To someone who subscribes to a principle of simplicity — say, Occam’s Razor or Razors Should Have One Damn Blade — that title might seem just dumb. I’ll try to explain it, hoping you won’t offer some feedback along the lines of “Yes, dumb.”
These three movies are ones I’ve enjoyed many times over many years. Does each one have a compelling subject? Stylish execution? Good humor and drama? Check, check, check. Is each of them also loaded with cinematic bullshit — excuse me, delusive Hollywood-ization? Oh boy, big check.
Let’s start with “The Buddy Holly Story,” the 1978 biopic for which Gary Busey deservedly received an Academy Award best lead actor nomination. This movie about the great and tragically brief career of a young 1950s rocker — later considered a proto-country rocker — is fun to watch and more fun to listen to. It spins the inspiring tale of a small-town boy who heroically overcomes small minds in Lubbock, Texas and the 1950s music industry to become a big star for a poignantly brief period ended by a plane crash.
But there’s a core problem with “The Buddy Holly Story.” Like most other Hollywood biopics, the plot involves more mendacity than biography. One bit of Hollywood-ization that first impressed and later depressed me was a scene early in the movie. Buddy had (supposedly) dared to perform a couple of his “bebop” songs at a roller rink, inspiring a crowd of giddy white kids to hand-dance on a Saturday night. Holly dutifully attends the following Sunday morning church service with his parents and girlfriend (a Barbie Doll dolt who is nothing like Buddy’s actual hometown girlfriend). In a pre-service brief sermon, the righteously irate pastor rails against “what took place in our town last night” and the “threat to our morals” posed by “jungle rhythm” music. Buddy squirms in his pew.
Does this scene fairly reflect Holly’s brave fight to survive the hostile religious, racial and musical bigotry of his benighted hometown? Uh, no. In reality, one of Holly’s most enthusiastic supporters was his pastor at Lubbock’s Tabernacle Baptist Church. After Holly became a success, he continued to donate 10% of his earnings to that church. The dramatic scene purporting to represent Lubbock’s core hostility to brave Buddy’s musical ambitions actually represented the spirit of Hollywood, not Lubbock.
That’s just the most preachy falsity of “The Buddy Holly Story.” You’ll find many others — misrepresentations of his personal and professional life — in a deconstructing article in Rolling Stone, and in the narrative of an indignant response to the film’s ersatz history, a factual documentary movie produced and narrated in 1987 by Paul McCartney.
Another movie I’ve loved, this one since 1960, is “Inherit The Wind.” Adapted from a successful Broadway play, this movie dramatizes the 1925 “Scopes monkey trial” in which Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes (the character is called Bertram Cates) is arrested for teaching Darwin’s theory on evolution to his students. The movie is a Stanley Kramer moral drama with brilliant performances by Spencer Tracy playing the character Henry Drummond, based on legendary attorney Clarence Darrow, and Frederic March playing Matthew Harrison Brady, based on divinely inspired orator and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. The courtroom drama features powerful lines, most memorably those of the Darrow character, many copied directly from actual trial transcripts. “Inherit The Wind” can be viewed (for many years, that was the only way I saw it) as a representation of scientific integrity and legal idealism fighting against religious know-nothingism.
But the movie has a deeply embedded problem: Hollywood know-nothingism. This negation of fact begins when Drummond arrives in “heavenly Hilton” (the actual town was Dayton, Tennessee) to be greeted with hostility and booing from the nasty townsfolk as he walks toward the courthouse. The high point in the festival of holy nastiness comes when the local preacher, an entirely fictionalized father of an entirely fictionalized fiancée of Cates, reduces his daughter to sobbing and rouses the rabble with a fire-and-brimstone oration condemning Cates to Hell. Brady does interrupt the family inquisition and the homegrown mob disperses, but next night the folks return to march through the streets singing, “We’ll hang Bert Cates from a sour apple tree!”
The real Scopes history is unrecognizably different. Dayton, a struggling town of 1,800 with a shrinking economy, cooked up the trial as a tourism promotion, which worked beyond its fondest expectations. When Darrow arrived in town, he was greeted like a celebrity hero. He later spoke warmly of the kind treatment he received in Dayton. John Scopes was the high school’s respected football coach, a mathematics teacher and occasional substitute teacher who was reluctantly recruited as a defendant in the case. In fact he never taught anything about evolution and suffered no ill effects from the case other than unwanted publicity. The falsifications of the script are, to use a favorite term of religious believers, legion.
When I learned of the phony dramatics behind this movie, which had moved and inspired me since I was an adolescent, I felt a bit stupid, a bit too easily deceived, as if I were denied kin of those benighted evolution deniers.
Another question: Why are Hollywood biopics so eager to invent evil pastors who never existed?
If you’re interested in a more comprehensive study of the bogus history in “Inherit The Wind,” there are several. The analysis at themonkeytrial.com is especially thorough, but you might need half an hour or more to plow through all the bogus story elements. Stipulated: A couple accurate critiques of this work do view it from a religious perspective. (As it happens, I don’t have that perspective myself, but fair is fair.)
A third movie whose backstory I was disappointed to discover is “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” It’s the inspiring story of an Irish-American family struggling as a threadbare vaudeville act in the late 19th century. Their plucky little son George M. Cohan grows up to become the celebrated writer and actor in many hit stage musicals from 1904 to 1940. Over the 77 years since its release, this movie came to be beloved by millions, including Sally Field and me.
It should be a harbinger of what’s to come that an early scene in the movie recounts baby George, future writer of many patriotic songs, being born on the Fourth of July. Actually he was a day early. (I was a day late.)
One of the movie’s many stagey anachronisms plays out in a touching scene showing a rare Cohan failure, his play “Popularity,” sinking within a day of the sinking of the Lusitania, provoking America to declare war against Germany. This co-occurence was in fact off by eleven years, or, granting artistic license, nine.
Another touching scene has Cohan writing the song “Mary’s A Grand Old Name” for his beloved lifelong wife — his only wife — then regretfully giving it to a star singer. The scripted falsehoods in this scene pattern those that enamored men often tell to women. They are multiple and complicated.
It’s easy to admire the Horatio Alger triumphalism and song-and-dance pluckiness of the movie. When Turner Classic Movies featured actress Sally Field in 2015 as a guest selecting favorite movies for their series “The Essentials,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy” was one of her selections. Following the screening of the film, Field chatted on-camera with host Robert Osborne, the expert and discerning movie historian (dec. 2017). As she excitedly began to praise a heartwarming scene in the movie, Osborne filled her in, gently as he could, on some of the many fictional elements in the movie. A dismayed Field learned, among other things, that this beloved figure of American theater was hated by most people in American theater. She sat there stunned, looking like the fortune she’d been promised in that email from Nigeria had just been snatched from her.
I tried for a month or so to find this video clip or a transcript of it, even asking Turner Classic Movies for help. TCM finally sent me a friendly note with a video of Robert Osborne and Sally Field discussing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” To my astonishment, this video was apparently a sanitized, surprise-free re-shoot of the original on-air interview (July 4, 2015, I think) when Osborne disabused Field of the movie’s extended falsification. In this apparent re-shoot, Osborne briefly, pleasantly chats up the movie with Field without burdening her with any of his knowledge of its mythology, also without Fields’ crushing disappointment. If anyone out there, maybe a TCM fanatic, has a video or transcript of the remarkable original interview, please send me a copy.
Do you have a movie you once loved, only later to feel you’d been hoodwinked by Hollywood-ization? I’d be interested to hear about it. By the way, biopics constitute most but not all of the movies that appeal to the heart yet are at heart contrivance. Some heart-warmers present a mountain of hokum beside a pebble of history. Have you seen “Field of Dreams”?