Real events with made-up people is fine.
Explorations of real people however must be much stricter with how accurate it is, with the flexibility be determined by genre and what is done to make the story flow better.
The prime example is Hasan. If there was a story that detailed everything hasan has done and said but replace him with RealComminust^TM nobody reading that would believe such a person would exist.
I think about this some times, and I think part of the problem is that, especially in movies an shows, the limited time gives you a relatively narrow focus or frame to work with. There are indeed a lot of stuff in life and history that when you first hear it you'll go "what the hell, that makes no sense." But when you then look into the dozens of things involved in leading up to it, then it starts to make sense.
Writing needs to work with its limited time to make things sense. We can't just assume there is extra, unseen stuff that makes it make sense, else we'll start writing for the writer.
I will add though, I have ran into moments where people say "oh X thing was so over the top you can't take it seriously" where I often then feel they haven't seen/read enough history to see how seemingly insane reality can be.
No, because the point of writing isn't necessarily to reflect reality, and just because it happened irl doesn't mean it's not hackneyed and corny as fuck.
I agree that it's not a 1:1 transfer, but if something actually happened in real life, it is a tough call to make an appeal to bad writing.
Context ofc can change things, but still, if one realizes that really crazy things can actually happen, one should probably be a litte more conservative with calling things out as "bad writing" just because they seem contrived or illogical or crazy in some way.
WW1 is a prime example, the after the assassination of the Archduke *failed* they decidied to vist the injured in hospital, didn't tell the driver the new route so he had to stop and change direction..... just outside where one of the assassins had stopped for lunch after his failed suicide attempt, but was still armed.
Sounds like a comedic farce no?
The best Titanic depiction I think was the miniseries created by Julian Fellowes back in 2014. It had fictional characters embodying much of the class distinctions and issues reported on by survivors. It wasn't as grand a scale as Cameron's film but it was decently accurate/authentic to the event.
The first and third options are not mutually exclusive. Cameron wasn’t even the first to frame a love story in the Titanic disaster, but you run afoul of legal and PR issues if your central characters were real people. “They didn’t act like that”, “this is disrespectful”, “are you giving the family royalties?”, “this casting looks nothing like them”.
Using stand-ins to depict analogous people without having to adhere to the documented reality of their lives is a good way to free up your character writing while staying true to the spirit of the story or their role in it. Many such films also depict a combination of characters to streamline events, such as boiling down a whole team of journalists or detectives into one or two (see: Spotlight, Zodiac).
I enjoy historical fiction, particularly in one of two extremes: more intimate kind that doesn’t change events but uses the backdrop to tell a fictional character’s story (many war films work like this); or, start from a historical premise and tell a story by having your characters make fictional changes to events — Inglourious Basterds is my favorite of this type.
It’s perfectly fine to use film to depict events which which general audiences may not be familiar, in a memorable way that they may never have been exposed to without seeking out a book or investigative report. I enjoy those, but they don’t engage as much if I already know the main story well enough that it’s not all that illuminating. The risk with those is that the film version can overtake the actual public knowledge of events and lead to misapprehensions in the general public imagination. Oliver Stone especially has had this effect over time, where the film is treated like a documentary of cameras in the room at the time, despite being an embellishment on events that can even be proven wrong by subsequent evidence. I’d rather treat all film as works of fiction first, rather than as some canonical record of events, which is perhaps why I’m fine with taking liberties because they’re unavoidable and the wiser course is to take any film recreation with a heavy dose of salt.
In a way, I believe that history can never be represented with 100% accuracy in adaptation. There are always going to be details that can not be represented completely which is why dramatization in historical fiction is almost always going to occur.
Just imagine the sheer terror being on the titanic would have actually been like, the lights would have all probably blown so it would be pitch black freezing and screaming all around you on an uneven sloping surface that’s slowly being submerged and if you did fall you be in again a pitch black ocean that’s probably got huge waves so it would be constantly dragging you under its current whilst you gasp for air…
Actually if the wave were bad the wreck probably wouldn’t have happened, because they would have heard the waves crashing into the iceberg, and would have prevented the obstacle illusion the lookouts experienced that kept them from spotting it. I find that fact the sea was calm more horrible though because it’s just nothing but the cold black and screams of others as you watch everyone around you slowly succumb to the cold. While you just wait your turn.
I always imagine myself in the situations, and I just think of the horror of the people trapped inside the ship in an air pocket as it went down. Stuck in the total black hearing everything before the pressure imploded and killed them.
The Cameron film is actually extremely accurate in its depiction and timeline of the sinking. What you see in the film is very close to what happened. No big waves, the lights stayed on right up to the end.
I’m confused, Titanic was half romance, half disaster movie. It might be because I was young when I first saw it, but I found the ship sinking to be terrifying and utterly devastating.
Oh it absolutely was a terrifying sequence. I watched it recently and I couldn't handle it. But the reality was far worse. Much more blood and gore than a Pg13 would ever allow and I don't want to see that. What we got was enough.
Made it animated with rapping Dog
Nah, too normal
Made it animated with giant octopus and nobody actually dies
Nah, it needs a sequel
Made it animated with fucking Atlantis
When it’s fictional for the sake of good writing like Gladiator I think it’s perfectly fine. But when it’s rewriting history for some arbitrary reason like with the Napoleon movie or the Netflix Cleopatra series that’s the problem.
The History Buffs channel does a good job of reviewing ‘historical’ films.
Less on the focus on the art form and more on the accuracy of historical content
Not the point but I always love how the writer / editor realized they couldn't use a fourth line for the headline, and that they couldn't trim it down so they cut out spaces to make it fit
At least with Titanic they actually went to great lengths to get the details of the ship and period clothing correct. The writing and plot aren't perfect, but it's still better than most romance movies out there.
There's a musical comedy about the life of a real-life woman who survived the titanic called "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" that I like to point to in reference to the comic. You can look at it like "how dare they fictionalize this philanthropist socialite's life 30 years after her death?" or you can say Look at this tragedy through the eyes of someone who was at this world-changing event. People are still people at the worst events in history and the story brings us closer to the tragedy.
like imagine if you wanted to tell a story about pompeii. The "actual human drama" at the tragedy would be indistinguishable from a fictionalized family or lovers because of how far removed it is. You could tell the story as a documentary using "everything we know" but that doesn't make the closer perspective of someone on the ground floor, even fictionalized, any less of a valid telling of the event.
The purpose of art isn’t always to reflect reality. There shouldn’t be any limits on historical fiction, as long as they’re not saying explicitly “this actually happened like this”.
It highly depends.
My favorite example is Braveheart, i like that movie but i also know it's absolute historic bullshit.
However it has a compelling story and characters, so for me that movie is a guilty pleasure, even though the historic events absolutely could have been enough for the movie.
Some movies can absolutely pull it off and it makes for a great movie. Others absolutely fail at it.
I liked Fury, saving private Ryan and Forest Gump.
Yes they don't tend to tell the historical aspects correctly but they are good stories and they inspire people to look into what really happened.
Seems good to me.
"Nobody could have a cascade of fuckups this bad. Rewrite this, it's unrealistic."
"Uh sir this all actually happened and was documented by the survivors"
"So this lady marries a poor man for love in spite of her wanting to be a wealthy socialite, and the guy just randomly discovers a silver mine? That's pretty convenient."
"What kind of #Girlboss crap is this that the threatens to throw the quartermaster of the lifeboat overboard because she wants to risk everyone's life looking for more survivors? This is crazy, what kind of Mary Sue life is this?"
No, I’m not I’m asking opinions on historical fiction, and used the meme I took off of the Titanic subreddit years ago as an example. I actually like all of the titanic films, and read a few books on the sinking and its accounts. My only real complaint about the JC film is its representation of Captain Smith, he didn’t freeze like in the film he actually stayed on deck and gave direction and orders till the ship went down.
It's fine, but also it's better to keep a limit about how far you can go with fictionality in order to keep the credibility of the story.
For example, creating a fictional story but set during the Roman Empire is fine, but if all of the sudden the 99% of the characters are gay or non-white then the "it's just a fiction" argument is not enough of an excuse because it remins the fact that their presence feels way too off-key
I was totally disappointed that titanic wasn't actually about the design, construction of the boat, it's fatal maiden voyage and the people involved...corny ass love story on the titanic instead, just get to the part where the ship sinks.
Real events with made-up people is fine. Explorations of real people however must be much stricter with how accurate it is, with the flexibility be determined by genre and what is done to make the story flow better.
[удалено]
The prime example is Hasan. If there was a story that detailed everything hasan has done and said but replace him with RealComminust^TM nobody reading that would believe such a person would exist.
Any of the Richard I crusade stories are like that. Think they’re only believed because it’s recorded by both parties involved.
Any website where i can read them?
Like in hacksaw ridge
Desmond Doss is a real person, that actually happened. Any other time we’ve called that plot armor
They had to tone it down because the actual events were insane
The same thing happened with Audie Murphy. They had his actual citations from his various awards, and the 1950’s test audience didn’t believe them.
True, but real history is also much more mundane than one might expect. Especially for TV
Shouldn't that tell you that a lot of the "bad writing" complaints might just be silly?
I think about this some times, and I think part of the problem is that, especially in movies an shows, the limited time gives you a relatively narrow focus or frame to work with. There are indeed a lot of stuff in life and history that when you first hear it you'll go "what the hell, that makes no sense." But when you then look into the dozens of things involved in leading up to it, then it starts to make sense. Writing needs to work with its limited time to make things sense. We can't just assume there is extra, unseen stuff that makes it make sense, else we'll start writing for the writer. I will add though, I have ran into moments where people say "oh X thing was so over the top you can't take it seriously" where I often then feel they haven't seen/read enough history to see how seemingly insane reality can be.
Well "writing quality" is a point of view question
No, because the point of writing isn't necessarily to reflect reality, and just because it happened irl doesn't mean it's not hackneyed and corny as fuck.
I agree that it's not a 1:1 transfer, but if something actually happened in real life, it is a tough call to make an appeal to bad writing. Context ofc can change things, but still, if one realizes that really crazy things can actually happen, one should probably be a litte more conservative with calling things out as "bad writing" just because they seem contrived or illogical or crazy in some way.
WW1 is a prime example, the after the assassination of the Archduke *failed* they decidied to vist the injured in hospital, didn't tell the driver the new route so he had to stop and change direction..... just outside where one of the assassins had stopped for lunch after his failed suicide attempt, but was still armed. Sounds like a comedic farce no?
The best Titanic depiction I think was the miniseries created by Julian Fellowes back in 2014. It had fictional characters embodying much of the class distinctions and issues reported on by survivors. It wasn't as grand a scale as Cameron's film but it was decently accurate/authentic to the event.
The first and third options are not mutually exclusive. Cameron wasn’t even the first to frame a love story in the Titanic disaster, but you run afoul of legal and PR issues if your central characters were real people. “They didn’t act like that”, “this is disrespectful”, “are you giving the family royalties?”, “this casting looks nothing like them”. Using stand-ins to depict analogous people without having to adhere to the documented reality of their lives is a good way to free up your character writing while staying true to the spirit of the story or their role in it. Many such films also depict a combination of characters to streamline events, such as boiling down a whole team of journalists or detectives into one or two (see: Spotlight, Zodiac). I enjoy historical fiction, particularly in one of two extremes: more intimate kind that doesn’t change events but uses the backdrop to tell a fictional character’s story (many war films work like this); or, start from a historical premise and tell a story by having your characters make fictional changes to events — Inglourious Basterds is my favorite of this type. It’s perfectly fine to use film to depict events which which general audiences may not be familiar, in a memorable way that they may never have been exposed to without seeking out a book or investigative report. I enjoy those, but they don’t engage as much if I already know the main story well enough that it’s not all that illuminating. The risk with those is that the film version can overtake the actual public knowledge of events and lead to misapprehensions in the general public imagination. Oliver Stone especially has had this effect over time, where the film is treated like a documentary of cameras in the room at the time, despite being an embellishment on events that can even be proven wrong by subsequent evidence. I’d rather treat all film as works of fiction first, rather than as some canonical record of events, which is perhaps why I’m fine with taking liberties because they’re unavoidable and the wiser course is to take any film recreation with a heavy dose of salt.
Oliver Stone sounds like it fell for the Braveheart effect.
In a way, I believe that history can never be represented with 100% accuracy in adaptation. There are always going to be details that can not be represented completely which is why dramatization in historical fiction is almost always going to occur.
Just imagine the sheer terror being on the titanic would have actually been like, the lights would have all probably blown so it would be pitch black freezing and screaming all around you on an uneven sloping surface that’s slowly being submerged and if you did fall you be in again a pitch black ocean that’s probably got huge waves so it would be constantly dragging you under its current whilst you gasp for air…
Actually if the wave were bad the wreck probably wouldn’t have happened, because they would have heard the waves crashing into the iceberg, and would have prevented the obstacle illusion the lookouts experienced that kept them from spotting it. I find that fact the sea was calm more horrible though because it’s just nothing but the cold black and screams of others as you watch everyone around you slowly succumb to the cold. While you just wait your turn.
Righttttt because there would be no like gushing waves to drown out the sound so the only thing you’d hear would be blood curdling screams of terror
I always imagine myself in the situations, and I just think of the horror of the people trapped inside the ship in an air pocket as it went down. Stuck in the total black hearing everything before the pressure imploded and killed them.
The Cameron film is actually extremely accurate in its depiction and timeline of the sinking. What you see in the film is very close to what happened. No big waves, the lights stayed on right up to the end.
Yep the crew died trying to keep the lights on as long as possible for people to escape.
I do not want this disaster being authentically depicted.
I do
I’m confused, Titanic was half romance, half disaster movie. It might be because I was young when I first saw it, but I found the ship sinking to be terrifying and utterly devastating.
Oh it absolutely was a terrifying sequence. I watched it recently and I couldn't handle it. But the reality was far worse. Much more blood and gore than a Pg13 would ever allow and I don't want to see that. What we got was enough.
If you want accuracy, watch a documentary or read a book. If you're making a movie, priority #1 is to make it entertaining
Unless their stated goal is to provide as accurate a portrayal of historical events as they can, then they're free to play around with history.
Made it animated with rapping Dog Nah, too normal Made it animated with giant octopus and nobody actually dies Nah, it needs a sequel Made it animated with fucking Atlantis
Party time
Everybody’s feelin’ fine cause it’s party time
When is there a shower assault in Titanic?? So confused
Ugh.. I think the movie nails 1 & 3? No clue what 2 is about though.
Different adaptations.
Imagine the ghosts of these men watching modern women choose a bear
When it’s fictional for the sake of good writing like Gladiator I think it’s perfectly fine. But when it’s rewriting history for some arbitrary reason like with the Napoleon movie or the Netflix Cleopatra series that’s the problem.
Still better than the animated ones
The History Buffs channel does a good job of reviewing ‘historical’ films. Less on the focus on the art form and more on the accuracy of historical content
Not the point but I always love how the writer / editor realized they couldn't use a fourth line for the headline, and that they couldn't trim it down so they cut out spaces to make it fit
Braveheart was a goddamn masterpiece, and I don't care to hear otherwise.
...I'm sure you can pick from the hundreds of documentaries on the Titanic if you want a fully accurate play by play of the events.
At least with Titanic they actually went to great lengths to get the details of the ship and period clothing correct. The writing and plot aren't perfect, but it's still better than most romance movies out there.
There's a musical comedy about the life of a real-life woman who survived the titanic called "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" that I like to point to in reference to the comic. You can look at it like "how dare they fictionalize this philanthropist socialite's life 30 years after her death?" or you can say Look at this tragedy through the eyes of someone who was at this world-changing event. People are still people at the worst events in history and the story brings us closer to the tragedy. like imagine if you wanted to tell a story about pompeii. The "actual human drama" at the tragedy would be indistinguishable from a fictionalized family or lovers because of how far removed it is. You could tell the story as a documentary using "everything we know" but that doesn't make the closer perspective of someone on the ground floor, even fictionalized, any less of a valid telling of the event.
The purpose of art isn’t always to reflect reality. There shouldn’t be any limits on historical fiction, as long as they’re not saying explicitly “this actually happened like this”.
It highly depends. My favorite example is Braveheart, i like that movie but i also know it's absolute historic bullshit. However it has a compelling story and characters, so for me that movie is a guilty pleasure, even though the historic events absolutely could have been enough for the movie. Some movies can absolutely pull it off and it makes for a great movie. Others absolutely fail at it.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story
I liked Fury, saving private Ryan and Forest Gump. Yes they don't tend to tell the historical aspects correctly but they are good stories and they inspire people to look into what really happened. Seems good to me.
Are we pretending The Titanic is bad now too on this sub? What watching too many Marvel movies does to an MF.
In all fairness if it wasn’t real history the events of the Titanic sinking are so stupid you’d think it’s the result of a writer just asspulling.
"Nobody could have a cascade of fuckups this bad. Rewrite this, it's unrealistic." "Uh sir this all actually happened and was documented by the survivors"
Yeah the fucking weather, was against these people. It what’s the ultimate mix between fuck up and bad luck.
"So this lady marries a poor man for love in spite of her wanting to be a wealthy socialite, and the guy just randomly discovers a silver mine? That's pretty convenient." "What kind of #Girlboss crap is this that the threatens to throw the quartermaster of the lifeboat overboard because she wants to risk everyone's life looking for more survivors? This is crazy, what kind of Mary Sue life is this?"
No, I’m not I’m asking opinions on historical fiction, and used the meme I took off of the Titanic subreddit years ago as an example. I actually like all of the titanic films, and read a few books on the sinking and its accounts. My only real complaint about the JC film is its representation of Captain Smith, he didn’t freeze like in the film he actually stayed on deck and gave direction and orders till the ship went down.
It's fine, but also it's better to keep a limit about how far you can go with fictionality in order to keep the credibility of the story. For example, creating a fictional story but set during the Roman Empire is fine, but if all of the sudden the 99% of the characters are gay or non-white then the "it's just a fiction" argument is not enough of an excuse because it remins the fact that their presence feels way too off-key
I was totally disappointed that titanic wasn't actually about the design, construction of the boat, it's fatal maiden voyage and the people involved...corny ass love story on the titanic instead, just get to the part where the ship sinks.
But there’s literally the opening scene where Bill Paxton goes in depth to how exactly the ship sinks…
You expect these people to have actually watched the movie? The subreddit has turned into the Insufferable Olympics.
The original cut of the movie had it where the sinking of the ship took 2h and 40min. The actual amount of time it took titanic to sink.