Hi, Larry.

I said that the movie is historical fiction. That is: the movie is a fictional treatment of an historical subject. I stand by that. Is all the dialog taken from actual transcriptions of radio transcriptions, diaries, notes, or tape recordings? No. Are the participants playing the parts in the movie, and scrupulously reproducing their every move? No, and it would be cruelty to do so. Was it filmed on location? No. The only historical film is newsreel. Documentaries with interviews, or better, uninterrupted statements from participants and witnesses without prompting or other interference, are oral history on video. Period.

The book is what historians call a secondary source. This is because the author himself was not a participant or a witness. Nowhere did I talk about the book. The book and the movie are not two expressions of the same thing. The book is a history. The movie is a movie.

Sandburg's masterful biography of Lincoln is a secondary source. Bruce Catton's epic history of the Civil War is a secondary source. This doesn't make either of them bad work, just removed from the events themselves. All they could do was to take testimony from those who were there (primary sources) and attempt to tell the whole story truthfully at one remove. Bowden did similar work on Black Hawk Down, with the additional advantage of having multiple physical records to compare to personal accounts.

Some people don't pick on movies that portray soldiers well for special treatment. Some people treat all movies this way. Some people want other people to realize that smudging the line between entertainment and history doen't produce entertaining history, but fiction whose topic is historical. Some people want other people to understand that when they pin their history to the movies instead of to history itself, they find themselves one more remove from the genuine. Cubic zirconia is very pretty, and sometimes it doesn't matter that it's not a real diamond, but sometimes it does. Similarly, movies can be very informative, but they are not the real thing, not ever. People who see reality at the movies have just undercut reality.

Barbara Tuchman remarked in her introduction to, I think, The Proud Tower that true history does not include statements akin to "as Napoleon stood looking out to the sea from his prison on St. Helena, he must have thought...". She went on to explain that any remark attributed to any individual that appears in her books has a concrete reference to back it up: letters, diaries, communiques, telegrams, etc. Bowden approached his work with a similar professional ethic. This is what I was getting at: Movies make substitutions and edits all the time without that kind of strictness because they are art, and may take license.

There is good fiction and bad fiction, in print, on tape and on film. Authenticity goes to make good fiction. That's another topic.

Mary Anne