'Public Enemies' No. 1 (in historical accuracy, writer says)

There are those, I wager, who will say Johnny Depp is too polite or too smooth to portray Dillinger. In fact, those were the very qualities that made the real Dillinger so appealing. It would be self-serving of me to say that this new "Public Enemies" brings the most historically accurate Dillinger -- I've seen the film, and it's true -- but Michael Mann impressed me as a real stickler for historical accuracy. Yes, there is fictionalization in this movie, including some to the timeline, but that's Hollywood; if it was 100% accurate, you would call it a documentary.

This is the first Dillinger and the first gangster movie I'm aware of that takes great pains to get not only the details but the sites right. Mann not only shot at the actual scene of Dillinger's greatest jailbreak, the lockup in Crown Point, Ind., but at the actual scene of his greatest shootout, at the Little Bohemia lodge. Somehow he prevailed upon Chicago to hand over six entire blocks of North Lincoln Avenue, where Dillinger memorably met his fate outside the Biograph Theater one hot night in July 1934.

I was an extra in that scene, dressed in period costume as one of the reporters rushing toward Dillinger-Depp as he was shot. It was a genuinely eerie experience. Up and down the street, storefronts had been transformed to appear exactly as they had that night 75 years before. Even the Biograph's marquee had been reproduced in detail. Yes, I know it's just a movie, and I know most in the audience won't especially care that the details are historically accurate, but I can vividly remember looking around and smiling nevertheless, happy that, in this one small case at least, Hollywood was getting it right.