‘Straight Outta Compton,’ ‘The Danish Girl’ and other films show histories that feel like now

Timing, as is often said, is everything. Years ago, filmmakers couldn’t have known when they got projects off the ground about health insurance for gay couples, blacklisting and censorship, women’s voting rights, gender transformation and the racial divide as seen through the history of a rap group that those issues would be among the hot-button topics for 2015. Yet, as awards season begins, the timing of such movies as “Freeheld,” “Trumbo,” “Suffragette,” “Straight Outta Compton” and “The Danish Girl” couldn’t be better. And what’s interesting is that they all examine current social issues through the lens of the past.

It may partially be luck that these films time out so well with headlines, but there’s more to it than that.

“It’s a realization that the more things change, the more they stay the same,” says producer Ice Cube, whose life in the rap group N.W.A is the focus of “Compton.” “We haven’t dealt with these issues properly.”

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FOR THE RECORD:
Film producer: An article in the Nov. 19 issue of The Envelope about films that examine current issues though set in the past referred to Michael London as an executive producer on the film “Trumbo.” London is a producer on that film. —
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A film that shows audiences how little things have changed has a narrative advantage: It telegraphs that however buzzy the topics of today may be, they’ve been circling the edges of history all this time.

Tom Hooper, who won an Oscar for “The King’s Speech” and has directed the Nov. 27 release, “The Danish Girl,” about the first recipient of gender reassignment surgery (in the 1920s), says it’s about reexamining long-held myths.

“There is a risk in the way we make history; the making of history hard-wires the prejudices of the people who control the historical narrative,” he says. “I was motivated to right that wrong.”

Hooper says he likes approaching history from the margins and was surprised that the story of King George VI’s speech therapist (from “The King’s Speech”) “was literally not known. People wanted it hidden,” he said. “So it had been hidden. [For ‘Danish’] I was struck that so few people had any idea that the first gender reassignment surgery had happened way back when. They thought it was something that happened in the 1950s.”

In the case of “Suffragette,” screenwriter Abi Morgan says she was influenced by all of the modern-day reports of women’s rights violations going on around the world, and that it changed her story (about the key months when the British suffragette movement shifted from peaceful protest to activism).

“It did start to infect how we were writing ‘Suffragette,’” she says. “It made us aware that there were modern-day parallels and that became more and more important to us — that we had to make a film that would feel acceptable and relevant in the 21st century.”

Morgan says that the hard-wired history Hooper referred to has not been kind to suffragettes. “It became apparent that it has been very sketchily taught in school; it was important to go back and reclaim those stories of women,” she says.

Whether the resonance of the subject matter translates into nominations or even wins is a hard line to draw.

“It maybe gets you an entrée into the conversation, but it doesn’t go far,” says Trumbo producer Michael London about his film, which focuses on the blacklisting of screenwriter-author Dalton Trumbo during the middle of the last century. “The awards conversation is additive, but we weren’t focused on that as a goal.”

Academy Awards history bears that out; of the last 10 best picture Oscar winners, only a handful can be said to have direct resonance with current events (including “The Hurt Locker” in 2009 and “12 Years a Slave” in 2013). But sometimes, all that’s needed is that extra boost to being included in the conversation.

As Stacey Sher, who produced “Freeheld” (based on the Oscar-winning documentary short of the same name, about a terminally ill policewoman trying to get her pension benefits transferred to her lesbian partner), underscores the idea that shining a light on past injustices isn’t a curative in and of itself.

“There’s still a lot of bias and prejudice and other people looking to infringe on people’s civil rights in this country,” she says. “We still have a long way to go.”

calendar@latimes.com