History Is Only the Launch Pad

When I walked into Armyan Bernstein’s office the other morning, the movie producer had carefully laid out two sets of matching objects on his coffee table: a pair of fencing sabers and a pair of red Everlast boxing gloves. He gestured toward the table, saying slyly, “Take your pick.”

For Bernstein, there’s a lot of history in that gesture. The chairman of Beacon Communications is still visibly wounded over what happened to “The Hurricane,” his film about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter that took an ugly beating in the media after it opened at the end of last year.

The movie’s demise was a bitter personal blow for Bernstein, who co-wrote as well as produced the film that starred Denzel Washington as the boxer who spent 20 years behind bars fighting to clear his name.

The movie was initially viewed as an Oscar shoo-in, but after a barrage of stories attacking its accuracy, the picture became embroiled in controversy and was shut out at Oscar time. The boxing gloves were Bernstein’s way of saying that even though he’s started speaking to me again, he hasn’t forgotten what he feels was “one-sided” coverage in this newspaper.

Bernstein isn’t the only filmmaker eager to get into the ring with some reporters. Over the last decade, a number of ambitious fact-based films have had their reputations tarnished by attacks on their accuracy.

They include “Mississippi Burning” (Coretta Scott King criticized it for focusing on white heroes); “Amistad” (Barbara Chase-Riboud accused the filmmakers of stealing ideas from one of her books); “The People Vs. Larry Flynt” (Gloria Steinem blasted it, saying it glamorized a vile pornographer); “The Insider” (Mike Wallace and the

Wall Street Journal claimed their real-life roles were grossly distorted) and “JFK” (just about everybody had a beef).

“We live in an era where it’s become a style of journalism for the press to go after the dirt and pull things apart,” says Revolution Films chief Joe Roth, who made “The Insider” when he ran Disney Studios. “With ‘The Insider,’ the media took the personal outrage of a few powerful media people who felt wronged and turned it into a big story. Whenever there are negative vibes in the air, it always hurts your ability to sell a picture. If you want to buy a new after-shave but you hear stories that it makes your face break out, you’re a lot less likely to buy the after-shave.”

It’s no secret that we live in an era in which everything, from baseball free-agency signings to post-presidential vote counting, is subject to major-league media spin control. But Bernstein argues that we’ve entered a new era of gotcha-journalism in which the bar has been raised on judging real-life dramas. He has a compelling reason for concern: His new film, “Thirteen Days,” which stars Kevin Costner as Kennedy White House operative Kenny O’Donnell, offers an inside-the-White House view of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

“Thirteen Days” has so far received favorable coverage in several major media outlets. But that doesn’t mean Bernstein isn’t worried about its reception. And hearing his complaints made me rethink the truth-or-dare battle over “The Hurricane.”

“I think the media underestimates moviegoers’ intelligence,” Bernstein says. “People know that film by its very nature is subjective, interpretive and impressionistic. Every film, whether it’s ‘The Insider’ or ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ takes artistic license. You can’t tell the whole story of a man in 2 1/2 hours. People come to movies because they’re hungry for inspiration and greater meaning. They know Charlton Heston isn’t Moses. If we just gave people a history lesson, we’d be making movies for the History Channel.”

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Not every reality-based film has been mauled by bad press. “Erin Brockovich” was a huge hit and is viewed as a leading Oscar contender. “Men of Honor,” a recent film that starred Cuba Gooding Jr. as real-life Navy diver Carl Brashear, escaped without any significant controversy.

So why did the media pummel “The Hurricane” but give other films a free pass? After all, if a big issue with “The Hurricane” was its inventing a single racist cop as Carter’s primary persecutor, then why was the press silent about “Men of Honor,” which invented its central antagonist, the racist Navy diver played by Robert De Niro?

One explanation: “The Hurricane” wasn’t attacked by the people it dramatized but by the people it left out. The film’s most vocal critics were New York Times reporter Selwyn Raab, whose original reporting had played a role in overturning Carter’s conviction, and several lawyers who played key roles in the case who were not portrayed in the movie. As the Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter wrote earlier this year: “The Hurricane” “made a crucial policy mistake by offending a member of that sect that might be called thearticulati--a writer. This is a secret truth of American public life. Youmay disrespect and misrepresent the vast inarticulate masses, but you take your life into your hands if you offend any of a small number of professional communicators.”

Too often movies are judged most severely by those closest to their subjects. The harshest critics of movies about journalism, like “The Insider,” are invariably fellow journalists. When Spike Lee made “Malcolm X,” his most vociferous detractors were not white conservatives but black intellectuals. The closer the cut, the thinner the skin.

In the current issue of George magazine, Theodore Sorenson, a key Kennedy-era White House advisor, endorsed “Thirteen Days,” though he acknowledged that the film has inflated O’Donnell’s role in White House decision-making. Asked in the magazine who would have been a more accurate central character, he said with a laugh: “Me!”

After “The Hurricane” debacle, studios have become more diligent about damage control. To protect “Thirteen Days,” New Line and Beacon hired two handlers with key Washington connections: Hollywood publicist Stephen Rivers and former White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry.

Before the launch of “Erin Brockovich,” Universal (which also released “Hurricane”) retained a firm that specializes in crisis management public relations. It also held a no-holds-barred meeting with the filmmakers, the real-life Brockovich and various studio lawyers.

“We asked every question imaginable,” recalls Universal publicity chief Terry Curtin. “Did we change any names? If so, why? What facts were changed? Whose life rights did we buy? Who had a gripe against Erin? We essentially ran two press campaigns at the same time. One was offensive--selling our movie--and one was defensive--protecting our movie.”

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The fuss over movie accuracy isn’t going to vanish overnight. It’s a clash between two radically different sensibilities: the journalist’s desire for objective truth and the artists’ right to embellish it.

I side with the storyteller. Shakespeare took reality and sculpted it to his own ends; so has Hunter S. Thompson. The lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” take at least as many mythologizing liberties as the film, yet it is considered a classic example of song craft. So why shouldn’t filmmakers have as much freedom to recount history as a novelist or playwright?

Too often, journalists forget that there is no one indelible version of history. Having done a number of stories about the Hollywood blacklist in recent years, I’ve come to learn that virtually everyone recalls the details of the same events in very different ways. History is a jigsaw puzzle, not a precise text.

The other night, ABC-TV aired “Shooting War,” a documentary about World War II combat photographers. It included a segment about two of Hollywood’s greatest directors, John Ford and John Huston, who both made documentaries that used the bloody canvas of battle to chronicle wartime heroics and sacrifice. Ford’s “December 7th” won an Oscar for best short subject. Critic James Agee called Huston’s “Battle of San Pietro” “as good a war film as I have seen.”

However, the documentary revealed a new truth: Both films were full of fakery. Ford’s footage of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was created by the 20th Century Fox special-effects department. Huston staged his battle scenes months after the real event, posing American GIs as dead Germans. Nonetheless, Huston’s scenes of war offer an experience of the savagery of war that’s real, even if the footage itself is phony. It only goes to show that even movies that stray from the facts can be full of emotional truth.

Undercover: Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” which won him directing awards from both Los Angeles and New York critics groups, has such a great look to it that you immediately want to know more about Peter Andrews, the film’s cinematographer. Well, guess what. Peter Andrews is Steven Soderbergh.

He sought a “Directed and Photographed by” credit, but it was denied by the Writers Guild. As Soderbergh explains, “The guild has a rule that there can be no credit between the director and the writer. I requested a waiver, but it was denied.” Rather than take two separate credits, Soderbergh opted for a pseudonym, using his father’s first two names.

This isn’t the director’s first run-in with the WGA. Soderbergh says he resigned from the union after an arbitration dispute over his 1995 film, “The Underneath.” “They told me that you can’t quit the guild, but I sent them a letter of resignation, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m out for good.”

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.