HOLLYWOOD VERSUS REALITY: Good essay by Ellen Goodman, comparing Hollywood’s mangling of history with the outcry over Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s alleged plagiarism:
For Goodwin, sloppiness is cast as a career breaker. For Howard, a deliberate distortion of biography is a career maker. In one academy, a bad mistake is a capital cause; in the other Academy, editing and rewriting truth into falsehood is “just a movie.”
What an odd, upside down, unbalanced sense of what’s right and wrong and important. It reminds me of how John Nash–the real John Nash–described his return to reality: “I became disillusioned with some of the delusions.”
This is the award-winning message: In Hollywood, the moviemaker was smeared with the truth. And won anyway.
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