HOLLYWOOD MYTH

[ALLISTAIR FORREST MACLEOD]

IT IS GREAT TO SEE THE REAL STORY AS OPPOSED TO THE HOLLYWOOD MYTH ABOUT THE OLD WEST.DISTORTING THE REAL FACTS SHOULD BE A CRIME.....THE TRUE STORY HAS ALWAYS BEEN MORE INTERESTING TO ME, AND I AM GLAD TO SEE THAT YOU FOLKS ARE KEEPING THE TRUE STORIES ALIVE AND WELL

[anthony martin]

  Allistair,

 Well,relatively speaking...even from the earliest days of the west there was a certain amount of mythologizing and even historians have their biases and the fables that they love but I know what you mean and you'll get more straight dope here than in a lot of other places.Welcome aboard!

    

[ALLISTAIR FORREST MACLEOD]

THE TRUE OLD WEST STORIES ARE MORE INTERESTING THAN WAS IS FABRICATED BY HOLLYWOOD, IT IS AMAZING HOW A PERSON WITH A TYPEWRITER CAN CHANGE FACTS INTO SOMETHING THAT IS BELIEVED BY MANY

[Stan H]

Was it Buntline that said:

When the myth is better than the truth, print the myth.

[ChipProf]

Not exactly, Stan.  It was Dorothy Johnson, the Montana author of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, who wrote:

When the fact becomes legend, print the legend.

[Stan H]

Well, close enough I guess. You all get my meaning

[anthony martin]

  Stan,

     ChipProf pointed out that you were slightly mythaken.Yeah,even in the 1870's the west was being turned into a myth-look at all those dime novels and the wild west shows big and small that flourished thereafter.The business of the history of the old west would be comparatively small potatos without the mythic dimension.

[Bungalo Bill]

As a person with tangential ties to Hollywood and having delved into screenwriting, I have to say that we should not really blame the movies for distorting history.  Movies are not meant to be documentaries but rather a form of entetainment.  Condensing time or melding different people into a single character are but two ways writers attempt to simplify a story or make it shorter.  One of the reasons Wyatt Earp is not as popular as Tombstone is that it is three hours long.

Don't get me wrong; I appreciate accuracy as much as anyone. But when I watch a movie based on historical characters, I know enough to watch it for entertainment and not a history lesson.  Sometimes they do go too far, though. I agree.  It pained me to see James Earp portrayed as the youngest brother and (presumably) murdered by Ike and Old Man Clanton in My Darling Clementine, but I am pretty sure that was done to establish a reason for the hatred between the Earps and the Clantons.  A quick and dirty plot device replacing the convoluted story of the actual happenings that to this day are still argued and speculated.

And as has already been pointed out, written records don't always tell the truth.  Wyatt Earp's and Bat Masterson's descriptions of Doc Holliday hardly read like the same person is being described.

[Old Geezer]

Hey, Stan H........Buntline must have spent some time in Texas ! !

[Margaret-Anne Moore]

I heard the following in a documentary on John Ford:  WHEN HISTORY AND LEGEND COLLIDE, KEEP THE LEGEND!