What matters isn't truth but the facsimile of it.


When I'm hungry and crave a tuna sandwich, I don't go to a hardware store.

When I seek a history lesson, I don't go to a movie theater. I'll get lousy history and a lame movie.

OUR VIEW: Hollywood's history

Movies are fake. For openers, they don't even move. Most everyone knows that a movie actually consists of approximately 100,000 still images. There is no motion at all but merely the appearance of motion.

Full disclosure: In Steven Spielberg's timeless production of Tony Kushner's screenplay Lincoln, the dude in the stovepipe hat is not Abraham Lincoln but a British actor named Daniel Day-Lewis. Moreover, the beard on Lewis' face is not his own; it is the creation of a Hollywood makeup artist.

What matters in movies is not truth but the facsimile of truth. People frequently say truth is stranger than fiction, but that is rarely true, and thank goodness for it. We want excitement in our art; in our lives, we want a sweet and reliable kind of boredom. If you traveled on an airplane, for example, would you rather have a boring journey or an adventure?

There is one element in movies, however, that is completely true: emotion. If viewing a tear-jerker makes one sad, even if the facts are bogus the sadness is sincere. When I am scared watching a scary movie, the various elements of the film — plot, characters, dialogue — are wholly the invention of the screenwriter. The fear that I experience, however, is totally real.

This is the kind of truth movie audiences seek, not mere data but emotion. Art is the first part of "artifice" and "artificial." To fully and faithfully serve audiences, film artists ought to take every liberty they can to make a movie more engaging.

Kushner's fudging of the facts regarding the Connecticut vote on the 13th Amendment should be not a whole lot more troubling than screenwriter Chris Terrio's finessing of President Carter's last-minute reprieve for Argo's hostages and the ayatollah's police cars chasing the escape plane to the end of the runway.

That critics complain schoolchildren will be misled by the poetic license taken in Lincoln offers sorry testimony to the wretched state of American education. We are in serious trouble if we expect our kids to learn history from movies. School kids watching Lincoln will learn plenty about history. Properly framed, they ought also to acquire the healthy skepticism that is so essential a part of the learning process.

For it is not only movie writers but also historians who disagree from time to time about the so-called facts. Students will learn that when you examine history, you're not getting The Truth but merely one more scholar's opinion.

History is "his" story.

Richard Walter is the chairman of UCLA's graduate program in screenwriting and author of Essentials of Screenwriting.