, so that he or she knows what troubles serious thinkers about docudrama or its execution. truth Or FictiOn Writing docudrama, as I’ve said, is like boxing with one hand tied behind your back, and the rope that binds you is called “truth.” To reach the rewards , you have to be prepared to live dangerously, and at every step you have to recall the sign over the entrance to the minefield: “Watch the facts.” The key problem for docudrama lies in its relationship to truth and to audience expectation. Can imaginative drama really exist when its hands are shackled by the bonds of accuracy? Not everyone believes historical veracity Print the Legend? 155 and truth are necessarily the most important guidelines to the form. Thus, Nigel Andrews, an English newspaper critic, argues very persuasively for exactly the opposite view. If cinema cannot play fast and loose with history should it bother to play with it at all? . . . Look at the strength freedom with truth gave to some truth based films: Bugsy, The Long Day Closes, and Swoon. Though none “lied,” all pushed, pounded, and poeticized the facts till they turned to art. . . . Fidelity, whether to biographical truth or literary text, is a pedant’s virtue. Along with Andrews, most of the writers I spoke to in preparing this book also argued that truth was just the beginning. They acknowledged its force but, when push came to shove, argued that they were dramatists before they were reporters. the key QuestiOns Though the blurring of fact and fiction in dramadocs is a favorite topic of discussion among academics, I think there are only three issues at the heart of the matter that should trouble the writer: Accuracy Authorship and attitude Audience, and social responsibility Accuracy You need to resolve for yourself from the start what level of authenticity and accuracy you are offering in regard to dialogue, characters, and events. I’ve discussed dialogue elsewhere, but the issue is fairly simple. Where feasible, and when it is sufficiently dramatic, you try to retain authentic dialogue . Where that’s not possible, and that’s probably 90 percent of the time, you’ll go on to create your own. As far as invented dialogue, not only does it have to be entertaining and compelling, but it should also be in keeping with the character being portrayed. Thus, the dialogue for McKellar, in Public Enemies, is invented but very close to what the congressman might have said. Where you use real-life characters, you tend to aim for accuracy every time. Habits. Personality. Motivation. Traits. Modes of thought. Actions. All these things you usually want to make as close to the truth as possible. You will also invent composite characters, or necessary characters. Sometimes , they will be based on real people, like Margaret Thatcher’s hallucinatory husband in The Iron Lady, or the invented friend who accompanies the hero on his journey in Malcolm X. On rare occasions, as in Skokie, the invented person may even...

Share