"Watching The Lord of the Rings” by Christopher Vogler

Sometimes I like to see a movie twice; once to watch the movie, and once to watch the audience. You can learn a lot from watching the audience, how involved they are, how restless, how they breathe, when they lean over to talk to each other, when they don’t understand something.

I saw “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” for the first time early in the movie’s run, in a packed house, and concentrated on watching the movie. Watching movies is an uneasy process for me, since I am observing with a lot of agendas most movie-goers don’t have. I am watching professionally, both as a writer judging a fellow of the craft and as a worker in the film industry who needs to keep up on trends and be able to debate points with colleagues and bosses. Every movie becomes a tool or a weapon whose success or failure you use to prove your point and defend the movie you want to make. Every movie is evidence. I also watch with the eye of a teacher and lecturer and have to keep track of plot points and running times and earmark potential clips to illustrate ideas I talk about. To top it off, I’m scanning every movie for points of correspondence with my theories about the Hero’s Journey and the archetypes that I see pervading everything. I’m especially interested in things that seem to contradict, plot elements or editing choices that defy either my perceived patterns or Hollywood’s unwritten but standardized code of story development.

“The Fellowship of the Ring” is so loaded with Hero’s Journey “evidence” that I don’t need to dwell there. Suffice it to say that reading the books as a teenager was one of my first experiences of modern-day myth-making, showing me how a writer could revive the potency of mythic patterns. When I was trying to work out and systematize those patterns for myself in my twenties and thirties, “The Lord of the Rings” was a major source of orientation, providing vivid examples of the heroic way stations such as the selection of the hero in the Ordinary World, the Call to Adventure, the fateful meeting with a Mentor, and so on. It’s all there, big and obvious, in fact so obvious that it must have been a worry for the filmmakers. Because everyone from George Lucas to He-Man, Master of the Universe to Dungeons and Dragons has been feasting all these years on the archetypal imagery in LOTR, mining its icons of demons and dwarfs and wizards with pointy hats, wouldn’t it seem, well, a little old hat?

It made over 300 million dollars in its first run, so I guess not. Timing is everything, and they may have been lucky to come along at a time when the world imagination was bruised by reality and desperately needed the Tiger Balm of myth to ease its pain. I like to think the movie would have worked at any time because there was a commitment, in the books and in the faithful adaptation, to giving depth and dimension to the archetypes that have been turned into clichés by other hands.

What was interesting was how the movie seems to challenge some of the unwritten rules of Hollywood development. These are truisms that everyone quickly learns and most of the time they are true and useful, but like any convention they can stultify creativity. There will always be an embattled borderline between common sense and artistic risk-taking.

It’s hard to imagine “The Fellowship of the Ring” surviving a conventional Hollywood development meeting. For one thing, it doesn’t have a “happy ending” and in fact leaves matters unresolved in a way that is quite risky. The filmmakers were gambling that people were willing to wait three years to resolve an overall dramatic question: Will Frodo resist temptation and survive Orc attacks to fulfill his mission? It’s more radical than the story links that Lucas plants in the Star Wars movies, like Darth Vader surviving the Death Star battle or Luke Skywalker getting a wink from Princess Leia that lets you know there’ll be a sequel. Lucas ends each movie on an upbeat, celebratory note, evoking a sense of community or group spirit. By contrast, at the end of “Fellowship” the heroic team is scattered and grieving, the principal hero isolated and uncertain. Not the sort of thing that reassures movie executives. I can hear the dialogue in the typical; Hollywood story meeting: “The characters keep talking about this place Mordor for 125 pages and you’re telling me we don’t even get there until the third movie?!”

Another element that would have provoked vigorous objections in a conventional story meeting is the fact that there are two of everything. What I noticed on the first viewing was how polarized this story is, how shot through with duality, pairing and twinning. It’s not only split into the two obvious camps of good and evil but further polarized into pairs and twins at every level, the ultimate buddy picture. There are two pairs of Hobbit adventurers, two lanky-haired human warrior nobles, two white-bearded wizards, two races of monstrous Orc warriors, two otherworldly women, and two elaborate sets depicting shimmering Elvish dreamworlds. Even the taciturn elf Legolas and the sputtering dwarf Gimli make a Mutt and Jeff pairing of opposites.

All this doubling would probably be the first thing conventionally-minded execs would want to change. “Hm. We have two of everything. Why don’t we combine the two human warriors into one guy? And just have one girl. And one monster. And one set.”

Thankfully the development of “The Lord of the Rings” went on mostly outside the Hollywood arena, for doubling and twinning have their value. Ask Buñuel, ask Hitchcock. In movies like “That Obscure Object of Desire” or “Strangers on a Train” they used döppelgangers to give resonance and a sense of life’s mystery to their works. Polarization and doubling are great engines of conflict, allowing the audience to experience contrasting reactions by different characters to the same situation and tugging on conflicting drives and desires within each person viewing the story.

Hollywood’s cookie-cutter narrative conventions don’t apply when a film has a broader vision. The fellowship of artists and craftspeople who brought forth this version of “The Lord of the Rings” are working, like Lucas in the “Star Wars” movies, on an epic canvas. An epic is a series of adventures linked together by a single great struggle or quest, some unanswered question weaving many threads of narrative into a coherent tapestry that will bear being told over a long period of time. Repetition, doubling, twinning, echoing and mirroring are the instruments of epic, bringing out the music and magic power of names and probing the mysteries of identity. Hollywood thinking may say the doubling is redundant, but an epic marches to a different heartbeat.

The episodes or chapters of an epic like “The Lord of the Rings” may not require the usual neatly wrapped but often sterile resolution of Hollywood conventional thinking. The filmmakers were signaling the audience that it was going to be a long ride with a bigger vision than a single blockbuster Friday night opening.

Wait; doesn’t this long-term storytelling fly in the face of the famous short attention span of modern audiences? Don’t they want instant gratification? Maybe the impatient choppiness of current entertainment and the breathless pace of technology have generated a desire for something to countervail, something patient and deep, something willing to work in you over a long time, something to link the parts of your life. It took three Christmas seasons to unfold the full epic of “Lord of the Rings” and with “Star Wars,” most of our lifetimes. Audiences, young and old, are saying “That’s OK. We like that once in awhile.” There’s something reassuring about the artist who thinks we’re going to live long enough to enjoy all this story in the post 9-11 world.

The repetition, the doubling, and the long strands of inter-connected narrative all mean something. They say that life is a series of cycles, and that we will likely meet the same kinds of archetypal guardians, opponents and allies at various stages along the way. But the nature of the conflicts changes as you age and grow over the span of an epic. Reading “The Lord of the Rings” in my 20s, I was inspired by its idealism but also terrified by its vision of middle life and old age as a patient, plodding struggle against the mundane grinding of evil. Seeing the movie meant something else to me from my current perspective, around the corner of age fifty, reminding me that the raw intensity of youthful dreams still has purity and power. At the same time I felt the death of comrades in the movie keenly, for comrades have started to fall around me, and I looked to the story for the courage to continue the struggle without them.

Like any good mythic cycle, J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” keeps drawing parallels appropriate to every time and place. In creating the story, Tolkien was reacting to the hammer blows of industrial revolution and world war on his beloved English countryside. In the 1950s the books seemed like a prediction of the uneasy struggles of the Cold War, and in later decades strangely reflected both the trippy odysseys of many hippies and the harrowing battle experience of grunts in Vietnam. Today, the first installment of the movie version resonated with the titanic, polarizing struggle against terrorism and, like the events of Sept. 11, invited consideration of what’s human, heroic, and evil in our fellow men. The image of the twin towers shadowed the movie (and all movies for awhile) like a ghost, forcefully brought to mind by the looming presence of Saruman’s dark tower, a true axis of evil. Eerily, Tolkien titled the second book in his trilogy “The Two Towers”, providing the title for the second episode of the Trilogy.

My first viewing of “The Fellowship of the Ring” had another impact on me, quite a physical one. It gave me a complete spinal adjustment, so bone-shakingly righteous was the battle against the monsters in the depths of Moria Mines. I actually felt my vertebrae snapping into alignment, making eights buck admission seem like a bargain compared to a session with the chiropractor. It was the most physical catharsis I’ve had in the movies in years.

I depend a lot on bodily reactions to evaluate a movie or a script. My mentor, popularizer of myth Joseph Campbell, used to say the archetypes, symbols, and narrative patterns of myth operate on the organs of the body, triggering physiological reactions. When I had to evaluate a great many scripts as part of the studio assembly line, I depended on my body to tell me whether the things were any good or not. My criterion became “It must stimulate two organs of my body to get a positive recommendation” and when I reported verbally to executives on scripts I’d read I would describe its physical effect on me – it made my blood run cold, it made my heart pound, I choked up, I laughed out loud, etc.

So, hoping for another spinal crack, I came back a second time later in the run of the movie, but instead of a lumbar release I got to see how the movie was playing for young American manhood. This was my viewing to watch the audience.

The theatre was empty but for me and a scattering of young males who reflected the ethnic diversity of Los Angeles, prime cannon fodder for the war against terrorism. I sensed they were either just out of the military or thinking about signing up; there was a certain professionalism about their running critique of the movie.

Since it was just us guys in the theatre they felt free to loosen up and react loudly and enthusiastically, in short, they were a good audience. It’s as close as I can get in L.A. to the conviviality and involvement of a pre-Giuliani 42nd St. grind house where the audience talked back to Clint Eastwood and Sly Stallone.

With warrior eyes, the eyes of young men who had survived the streets of L.A., my audience rated the weapons and tactics of the little band of brothers on the screen. The Elf Legolas, looking like a slender surfer dude, got top marks for his awesome archery, handling his bow like a machine gun and even flinging an arrow bare-handed in a pinch. A good man to have on your squad. They gave Boromir his props for the way he went down fighting impossible odds, like Roland in the pass of Roncesvalles or the doomed Rangers in Mogadishu.

My fellow movie-goers weren’t just hooting and hollering through the battles, however. They were struck to respectful silence by the spell of Elvish magic and the ethereal radiance of the two Elf women, Arwen and Galadriel, portraits of idealized womanhood such as Henry V’s knights would paint on the inner surface of their shields. When the gallant Arwen defied the Ringwraiths at the river crossing, the young could-be warriors in the darkened theatre had to furtively dab the corners of their eyes. Tears fell again as Samwise Gamgee grieved over his comrades’ capture and death and the utter failure of his mission. The characters of fantasy didn’t seem so distant from the lives and emotions of these young men, who might soon being facing opponents no less dangerous than those on the screen.

Clearly, the revival of Tolkien’s mythic creation in this time of terrorism was serving the purpose the myths have always served, to present role models and ideals, to give signal lessons in tragedy and triumph, to give orientation and anchorage in the stormy seas of life. It’s also a pretty good manual of close combat at the squad level. My audience might have been escaping into a fantasy, but they also were drinking up this stuff with an eye on reality, looking for ways to carry themselves in battle and on the street.

“The Lord of the Rings” speaks of vast conflict and shattering polarization, but tells us there is power too in unity, and that behind the masks of dualism we are one. People of good will can band together like the heroes of the tale, putting aside differences in common cause, trying to make the world a little better despite immense forces to the contrary. Against darkness and apparent evil, we have the shield of fellowship and the comfort of unity and community.

As the legend says, “One Ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.” We were certainly bound in the darkness, me and that afternoon’s audience for the first chapter of “The Lord of the Rings,” fellow travelers on a long journey together, seeking meaning for our shadowed world in the mirror of a myth, just as humans have always done.

"On the Firing Line" by Christoper Vogler

A behind-the-scenes look at the development of THE THIN RED LINE, Terrence Malick's acclaimed comeback film.

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My four-and-a-half-year run as a development executive at Fox 2000 led me into some fascinating and varied arenas of story, from a seven million dollar labor of love (SOUL FOOD) all the way to a $100 million special effects inferno (VOLCANO). But undoubtedly the highlight of that period was the opportunity to work on Terrence Malick’s filmed essay on war, THE THIN RED LINE.

Fox 2000 is a division of 20th Century Fox, producing feature films under the direction of Laura Ziskin, president of production, an experienced producer of quality films like NO WAY OUT, THE DOCTOR, HERO, TO DIE FOR, and PRETTY WOMAN. Fox 2000 was started in 1994 to expand Fox’s slate of feature films.

At some point in 1997 I was delighted to learn that Ziskin had decided to support Terrence Malick’s comeback film, an adaptation of James Jones’ epic novel of World War II, THE THIN RED LINE. Malick, a famous recluse known and admired for two artful feature films from the early 70s, BADLANDS and DAYS OF HEAVEN, had virtually disappeared from Hollywood’s scope for twenty years. Now he was back, with an ambitious project to film Jones’ complex, controversial novel, a semi-autobiographical account of his experiences in the battle of Guadalcanal.

We got into the development rather late, after Malick had already been working on the script for many years. We contributed notes and suggestions about editing the script, which was about 180 pages long when we first saw it. It was a unique document, unlike any other screenplay I had ever seen. It included long descriptions of action and patches of inner monologue, detailing the tortured thought processes of the men under stress. As I discovered when I read Jones’ novel, Malick had in effect transcribed large portions of the book, simply changing the narrative to present tense. The effect was a dense and challenging read. It was difficult to sort out the many characters. Some had similar names, a feature of Jones' book. Jones seemed to be suggesting that the soldiers were almost interchangeable units, at least from the Army’s point of view. Again, the characters were hard to sort out because some of them weren’t in the story for very long before being shot to pieces.

This was a script that had to be read more than once. After several readings it began to make sense and the major themes and character relationships began to emerge.

My first assignment was to read the novel of "The Thin Red Line" and compare it to the script, so the studio would know what characters and situations were taken from the book and what Malick had invented, combined or cut out. James Jones is a wonderful writer who was able to project himself convincingly into the minds of many characters, breaking the basic novel-writing rule about sticking to one point of view. At the end of that book you're beginning to get some idea of just what hell those young soldiers went through.

I wrote a memo on what I thought the major themes were, basically that the young men became a kind of family under the intense stresses of combat. The army and the war try to dehumanize them and they must fight to maintain their individuality.

My second assignment was to prepare a briefing document that described the military situation at Guadalcanal and its importance in the war. Neither Malick nor James Jones spent much time setting the campaign into its historical context, preferring to dramatize the disorienting subjective experience of troops thrown into combat with little motivation or preparation. I learned that this was the first major amphibious landing by U.S. troops, and America’s first opportunity to respond in force to the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. In less than a year, the U.S. geared up its military and launched the Pacific campaign at Guadalcanal, first in a chain of islands that would have to conquered to push the Japanese back to their homeland.

Next we began to send notes to Malick and the production crew who were just about to start shooting in northern Australia. These notes presented suggestions for trimming the script, combining and eliminating characters to emphasize certain themes and relationships. Malick took these suggestions with good grace and continually strove to streamline the unwieldy but fascinating script. While looking for characters to cut, we all had our favorite characters whose presence we fought for, like Mazzi and Tills, two G.I.s who provided some comic relief.

From the beginning of our involvement, we backed Malick as a respected artist and trusted his instincts. Malick added some scenes at the beginning that are not found in the book. These involve Jim Caviezel's character, the wandering rifleman Witt, and show him going AWOL and living with a native tribe, to explain the kind of trouble that Witt got himself into, and set the tone of contrast between the peaceful, beautiful village life and the horror of war.

It was a little worrying because the movie could have turned into a HEAVEN’S GATE or APOCALYPSE NOW situation where a great artist struggles to find a form and the production never comes to an end. But we trusted Malick to make it into a beautiful design, and in fact he not only produced a powerful film, he came in on time and on budget.

Once the picture started shooting, my job was to view the dailies as they came in on videotape. This was a huge job because Malick had at least two crews shooting at all times. He did a lot of improvising with Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and the others while a second unit was out shooting butterflies, shadows, and explosions.

He seemed to be a gentle, patient director who guided and calmed the actors with the simplest directions possible. "More scared," he would say, "As scared as you've ever been in your life.”

He shot a tremendous amount of film, enough, as Nick Nolte has said, to make a whole other movie without duplicating any of the footage. Sadly, some wonderful performances and ideas had to be cut, because something had to go. There was simply too much story, and everyone knew it all along, including Malick.

The part of Fife, the scrawny company clerk played by Adrian Brody, was a major element of the story in the book and the script, and yet was cut down to two lines in the finished movie. In the dailies we saw a wonderful friendship between Fife and Witt being tested by battle, and Fife's loyalty to his fellow soldiers driving him to return to the front lines even when wounded and entitled to go back to the States. All of that was gone, including Fife getting into fights with other GIs as he developed his self-esteem, getting wounded, and being questioned by an Army doctor.

I felt terrible for the actors who worked so hard on scenes that didn't make it into the movie. Adrian Brody, with his quizzical looks and talent for comedy, created a person who was very real to me, and it didn't feel right to see the movie without him. There were other characters, just as fully realized, who had to be cut.

The final product was an amazing movie, a harrowing view into the hell of combat. Reviews were mixed and the box office was disappointing to those of us who worked on it. But few could disagree that Malick had brought forth a haunting visual masterpiece. I feel there are other movies waiting to be made in the material shot for THE THIN RED LINE and I'd love to see alternate versions someday. Wouldn't it be an interesting experiment for a studio to finance the re-editing of the material shot for a film like this? Perhaps the same director could come back in a few years and re-edit his own material, as has been done in a few cases.  Or, if he happened to be in a generous mood, the director might allow his editor to exhibit his preferred cut, or even allow some other director to re-edit his raw footage into a totally new film. Maybe there’s another THIN RED LINE sitting in film cans in a vault somewhere, with equally brilliant performances and stunning visuals waiting to be edited into another masterpiece.

What's the Big Deal?
article by Christopher Vogler
April 12, 2007

Hollywood is a sink-or-swim industry where they rarely take time to teach you anything. But I once got a useful lesson early in my career when I was a reader for Orion Pictures.  Our story editor called a meeting of the readers to tell us none of us had any idea what a scene was.  I was surprised; I thought I knew.  A scene is a short piece of a movie, taking place in one location and one span of time, in which some action takes place or some information is given. 

Wrong, she said.  And proceeded to explain that a scene is a business deal.  It may not involve money but it will always involve some change in the contract between characters or in the balance of power.  It’s a transaction, in which two or more people enter with one kind of deal between them, and negotiate or battle until a new deal has been cut, at which point the scene should end. 

It could be the reversal of a power structure.  The underdog seizes power by blackmail.  Or it could be the forging of a new alliance or enmity.  Two people who hated each other make a new deal to work together in a threatening situation.  A boy asks a girl out and she accepts or rejects his offer.  Two gangsters make an alliance to rub out a rival.  A mob forces a sheriff to turn a man over for lynching.  The meat of the scene is the negotiation to arrive at the new deal, and when the deal is cut, the scene is over, period.  If there’s no new deal, it’s not a scene, or at least it’s not a scene that’s pulling its weight in the script.  It’s a candidate either for cutting or for rewriting, to include some significant exchange of power.

The story editor pointed out that many writers don’t know what a scene is, either, and put in non-scenes that are just there “to build character” or to get across exposition.  They don’t know when to begin and end a scene, wasting time with introductions and chit-chat and dragging the scene out long after the transaction has been concluded.  The scene is the deal.  When the deal is done, get off the stage.    

I found this principle very useful in pinning down the essence of a scene, and I found it also works at a macro level in identifying the bigger issues in a script, for every story is the re-negotiation of a major deal, a contract between opposing forces in society.  

Romantic comedies are a re-negotiation of the contract between men and women.  Myths, religious stories, and fantasies rework the compact between humans and the greater forces at play in the universe.  The terms of the uneasy balance between good and evil are re-evaluated in every superhero adventure and story of moral dilemma.  The climax of many movies is a courtroom judgment that lays out a new agreement, passing sentence on a wrongdoer, proclaiming someone’s innocence, or dictating terms of a disputed transaction.  In all cases, we go in with one deal and we come out with a new deal having been cut.

Knowing when the big deal of the movie has been cut tells you when the movie should be over.  Many movies today go on long after they have truly ended, as far as the audience is concerned.  They know it’s over when the last term of the deal has been decided, and they get restless if the filmmaker goes on with extra flourishes and codas and flashforwards to ten years later, etc.

And at the most macro level of all, storytelling itself is a deal.  It’s a contract between you and your audience.  The terms of the deal are these:  They agree to give you something of considerable value--their money--but much more importantly, their time.  You are asking them to pay attention to you and you only for ninety minutes.  Think about that!  Focused attention has always been one of the rarest and most valuable commodities in the universe, and it’s even truer today, when people have so many things vying for their attention.  So for them to give you even a few minutes of their focus is huge stakes to put on the table, worth much more than the ten bucks or so they shell out, and therefore you’d better come up with something really good to fulfill your part of the bargain. 

There are many ways to fulfill that contract.  I used to think the “Hero’s Journey” model that I describe in my book THE WRITER’S JOURNEY was an absolute necessity.  I still think it is the most reliable way to honor the terms of the deal with the audience, providing them with a metaphor for their lives that includes a taste of death and transformation.  They tend to read it into any story anyhow, and it’s actually hard to tell a story without including some of its elements. 

But I’ve come to see it’s not the only way to hold up your end of the deal.  At a minimum, you must be entertaining, in the original sense of the word, to hold their attention with something a little novel, shocking, surprising, or suspenseful.  Be sensational; that is, appeal to their sensations, give them something sensual or visceral, some sensation that they can feel in the organs of their bodies, like speed, movement, terror, sexiness. 

A good ride to another place and time can fulfill the contract.  I don’t remember being moved much by the story of THE ABYSS, but I felt well repaid by being taken to a cool dark place under the sea for two hours on a hot summer afternoon.  Giving them stars they like in appealing combinations or new costumes is a way the studios have always used to uphold their deal with the public.  If you loved Kevin Costner in his cavalry outfit, you’ll love him in tights as Robin Hood.  Sheer novelty weighs heavily with audiences, justifying the investment of their time and attention.  It’s worth a lot to people to be able to talk about the movie everyone’s buzzing about, be it PULP FICTION, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, or 300.  Fulfill a deep wish the audience has, to see the dinosaurs walk again in JURASSIC PARK, or to fly and wield superpowers in SUPERMAN.  The audience will forgive a lot of story problems and plot holes if other terms of the contract are satisfied.

At first, I resisted the idea that it’s all wheeling and dealing. It can’t just be about business, can it?  But I came to see it is, in a way.  From the Bible on down, we have lived by our contracts, for the Bible is an account of the deals made between God and his creation.  We all have an unwritten deal with the rest of society, called the social contract, to behave ourselves in return for our freedom and relative safety.  The essential documents of our civilization are contracts, agreements made or statements declaring the terms of a new deal, from Hammurabi’s Code and the marriage contract to the Bill of Rights. 

Just be sure when you tell your story that you’ve thought about “What’s the deal going down here?” in every scene and “What’s the big deal?” of the whole story.  Think of the attention and time your clients, your audience, have put on the table, and try to fulfill your part of the bargain with something that at least entertains them, stimulates and amuses them, and maybe even transforms them a little bit.

Henry Ford said it is bunk. Napoleon said it is a set of lies, agreed upon. But history, as depicted in motion pictures, can revive interest in people and events which may otherwise remain generally overlooked.

In the recent past, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman won the Golden Globe award for his script about the schizophrenic, mathematical genius John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, based on the book by Sylvia Nasar. The biopic posed historical challenges, as Nash had in reality divorced his wife Alicia before returning to her, had a child out of wedlock and homosexual tendencies. Miramax Pictures allegedly participated in a campaign to discredit the accuracy of A Beautiful Mind, and by association, Universal.

But as Goldsman explained, "The architecture was really genius, madness, Nobel Prize." As for the enduring commitment between Nash and Alicia, he acknowledged, "They divorced, then they lived together for decades. Then, they remarried. So, the fact of John and Alicia is that they started married and ended married ... he was in Europe for a year. That's not the movie either, you know what I mean? There's certainly compression".

Perhaps Gregory Allan Howard had even more of a daunting task concerning economy of storytelling, as he is credited with the story and wrote the original draft for Ali, about one of the most recognizable people on the planet. "What I wrote was a father and son story," says Howard, one which concentrated on Muhammed Ali's life from age 12 to 40, as opposed to the decade covered in the film.

Howard prefers relying on interviewing to get at historical truth, a technique which proved quite effective when sixty interviews resulted in his script about a 1971 football team helping to integrate Alexandria, Virginia in Remember the Titans. He feels Hollywood generally fails at biopics. "If you have a true story, you should try to adhere to it above the 50 percent level, otherwise there is no point. You might as well just make everything up."

When Richard Eyre co-wrote and directed Iris, he knew that most viewers would not be familiar with author and philosopher Iris Murdoch, her battle with Alzheimer's disease or the book Elegy for Iris, which her husband, John Bayley wrote about their life together. The film depicts Murdoch both young and old, with the help of Kate Winslet and Dame Judy Dench. "I never saw it as a biographical picture," Eyre contends. "I saw it as a relationship and the story of the young and the old (Murdoch) was a necessary device ..."

Eyre elucidated Murdoch's views through a series of lectures in the film, but realizes that an emotional truth is often a substitute for an historical event. "I'm not being entirely facetious where I say certain elements of it are not biographically true, in the literal sense. You know, who knows what goes on in private in a marriage?"

As resident historian for the series History Vs. Hollywood on the History Channel, Steve Gillon gives Hollywood high marks on its recent biopics. "Historians have not been involved enough in using the opportunity of these historical films to engage the public in a larger debate about the events that are described in film." As an author specializing in post-New Deal America and a professor at the University of Oklahoma, Gillon has consulted on the History Channel's examination of films like The Patriot, U-571, 13 Days and their powerful two hour doc, The True Story of Black Hawk Down.

"The most difficult question a historian has to grapple with is causation, is what leads people to do the things they do ... when you take that 300 or 400 page book and try to turn it into a film that is dramatic and can reach a wide audience, you make further compromises to the complexity of the personality you can present."

Gillon, whose books include That's Not What We Meant to Do, examining legislation which achieved the opposite of its intended effect, lays out clearly the battle lines between historians and historical films: "I think historians have to understand the requirements of filmmaking, sort of the limitations...and the need and desire to reach a wider audience. And filmmakers also need to understand the importance of presenting as much as possible a portrait that's historically accurate."