History by Hollywood

by Robert Brent Toplin

This newly updated edition of History by Hollywood explores the question of what happens to history when Hollywood filmmakers get their hands on it. With a fresh look at recent films and television productions such as Titanic, Pearl Harbor, The Patriot, and John Adams, Robert Brent Toplin examines how filmmakers have interpreted American history through their movies. Toplin discusses how writers, producers, and directors become involved in making historical films, what influences their interpretations of the past, and the responses they make to the controversies their works excite. With a realistic appreciation of the challenges filmmakers face, he effectively measures the strengths and weaknesses of Hollywood's presentation of history in the films Mississippi Burning, JFK, Sergeant York, Missing, Bonnie and Clyde, Patton, All the President's Men, and Norma Rae.

Genres: History, Film, Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

About the author

Robert Brent Toplin is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and film review editor for the Journal of American History. Among his ten books are Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History, and Controversy, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past, and Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond.

Reviews

[Lauren Heib · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written and made the material interesting. I only found one chapter to be insufferably long.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice, scholarly but not too scholarly. Toplin sets out a few ways that Hollywood manipulates history in films for its own purposes, and then he uses a bunch of case studies to illustrate these methods. For example, he discusses "Mississippi Burning" and how the filmmakers started from an actual event but invented many characters and most of the plot, in the service of telling a story that they felt captured something valuable about the civil rights era. Many others disagreed, and felt that by making so much up the film, the filmmakers cheapened the real history. Toplin looks at "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Patton" and how the history in those films was molded in the service of making statements about contemporary American life. He has a particularly interesting chapter on "JFK" and Oliver Stone. Really interesting book, I didn't read the essays about movies I hadn't seen, but the ones I did read were really good.