Even a true story can be made a little truer

Rob Long has taken to performing plastic surgery on the facts

Lyndon B Johnson, who was US president from 1963 to 1968, was a stalwart champion of the civil rights movement of the time.

He crafted and enacted – not without a lot of bullying and bribery and threats and begging – some of the most important civil rights laws in the history of the United States.

All of that, of course, is according to the history books. None of that is according to the Oprah Winfrey-produced movie Selma, now in cinemas across the US.

As the movie tells the story, Lyndon Johnson was a foot-dragging Texas politician without any real interest in the civil rights of African-Americans. He actively opposed the passage of those signature pieces of legislation and told their great champion, Martin Luther King Jr, to, essentially, cool it with the marching and protesting and the complaining.

The movie has it all wrong, at least if you’re a stickler for historical accuracy. There are plenty of records, accounts and dozens of still-living Johnson aides who were there at the time.

All of them aver to the accuracy of the historical record: whatever else you may think of Lyndon Johnson (and it’s clear he was a pretty awful guy) he was a powerful supporter of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and almost single-handedly pushed through important reforms.

But that, as I said, is history. And history is a subject they teach in school, and in school what you get is homework, and the first rule of Hollywood is, nobody pays for homework.

What we do out in Los Angeles, in our days of endless sunshine and hours spent in blood-boiling traffic, is tell stories. And when we’re not making them up out of thin air we’re “fixing” the ones that already exist, whether that makes them closer to the truth or not.

Audiences don’t pay for the truth. They pay to be entertained. If they wanted the truth they’d buy and read a history book.

What the producers and writers of Selma needed, when they started assembling the story and its twists and turns, was a villain. Well, not a classic villain – those they had in abundance, personified by the racist opponents to Martin Luther King’s movement and marches. What the story needed was an obstacle – something powerful and malevolent that stands between our hero and his (or her) dream.

In other words, no matter what Lyndon Johnson did as a matter of historical fact (or, as we say in Hollywood, in “boring, unpretty real life”) is irrelevant. The story needs a big fat obstacle and there’s nothing bigger or fatter than the President of the United States. And the producers – among whom, as I mentioned, is Oprah Winfrey, who knows a thing or too about how to jazz up a boring old story – calculated that audiences would forgive them for performing plastic surgery on the facts.

We perform plastic surgery on everything else in Hollywood. Why not on American history?

Well, for one reason: because everyone knows the history, and they’ll hold it against you.

Old time Lyndon Johnson loyalists are furious at the picture’s historical revisionism, and some are suggesting that their public criticism has hurt the movie at the box office and the awards shows. They’re probably right. There are a lot of Lyndon Johnson fans in the older cohorts of Hollywood – and it’s the older folks who have the lion’s share of the votes.

Here’s a confession: for the past few months I’ve been working with a couple of writers on a terrific script. It’s the true story of the only high-ranking woman in the American mafia. She was a powerful and terrifying local mob figure in Chicago for almost 40 years, and up until now her story has not been told.

One of the writers on the project grew up a few streets away from where it all takes place, and his grandparents and great-grandparents had dealings with this interesting and scary lady.

I mean, mostly. It’s mostly true. We’re not sure exactly how many (if any) people this woman murdered. As a producer, my job is to convince the writers that the answer to this question is, “Lots!” and not, “Well, the historical record is unclear so we’re going to avoid dealing with that particular question”.

It’s my chief contribution, as a producer, to suggest that this woman and Al Capone’s right-hand man, Frank Nitti, were secret lovers, when in fact there is zero evidence to support this plot twist.

At first they were uncomfortable. “We’re trying to tell a true story,” they told me.

“No we’re not,” I said. “We’re trying to tell an exciting story.” And there’s a difference.

We debated the right way to describe the relative truth of the tale. I kept pushing for us to declare, simply, that “This is a true story,” and let the linguists parse the meaning of “true” and “story” in the sentence. But the writers are cut from sturdier moral cloth than I, and so we finally settled on a blander, but still punchy, “This story is based on true events,” which may not be the full-on facelift and tummy-tuck I was going for, but is at least a little work around the eyes. While you can’t do major plastic surgery on history, there’s not a story in the world – true or not – that couldn’t use a little Botox.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl