Initially, I thought that its not appropriate to distort the facts of someone’s life in a biographical work, because when you think about a work being a biography, you assume that its going to stay with the guidelines of what really happened. Then I thought about the different reasons of how distorting the truth could be more entertaining for a movie vs say a documentary and a novel that is loosely based on events from someone’s life vs a biographical book. The reason why authors and directors distort the truth depends on what type of work it is and who is the targeted audience/ what do they want out of the book or film.
Distorting information in a film can dramatically change a person’s say dull life, to a much more entertaining, action-filled account. One of the main reasons people see films, is for the entertainment alone. Directors can take a story from someone’s life and embellish it, stretching the truth in a way that makes it much more interesting and something that is worth spending your money and time watching. Movies often change details to make the film more appealing to audiences. They can change names, cities, body types, etc to make the film desirable to audiences and reaching the goal of making a lot of money. They also face the task of choosing specific moments from a person’s life to document, because they are time limited. In say documentaries about a person’s life, the truth should not be altered. The audience is going to see the film because they want an accurate account of what happened to that person and of course having the film be entertaining is great, but that’s not the main goal of a documentary about a person’s life.
Writing a biographical book can also be compared to similarly; novels are often derived from stories that happen in people’s lives, but can be stretched to great lengths to make the book more complex, and like films, entertaining. As for distorting the truth about biographies, no one is going to grab a book about a person’s life, when all the stories are fabricated in it. In college especially, people read books about people so that they can learn the truth about someone’s life and maybe write a paper about them.
The standard in which biographical works being distorted varies depending on films and books. It depends on who the audience is and what is the subject geared for. Is the film’s purpose to explain the life story of a person or is it to entertain an audience about stories from a person’s life? I actually have a good example of a film, that I literally just saw (today), that is a biographical film about the creator of Facebook. “The Social Network,” is an account of the creation of Facebook and the trials and tribulations that Marc Zuckerman faced before, during and after the development of the biggest social network site. The film does stay true to many events that did happen for Zuckerman, but there were events that did not happen exactly like they portrayed, to make the film more entertaining, and stretching the truth definitely helped the film be entertaining. I thought that the mix of truth and fiction did help contribute to the film’s quality/ entertainment purposes.
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