Ten years from now, it will be hard to know what will be more memorable, "A Beautiful Mind" the movie or "A Beautiful Mind" the Oscar campaign, a watershed moment in the ongoing battle between historians and Hollywood over the custody of our shared heritage.
"It says it was really close," joked producer Brian Grazer as he accepted the envelope and the award for best picture, tacitly acknowledging the battle the film has endured on its way to the Oscar.
"A Beautiful Mind's" route to victory represented a personal vindication for some of Hollywood's biggest players, who launched a massive campaign to win the Oscar. Yet it was a victory, barely snatched from the jaws of defeat as Universal was forced to concentrate most of its effort on defending the film from charges of having whitewashed Nash's life.
This is the first Oscar winner with its own crisis PR manager, the inveterate Sitrick and Co. The firm, whose other clients have included Orange County in the middle of its bankruptcy, Enron wannabe Global Crossing and Paula Poundstone, wasn't brought on to squelch tales of Russell Crowe's sex life or hide evidence of discontent on the set, but to inoculate the film from a far graver adversary: the truth.
"I advise the studio on how to deal with journalistic issues, issues about the accuracy of the movie, controversies, which we seem to have more than our share," said Allan Mayer, the Sitrick partner in charge of the "Beautiful Mind" account, who also personally advises John Nash, the scientist on whose life the film is based, or rather "inspired by" as the credits state.
"In recent years particularly, journalists have become more sensitive to accuracy issues in movies, which in another time would have never been expected to be held to that standard," said Mayer, who added that director Ron Howard and Grazer have been totally upfront about their intention, which was to take "the outlines of John Nash's life and [use] the high points, and [fill] in with imaginative speculation what might have been. They weren't pretending otherwise."
"For people to say, we're shocked it departs from the book ["A Beautiful Mind," by Sylvia Nasar] is kind of strange. Maria von Trapp was not exactly the way she was portrayed by Julie Andrews [in the Oscar-winning "The Sound of Music"] back in 1965."
Yet, the fury over "A Beautiful Mind" was particularly intense, with critics complaining of how Howard eliminated the complex and nuanced elements of Nash's messy life (everything from a son from a woman other than Alicia Nash, to a George Michael-type of arrest in a bathroom, which lost him his security clearance). Ironically enough, the basis of the charges came not from alternate histories of Nash's life, or disgruntled ex-lovers, but from the very book on which the film is named, based, and which can now be bought in the bookstores. (Look for the Russell Crowe cover.)
The pressure was unrelenting on the studio marketing machine. At Universal there were weekly strategy meetings and furious claims of a "smear campaign." One involved in the process described his job for the last three months as "going to the war room," the famous epithet that Clinton staffers had named the hub of their campaign headquarters. Like political candidates, Hollywood movies now need to be vetted for the skeletons in their past, and whether they actually inhaled or not.
Ever since Oliver Stone's history-revising epic "JFK" in 1991, a revitalized truth brigade has been on call to examine Hollywood films under the microscope. Presenting an alternate vision of American history, Stone's film attempted to debunk the lone gunman theory behind the Kennedy assassination and the published version of the screenplay came complete with annotations and footnotes, like a doctoral dissertation. That film unleashed a torrent of invective from journalists and authorities of all stripes, from columnist Christopher Hitchens, to the former funeral parlor worker who put Kennedy's slain body into the casket.
In its wake, almost every film, which dealt with living historical characters, has had to contend with the inevitable comparisons between real life and fiction, from "The Insider," (about a whistle-blower in the tobacco industry) which upset newsman Mike Wallace, to "13 Days" (the story of the Cuban Missile crisis), which provoked the criticism of former Kennedy staffers.
