True Lies: moviemakers and authors don't let facts stand in the way

In pop culture lately, the truth of the matter is, there's something the matter with the truth.

Fallout from the revelation that James Frey embellished or fabricated parts of his best-selling memoir "A Million Little Pieces" has made headlines for weeks. Since his public castigation by his former champion Oprah Winfrey on Thursday, several readers have filed lawsuits against him, and on Tuesday, his literary manager dropped him.

But his is only the most high-profile of literary misdeeds that have come to light in recent weeks.

It seems that former teen-hustler turned HIV-positive writer J.T. Leroy doesn't actually exist; he's apparently a persona invented by a San Franciscan named Laura Albert. And a man calling himself Nasdijj, who published memoirs about growing up with fetal alcohol syndrome on a Navajo reservation, is actually Timothy P. Barrus, a white guy of Scandinavian descent from Michigan.

Some recent movies "based on a true story" are undergoing scrutiny as well.

"Walk the Line" and "Munich" have come under fire --- "Line" from some of Johnny Cash's children for its portrayal of his first wife; "Munich" for the liberties it takes with the tale of the aftermath of the slaughter at the 1972 Olympics.

The question is: Does anyone care?

Both "Line" and "Munich" received five Oscar nominations Tuesday; and despite Oprah's smackdown, Frey's book still sat in Amazon.com's Top 10 on Wednesday.

It seems that for many people, bottom-line truth is becoming less important than a good story.

Bradd Shore, director of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, says different narrative forms --- documentaries, dramas, comedies and polemics --- have started to merge over the years into hybrids like docudramas and reality TV, which isn't exactly as unscripted as the networks try to pretend.

"We have been prepared, in ways we're not aware of, for the blurring of things that are true and not true," Shore says. Separating fact, fiction

Dramatist Tony Kushner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award and Emmy for his epic "Angels in America," co-wrote the "Munich" screenplay and dismisses the fuss.

"I want to make a separation between the James Frey situation and the questions raised by a film like 'Munich,' " he says by phone from New York. " 'Munich' is a work of fiction."

Loosely based on the George Jonas book "Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist," the film opens with the on-screen caption: "Inspired by real events."

Kushner says he never pretended to know what Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir said to advisers in a top-secret meeting, launching a Mossad operation to assassinate Palestinians connected to the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes.

"The answer to the question 'Did it happen?' should be 'Yes,' " Kushner says. "Did it happen exactly this way? The answer is, 'Not necessarily, because we made a fiction of it.' "

Christine Becker, assistant professor in Notre Dame University's department of film, television and theater, says that even a disclaimer like "inspired by real events" isn't enough to remind viewers that what they're seeing isn't all true.

"Any mediated depiction of an historical event --- fiction or nonfiction --- is going to distort that reality in some fashion," she says. "It's always going to be filtered through a subjective frame of reference.

"The problem is that a lot of people don't think about that or, perhaps more importantly, aren't made to think about that by the makers of such texts."

Because of the immediate, visceral power of movies --- especially one by an accomplished audience manipulator like director Steven Spielberg --- they can convince viewers that what they're seeing is true. (Remember audiences who believed "The Blair Witch Project" was actual found footage?)

Though she has yet to see the film, Becker says, "I assume that, despite its disclaimer, 'Munich' comes across as a seamless historical portrait of events, even though there's no chance it could be."

"Munich" is hardly the first fact-based movie to catch flak for historical accuracy."A Beautiful Mind," the 2001 best picture Oscar winner, drew criticism for straightening out mathematician John Nash's sex life. In 1999, "The Hurricane," about boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, also got charged with playing fast and loose with facts.

In another current fact-based film, "Glory Road," about Texas Western coach Don Haskins, the integrated basketball team finds its hotel trashed and scrawled with racist graffiti. In real life? It never happened.

It's an example of how screenwriters condense and compress events, says Bettina Gilois, who co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Cleveland. "Sometimes you have to speak symbolically to convey 100 different things that did occur," Gilois says. In real life, Haskins and his team faced verbal and physical assault and found threatening letters in their mailboxes and bullets in their pockets. 'A basis in reality' desired

So what's the appeal of these fact-based films --- especially when, sometimes, fiction has to be applied to facts to juice things up, dramatically speaking?

"People have always valued stories that have a basis in reality," says Matthew Bernstein, professor of film studies at Emory University. "It gives them gravitas and relevance --- though I think we're seeing this to an unprecedented extent now."

Says Cleveland, "It's attractive to an audience because when you're telling an incredible story, [the factual basis] gives the story credibility."

Literary memoirs are trickier things. In recent years, titles like Augusten Burroughs' "Running With Scissors," Mary Karr's "The Liars' Club" and Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" (and its sequels) have made the genre a strong and profitable branch of publishing.

"Particularly in the last five years or so, readers have been very hungry for nonfiction and for real-life stories," says Charlotte Abbott, senior book news editor for Publisher's Weekly. "I think that reflects a larger interest in our culture, and the events of 9/11 have made people hungry for more information about the world. The appeal of a good memoir is that it can teach you something about life."

"Liars' Club" author Karr puts it like this, "I think people are lonely for the truth, lonely to see inside the human heart." That's especially true in a modern world where urban sprawl and Internet access can isolate people. "We have these far-flung communities. A lot of people don't have windows into each others' lives."

With its long legacy, the memoir also has a long history of unreliability. Part of playwright Lillian Hellman's memoir "Pentimento" became the Oscar-winning 1977 Jane Fonda film "Julia" --- though whether the woman called Julia existed is in doubt. (Novelist Mary McCarthy famously said, "Every word that Hellman wrote was a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' ")

Unlike Frey, with his defense that "essential truth" rather than actual facts is the heart of a memoir, Karr says veracity is crucial to the genre. She doesn't trust her own memory when she writes. So she gives manuscripts to the people she's written about, or who were party to the events she describes, to make sure she got it right. "That's my firing squad," she says. "That's when I go in sweating like Richard Nixon, afraid I've gotten it all wrong."

Tony Kushner of "Munich" also says the facts in a memoir are much more crucial than those in fact-based films.

"Making up stuff is not acceptable," he says. "You can't add stuff and take stuff out. If you get caught, you've been discredited."

That's now where James Frey stands. But "A Million Little Pieces" falling to pieces isn't likely to curb the memoir trend. Or the based-on-fact movie factory.

This year we'll see Nicole Kidman as photographer Diane Arbus in "Fur," and Sienna Miller as Warhol "It" Girl Edie Sedgwick in "Factory Girl." This week, a film based on the 1970 Marshall University plane crash, starring Matthew McConaughey, was announced. And Sept. 11, 2001, is providing fodder for multiple projects on TV and film.

There's no telling how factual these films will be. Maybe the bigger question, increasingly, is whether it matters. At a time when some people watch Jon Stewart's news spoof "The Daily Show" to learn about current events, and his Comedy Central colleague Stephen Colbert's word "truthiness" has entered the common lingo, everything is blurred.

As Emory's Shore puts it: "We've become immune to lying, because lying --- how different is that from fiction? And how different is fiction from a slight take on the truth?"

Staff writer Bo Emerson contributed to this article.

Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution