History Into Fiction

One of the challenges for a historical novelist or screenwriter is knowing when it’s time to move from research to the blank page.

Determined to tell the story of Napoleon, the late director Stanley Kubrick spent two years gathering background information for what he believed would be “the greatest movie ever made.” Yet the more he delved into his subject, the more he became swallowed up by the sheer vastness and enigma of the French general and emperor. As a result, Kubrick’s obsession never made it to the screen, but the surviving relics of his Sisyphean labors have now been collected for our benefit.

Kubrick expert Frederic Raphael, a prolific novelist and screenwriter, has applauded this effort in his review in The Wall Street Journal (August 13, 2011) of Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made, a collection of the director’s notes and files edited by Alison Castle.

According to Taschen–the publisher of this massive undertaking of ten books totaling 2874 pages–film buffs had long waited for Kubrick’s film on Napoleon, which was slated to go into production after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Enlisting dozens of assistants and an Oxford don, the director accumulated nearly 15,000 location scouting photographs and 17,000 slides of Napoleonic imagery.

Both M.G.M. and United Artists, however, decided at the time that historical epics were no longer marketable, and Kubrick never realized his dream.

“The more material [Kubrick] perused, the more he thought he needed,” said Raphael in his review. He also observed that “Kubrick exhibited an appetite for learning that smacks of neurotic postponement.”

Kubrick agonized over many of the conundrums that plague writers of historical fiction, including how to depict 19th century French characters speaking in English without making them sound apocryphal or anachronistic.

Raphael concluded that “it was always going to be impossible to cram everything onto the screen. But why did he bother creating from whole cloth when, for instance, Vincent Cronin’s one-volume life of Napoleon offered quite enough material on which to build an imaginative script?”

Historical novelists who become immersed in their subject know all too well the answer to that question.

In a revealing Question and Answer exchange on March 24 with Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times, both the producer and the writer of “The Kennedys” vigorously countered charges that the project had strayed from the historical record.

The controversial miniseries about the famous political family was dropped by the History Channel in January amid reports that members of the Kennedys had tried to halt it. ReelzChannel, another cable network, picked up the series and will run it starting April 3.

In the interview, producer Joel Surnow and writer Stephen Kronish–both veterans of the popular television show “24″–explore the usual flash points that arise in any artistic endeavor that seeks to recreate history, particular of events still relatively recent: Political and ideological leanings of the creators; the use of composite characters and imagined dialogue; the compression and rearrangement of time to accommodate the demands of the mythic structure an audience subconsciously expects.

Kronish rejects the notion that a liberal should not be allowed to write about conservative icons, and vice versa.

Both Kronish and Surnow agree that biopics by necessity have to use some reconstruction for gaps in the historical annals. But they insist that the scenes created for their series had links to documented incidents, even if the exact words used and reactions of the participants were not recorded verbatim.

Surnow denies the History Channel’s assertion that the “dramatic interpretation” of the miniseries ultimately delivered “is not a fit for the History brand.” He said that all eight scripts for the series were approved by the historian hired by the network to consult on the project.

The Itzkoff interview with Surnow and Kronish is sobering reading for any historical novelist or screenwriter who hopes to recreate an event from American history that is still charged with political overtones.

It’s Oscar season, and the latest nominated movie to come under the harsh scrutiny of historians and cultural commentators is The King’s Speech.

The UK-produced film tells the story of Prince Albert, the Duke of York’s struggle to overcome his speech impediment in preparation for taking the throne during the those tense days leading up to World War II.

The principal duelists this time are the movie’s screenwriter, David Seidler, and journalist-essayist Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens takes issue with what he considers the movie’s whitewashing of Winston Churchill’s early vacillation in confronting the Nazi threat in an effort to keep King Edward VIII on the throne.

The thrusts and parries in this argument are fascinating and instructive on the inevitable tensions and competing demands when filmmakers take on the challenge of portraying historical figures. In order, the briefs are as follows:

1) Christopher Hitchens’s review of the film at Slate.com;

2) David Seidler’s defense of his treatment of history in an interview with
Huffington Post blogger Patricia Zohn; and

3) Hitchens’s rebuttal to Seidler.