British Historians Attack Hollywood 'Distortions'

[Rose Siding]

LONDON (Reuters) - Hollywood film studios are guilty of a "grotesque distortion of history" which is destroying Britain's national identity, a newspaper on Sunday quoted British historians as saying.

The chief executive of English Heritage, the government body responsible for the historic environment, told the Independent on Sunday film-makers' "sloppy" and "formulaic" approach to history had left a generation of children confused.

"One of my principal concerns is that the majority of children now leave school with the sketchiest of chronology about English history," Simon Thurley said, adding that they turned to films for knowledge.

Antony Beevor, Britain's best-selling author of popular history, told the newspaper the Americanization of British history was a particular problem.

"You can't turn every hero in the world into an American," he said.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=762&e=1&u=/nm/20040801/en_nm/britain_film_dc

Pax Americana, Skippy

[dflprincess]

1. I agree with them about U571

The Brits are the ones who captured the first Enigma machine. But "Saving Private Ryan" was just a story about American soldiers - it wasn't a remake of the "Longest Day". If it had been, then they could complain about the rest of the Allied forces being left out.

As for Kevin Costner's version of Robin Hood, I thought it was just a bad moving.

[DivinBreuvage]

6. Did you see Cary Elwes in "Robin Hood: Men in Tights"?

There's a scene where Prince John asks why he should listen to him, and he responds "Unlike some Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent." The movie mostly sucked, but I loooooove Cary Elwes.

[SquireJons]

8. You hit the nail on the head

The Brits are beginning to sound as bad as the French on this cultural restoration thing. I agree that American culture is often shallow and accurate history isn't our thing, but they make a pretty poor case. U-571 I agree with, but the other two are just silly. They should have included The Patriot and Braveheart to make a more compelling case.

But it's not just us that like to bash the Brits. The Aussie's love to directly insult the English, any chance they get. And while we're at it, what about Monty Python? Are we to judge English history by 'The Holy Grail?'

[truebrit71]

13. I'm sorry but who are "The Brits" you refer to?

The pompous buggers that are mentioned in the articel are foks with far too much time on their hands...U571 was a blatant re-write no doubt, but Saving Private Ryan was about the American forces that invaded Omaha beach. Apparently these 'historians' forgot that the Brits went ashore at Sword and Juno. Not terriblt clever. As for Robin Hood he is a figure that is as much mythical as material so for anyone to proclaim that he has been portrayed inaccurately is laughable. That would be like saying that The Passion was historically accurate. How does anyone prove that? They went to the Jerusalem DMV and looked up his records?....gimme a break..

As for the Aussie bash of my fellow countrymen I have one word for them. "Convicts". That normally shuts them up. :-)

And I state for the record that the Holy Grail is indeed the most historically accurate movie ever made.

Cheers!

[Demonaut]

2. I agree, even Disney's translations of old european tales

are horrible and don't teach the readers of the moral of the stories

[markses]

3. Anthony Beevor's "Stalingrad" is terrific popular military history

Just a great read.

[MrPrax]

4. Great Flick...

The book is above par as well...

But the tank scenes are really harrowing...a battle shown from the losers perspective

[DivinBreuvage]

5. I agree, and "The Fall of Berlin 1945" is even better

although a horrifying tale. Those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind, as the good book says. Let that be a warning to all nations that wage aggressive war.

[SheilaT]

7. Hollywood usually gets a lot of stuff wrong.

I hardly know where to begin.

Movies set in another (earlier) century but everyone is a 20th (or 21st) Century person wearing old clothes.

A lot of it seems trivial and picky to complain about, but it all adds up.

I'll just give one example: Toward the end of the Oliver Stone Movie JFK, where Kevin Costner and Donald Sutherland (I hope I have the characters right) meet and discuss various things, the Sutherland character talks about how the phone service went out on November 22, 1963, as if that had been caused somehow by those who plotted JFK's assassination. Well, back then, all phone lines were land lines, and there were a limited number of them. When too many people tried calling -- and that day practically everyone in the country was trying to call someone -- what happens is that first the dial tone is slow to come on, and eventually disappears altogether. Nothing sinister. A simple overload of the system. It also would happen every Mother's Day, because everyone with a living mother was trying to call Mom that day.

I used to be a phone operator, and we couldn't convince the dialing public that we operators didn't have access to more phone lines than they did. In reality, we competed for the same phone lines.

Today, what with all the wireless stuff, there's a far larger number of phone lines available, but as I recall, on September 11, 2001, people had trouble making calls in and out of NYC, but I forget if it was the landlines of the cell phones that were the problem.

[drdtroit]

9. There were absolutely no cellphone signals

available here in the Apple and it took me until after 11pm. to be able to get out on a land line and let my family know that I was ok.

[NashVegas]

14. And Thank Goodness Some Aren't As Complacent About It as We Are

The American press doesn't say 'boo' when Hollywood throws history out the window, but foreigners will, especially when you're messing with their shit.

The worst example in recent memory was The Patriot with Mel Gibson, which painted the Brits as sadists. The British press blasted the movie, but here, the only stories regarding that were about how the British were offended, not a peep about how some New Englanders and others who grew up where the battles were fought were offended.

[Shallah Kali]

10. More complete article

Heritage chief accuses Hollywood of rewriting history to suit American tastes
Guardians of our history, worried by routine distortion of the past, appeal for more accuracy. Jonathan Thompson reports

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=546798

Quote:

He singled out films such as Saving Private Ryan, U-571 and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as prime offenders, and said that Warrior, Mel Gibson's forthcoming portrayal of the Iceni queen Boudicca was "bound to be ludicrously misleading". He appealed to Gibson - who recently directed The Passion of the Christ - to inject some accuracy into Warrior.

"One of my principal concerns is that the majority of children now leave school with the sketchiest of chronology about English history," said Dr Thurley, the former director of the Museum of London and a leading historian. "One place they turn to for that knowledge is films."

-----

I have to agree that hollywood takes too much liberty with history, any history not just British related. This is too bad because people end up thinking the movie is totally based on historical facts, that the events depicted actually happened, when things are instead fliped around any which way to suit the filmmaker. Movies tend to make more of an impression on people than what they learned in school as kids. This is why I enjoy watching 'History VS Hollywood' on The History Channel to help me know what is fact and what was fiction.

[Bridget Burke]

11. The historian's major complaint is with British education.

He claims children leave school with great gaps in their historic knowledge. Then the gaps are filled in with inaccurate "Hollywood" films. So the education problem needs to be addressed.

I agree about the deficiencies of the films. But, once upon a time, there was a British film industry. Funding is tough, but so much British talent has to leave the country to work in big films. While the British filmmakers plan the next cute vehicle for Hugh Grant.

[fedsron2us]

12. Sadly this is all too true

Schools have tended to teach history as a series of themes such as the 'Rise of Fascism' etc. Simple chronology is often neglected. As a consequence many pupils fail to understand that events occur in a particular order and that this is a key part of the whole historical process. This neglect is simply magnified by Hollywood which presents ludicrous scenarios of the sort that occurred in 'Braveheart' where it was suggested that William Wallace was the father of Edward III even though the former was executed in 1305 and the latter was born in 1312. Of course, Tony Blair is only too happy to neglect the study of British history as it fits in with New Labour's year zero mentality. In particular he does not want to be reminded of the great achievements of Clement Attlee's 1945 Labour government which so singularly eclipse anything done by his own administration. Like so many politicians he prefers to think of the past as 'heritage' that can be parceled up and sold to gullible tourists. Any Americans who come to Britain will find that they have to look long and hard for any memorials to the English radicals like Tom Paine whose ideas helped to foment the creation of the USA. These people have simply been air brushed out of our history. I suspect that the current incumbent of the White House would like to do something similar on the other side of the Atlantic.