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2003 Panel Discussion

When History Goes Hollywood

What happens to real events when they become the subject of Hollywood feature films? Is history served? Is the audience? The director of the movie "Seabiscuit" joined two Stanford professors, a documentary filmmaker and a historian, to explore that question on November 11, 2003 - and their answers may surprise you.

• Discussion Audio (Stanford iTunes)

Gary Ross

Panelists

Gary Ross, Writer and director of the 2003 film "Seabiscuit"
Kristine Samuelson, Director of the Graduate Program in Documentary Film and Video, Stanford University
Richard White, Professor of American History, Stanford University

Moderator:
James R. Bettinger, Director, Knight Fellowships

Seabiscuit filmmaker, scholars explore history, Hollywood

by Barbara Palmer
Stanford Report, Nov. 19, 2003

Professor Kristine Samuelson, the director of the documentary film and video program and a filmmaker for 25 years, said she fell into documenting the history of the Vietnam War when she learned that her two teenagers wouldn't study anything much past World War II in their high school history classes.

As she and her husband, John Haptas, began work on the project that became the 1999 documentary film Riding the Tiger, they talked with other high school students and discovered that "pretty much everything they knew about the war came from Apocalypse Now; Good Morning, Vietnam; and Platoon. "A great deal of our most recent and relevant history is being told in fragments of dramatic twists and turns that in many cases are wildly fictional, really wildly fictional," Samuelson said.

On Nov. 11, Samuelson; Richard White, professor of American history; and Gary Ross, writer and director of the blockbuster movie Seabiscuit, gathered at Green Library to discuss the intersection of fact and fiction in historically based films in the panel "When History Goes Hollywood." The event was sponsored by the John S. Knight Fellowships Program for Professional Journalists and the library's Social Sciences Resource Center and moderated by James Bettinger, the Knight program director.

It could be argued that in a post-literate society where fewer and fewer books are read and more and more movies are made, filmmakers bear increasing responsibilities to be true chroniclers of history, because that is where most people will get their history, Ross said.

One of the problems is that there is no absolute objectivity in history and filmmaking, even in documentary filmmaking, Ross said. "You can pick virtually any topic and find 20, 100, 1,000 histories, all of which will change."

What filmmakers do is peddle iconography, he said. "I can go down a checklist of all the historical facts, be totally faithful to it -- and manipulate the hell out of people through iconography, the symbolism I use." In his own work, "I don't know of a way to be truthful in my medium except to be emotionally truthful," he said.

In Seabiscuit, Ross collapsed the forces acting on jockey Red Pollard so that the stock market crash in 1929 was a direct cause for his poverty, while in reality his family's fortune was wiped out in 1915. "The emotional truth of what Red Pollard went through for me is that he was a young man plunged into poverty at a time when America was going through tremendous hardship," Ross said. "The changes were more emotionally true to the story than the facts of Pollard's life," he added. (When he discussed the change with author Laura Hillenbrand, on whose nonfiction book the movie is based, he reported that she said, "I wish I would have been able to do that.")

Within the framework of documentaries, which "do feel like a piece of the True Cross," there is a lot that can be dishonest, Samuelson said. "Film is such a malleable and coherent medium that you can create this reality that in fact isn't entirely accurate," she said. It's easy for viewers to park their critical brains at the door when immersed in a film, but it's important that they be thoughtful, because there are so many ways in which history can be turned on its head, she added.

Historians don't own the past, but they do get to make up the rules as to what counts as history, "which is a very particular way of retrieving the past," said White. "Filmmaking and history are to me, if not antithetical ways of reaching the past, then certainly mutually exclusive ways," he added. "Historians can't invent things, can't invent dialogue, can't invent people -- they can't do all of the things that in fact are absolutely necessary in making a film."

But you don't want a panel of historians reviewing films for accuracy, as was suggested during the recent highly politicized flap over a CBS miniseries about Ronald Reagan, he said. "Of course, these are fictional recreations, which may or may not be true to history, but the point is you show them and then you argue about it, you don't censor things."

History is very narrowly powerful within universities, he said. "It's not powerful in popular culture where other ways of getting at the past have a much greater home." He pointed out that every history written in the last century probably didn't add up to $87 million, which was the budget for Seabiscuit, he pointed out.

"I'm devoted to being a historian, but I realize more and more the limits of what it does," he said. "More people know me because they saw me on [the Ken Burns documentary series] The West than ever know me for anything I ever wrote. And The West will never have anything like the audience of Seabiscuit.

"The ultimate cultural product, whether it is a Hollywood film or a history or a documentary, can put us in relation to the past in a way that tells us something about ourselves and something about the strangeness of the past and the possibilities it once contained."