ST. PETERSBURG (FL)
Poynter
December 5, 2018
BY Bill MItchell ·
The new movie about Gary Hart’s demise at the hands of the Miami Herald, “The Front Runner,” challenges media scrutiny of the personal lives of politicians as a distraction from what really matters.
Fair enough. I happen to believe the Herald did the right thing with that story, but it’s certainly a topic worthy of the debate the film is provoking.
But here’s a challenge to Hollywood: Isn’t it time you cleaned up your sloppy approach to the fiction embedded in films based on true stories and featuring the names of real people?
I recognize you’re in the entertainment business, not the news business, and that audiences increasingly demand high drama and neatly tied loose ends. It’s the muddling of history that bothers me, and I believe you could do less of that without sacrificing audience engagement.
It’s difficult to imagine a better time than now to pay closer attention to the facts of the matter — focused on real as opposed to imagined history — as we stumble our way through the fog of alternative facts and White House mendacity.
“The Front Runner” has prompted lots of discussion about the relevance of a candidate’s sex life, comparisons with coverage of President Trump’s sexcapades, even the possibility of Hart being set up by a Republican dirty trickster. All good.
But it was the question of what’s real and what’s not that was on my mind as I took my seat in a downtown Boston theater one day last week to watch the new film based on the Herald’s 1987 surveillance of Hart and Donna Rice, the 29 year-old woman he invited to his Capitol Hill townhouse.
Some of the best and worst reflections of the “true story, real people” genre were illustrated with the “Spotlight” movie I viewed three years ago in the same theater. The Oscar-winning account of the Boston Globe’s investigation of clergy sexual abuse managed to capture several Globe staffers with uncanny accuracy. At the same time, it distorted the role of another, Stephen Kurkjian, and unfairly savaged the reputation of a PR guy named Jack Dunn.
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