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The Trial of the Chicago 7: fact v drama | The Economist

“The Trial of the Chicago 7” has been nominated for six Oscars. Aaron Sorkin, the film’s screenwriter and director, speaks to The Economist about the tension between historical accuracy and compelling drama.

00:00 - The Trial of the Chicago 7
00:51 - Why is the story still so relevant?
01:34 - How to adapt real events into drama
02:40 - Why the film deviates from historical fact
04:41 - Historical accuracy v artistic truth
05:41 - Altering events in historical drama v fake news

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The new economics of blockbuster films: https://econ.st/3fJETR8

Read our article about “The Crown” and the issue of historical accuracy: https://econ.st/2PFms5i

How the pandemic has shaken up the movie business: https://econ.st/3g20Lrd

Covid-19 and controversy at the Golden Globes: https://econ.st/3uqXnKj

The power of protest and the legacy of George Floyd: https://econ.st/3upkVyY

How history repeated itself in protests at the death of George Floyd: https://econ.st/3uvDDoI

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44 comments

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  1. Toms Done

    Yikes, I get scared when they start talking about "truth vs. accuracy"!

    1. Isaac Flett

      Yeah I can accept truth coming through without perfect accuracy, but the idea of truth being obscured by accuracy is kinda scary.

    2. Bastard Owl

      Exactly. His explanation wasn't for truth either; it was for what he thought were the most salient aspects of the story and the fact that he doesn't seem to understand the difference is terrifying. This "my truth, your truth" nonsense needs to be scrubbed from the vernacular as soon as possible.

  2. Carolina Lenis

    The difference between a real story based movie and a documentary ???? Excellent film.

    1. BLR Brazil

      No Carolina, it is entertainment at the cost of information, or rather, the dangerous distorting of information to fulfill a propaganda agenda that many people will assume is correct.

    2. Carolina Lenis

      @BLR Brazil I would agree if we were talking about important and verified sources of information like a newspaper, a documentary that claims to be informative. But we are talking about a movie. I think it is our responsibility to fact-check and not to believe everything we see on TV. I agree that a warning should be displayed about the changes made but that's about it 🙂

    3. BLR Brazil

      @Carolina Lenis: I agree with you about the responsibility Carolina. But don't underestimate the power of the image to affect people's thinking and opinions. Look at how the cowboy films painted the native Americans as evil savages and Latins as lazy and treacherous, until other film-makers started to show another side. But that first side influenced the opinions of a whole generation. And people tend to take anything 'historical' as portraying a realistic picture of reality at the time, so it is fertile ground for revisionists and propagandists.

    4. Carolina Lenis

      @BLR Brazil I agree with you. However I don't see it being applied in this particular movie. But someone could see it very differently 🙂

  3. Nathan Ngumi

    Interesting…

  4. Bilal Shamim

    Please keep in mind that the economist is a pro neo-liberal publication, so they have a bias in watching this movie.

    1. C R

      True but they at least interview both sides unlike Fox or CNN.

    2. BLR Brazil

      Well I rather think The Economist has helped Sorkin to destroy the integrity of his film here. It is clearly a propaganda piece in the guise of history.

    3. J Oliver

      It was proven CNN doesnt show both sides in the massive settlement of nick sandman.

  5. David Malone

    I think he just explained why documentaries are far more interesting than movies. If a story is worth telling then it is let down by factual alterations to heighten drama. Although Sorkin makes a case for his decisions as an artist, the finished product is typically dished up as true account.

    1. BLR Brazil

      The cinema is increasingly presenting travesties of history and claiming they are based on fact. And they know that most people will not go away and investigate the truth of the matter, but will mentally register what they have seen as 'probably how it was', especially if the travesty is entertaining and embellished with sharp humour, like the appalling "The Favourite". Even award contender "Ammonite" built a story about a not so distant historical figure around a basic premise for which there is absolutely no record or evidence.

    2. David Malone

      @BLR Brazil Yep, film adaptations of novels are generally annoying but when they rework history to tell a completely different story filmmaking becomes a lazy art form.

  6. Juan Francisco Mollinedo

    Hahaha ha… "Artistic truth"…. That's how you lie and make propaganda out of facts.. Sad

  7. Juan Francisco Mollinedo

    Hahaha ha… "Artistic truth"…. That's how you lie and make propaganda out of facts.. Sad

  8. First Commenter

    Hollywood has always been producing fake news. What is new?

  9. Bastard Owl

    What he's really saying is that telling a story incorrectly (through omission of certain details, embellishing of other details or straight up changing time scales, who did or said what, or anything else) is not bias or fake news but "artistic truth" and if it's "artistically true" then it's arguably more accurate than "journalistic truth" (i.e., depicting the events as they actually occurred). Even attempting to blur this line is terrifying no matter who does it or why they do it.

    1. BLR Brazil

      Entirely agree, and yet it has become the MSM norm in recent years, to the point where 'journalistic truth' has become a sick joke. Chosen narrative is the more accurate term now and the media seek to 'cancel' anybody who says anything that contradicts their chosen narrative.

  10. Username Password

    What happened to the black guy? Nothing changed all these decades?

  11. Username Password

    And was the judge beheaded, quartered, his guts pulled out?

  12. Sonja M

    When making a movie out of historical events and presenting it as true (“based on a true story”), your artistic license should deal with what’s in the characters minds, and collapsing the timeline into a 2-hour consumable narrative. The documented, hard facts should be the scaffolding you build your story on. When you change the facts, it’s propaganda/revisionism and deliberately miseducates the public, who (let’s face it) get most of their knowledge about history from watching movies & TV.
    If you don’t want to be hampered in by facts, write your own story and don’t bother presenting it as “true”. That’s what CREATIVITY is.

  13. Filip Misic

    I have the biggest secret of life in my head.

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  15. BLR Brazil

    'Artistic truth' can be a very dangerous justification for ignoring facts and going in a different direction altogether! Clearly in this case Sorkin has his own narrative he wants to sell and he manipulates the facts (and no doubt inserts his own fiction) to put across that narrative. In the past that would've been decried as intellectual dishonesty and blatant bias, but now the MSM are doing that as a matter of course it is apparently becoming accepted behaviour.

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  17. Queen Bee Channel deep red honey

    ?????

  18. David Boson

    not a documentary?

    1. markcoveryourassets

      And not a mocumentary but a crockumentary.

  19. William Condon

    Ya, it’s this versus what Eastwood did with Richard Jewel where he just straight up made the reporter sleep with an FBI agent for information even though he has no evidence of that.

  20. markcoveryourassets

    As soon as Sorkin described the police response in Chicago as being heavy during the 2020 riots, I realized he was one of those who would describe the protests as “mostly peaceful.” They weren’t, and many used the cover of these protests to loot, even renting trailers to haul away their swag. One of the risks of having a public protest is that others outside of your control can escalate the situation to violence. The anti-riot police have to step into that confusion so that the hard-earned property and lives of noninvolved people and of the initial protest are not further harmed. At the end of the day, you can’t say it was a mostly peaceful protest. It was a protest that became a violent riot. There are other ways to go about this, as Mr. Gandhi taught us.

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