The Real Story: P.L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the Inside Story of “Mary Poppins”
Posted on December 18, 2013 at 8:00 am
As “Saving Mr. Banks” shows, Walt Disney did really spend more than 20 years trying to persuade author P.L. Travers to let him make a movie from her story about the magical nanny, Mary Poppins. Many moments in the film are taken directly from the tape recordings Travers insisted on to document her disagreements with screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and the songwriting team, the Sherman Brothers (Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak). Travers did not like the movie. She would not allow a sequel and made it clear in her will that should a theatrical version be mounted, no American could control it.
Travers had a fuller and more fascinating life than this movie portrays. She was an actress, poet, essayist, and critic. She was enthralled by the work of the mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and studied with him and she lived with Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo peoples to learn about their mythology and folklore. She never married. She insisted on being called “Mrs. Travers,” as the movie shows, but Travers was her father’s first name. In the movie, she does not answer a question about her family. She did have romantic relationships with both men and women, and she adopted a son, selected according to the advice of her astrologer. He had a twin brother she chose not to adopt or even tell her son about until the brother came looking for him.
“Inside Llewyn Davis” is not a true story but elements of the plot and characters are based on real-life folk music characters and locations from the 1960’s. The Coen Brothers painstakingly re-created the settings of the era and recorded all the songs live to give them a more organic, authentic feeling. The Guardian has a guide to the places visited by the title character for performing, scrounging, and arguing. The title character, played by Oscar Isaac, is inspired in part by Dave van Ronk, whose book, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, tells the story the 1960’s folk music scene in Greenwich Village, with encounters with young stars-to-be like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and older luminaries like Woody Guthrie and Odetta. Isaac does not look or sing like the 6’5″ van Ronk. According to Rolling Stone:
Inside Llewyn Davis slips in more than a few details from Van Ronk’s memoir. Like Van Ronk, Davis spends time in the merchant marines, schleps to Chicago to unsuccessfully audition for the famed Gate of Horn club, rejects the idea of joining a Peter, Paul and Mary-style folk group, and complains to the head of his record company that he’s so broke he can’t afford a winter coat. Those close to Van Ronk insist that the troubled, largely solipsistic Davis, who spends the film dealing with a traumatic personal event, couldn’t be further from Van Ronk. “That character is simply not Dave,” says Wald. “People slept on his couch — he didn’t sleep on theirs. And the reason Dave became who he was in the Village was the way he welcomed anyone who cared about the music. Llewyn is clearly not that guy.”
Here van Ronk sings one of the songs performed by Oscar Isaac in the film.
There’s no suggestion that these people love the music they play, none that they play music for fun or have jam sessions, not a smidgen of the collegiality that marked that period.
Musicians supported each other. David and I had hordes of people in our apartment several times a week, many of them folksingers, many of them uninvited drop-ins who always were welcomed. I cooked; we talked politics; the musicians played. They introduced new songs and arrangements and often jammed. We had fun. If a new club opened, folksingers told each other about it and recommended one another to the club owner. When a new coffeehouse in Pennsylvania stiffed David, Tom Paxton refused to play there until David was paid. (He wasn’t and Tom didn’t.) When I received a series of obscene phone calls and the police said they couldn’t do anything, Gaslight performers “babysat” while I stayed home to study for graduate exams. Noel Stookey, Tom Paxton, Hugh Romney (later known as Wavy Gravy), Len Chandler, and others came over between their sets and hung out while I worked.
In the 1950s and ’60s, there were other folk-music scenes. The old-timey musicians; the bluegrass people; the people around Alan Block’s sandal shop; the people the real Jim and Jean hung out with. There was some interaction, but even if the people in those groups didn’t see each other daily or weekly, there was goodwill. No one would know that fromInside Llewyn Davis.
T. Bone Burnett produced the movie’s magnificent score, including a performance of “500 Miles” by a trio (Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan, and Stark Sands) that is reminiscent of Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Broadway star Stark Sands plays a GI turned singer who shares a history with former soldier Tom Paxton and sings one of Paxton’s best-known songs, “The Last Thing on my Mind.”
The Real Story: Dallas Buyer’s Club and Ron Woodroof
Posted on November 4, 2013 at 3:59 pm
“The Dallas Buyer’s Club” (expanding to wide release this week) stars Matthew McConaughey in the real-life story of Ron Woodroof. He was a Texas man diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, when there was no safe and effective treatment, and given just one month to live. He fought not just the disease but the system. And in the course of his work to find treatment for himself and for other people with AIDS in his community over the next six years, he changed from a hard-living, harder-partying, pleasure-loving bigot to a brave, generous, passionate man of vision and compassion. He smuggled drugs from Mexico into Texas and exploited a loophole to distribute them. It was illegal to sell drugs, even legal drugs if they were not prescribed, but at the time it was not illegal to give them away. Woodroof charged people with AIDS to join a “club” — and then the drugs were free.
The movie was written by Craig Borten, who had the opportunity to interview Woodroof for 20 hours before he died in 1992. As usually happens in feature film versions of real stories, there were some additions and changes. Woodroof is depicted as a rodeo competitor in the film, which is not true. Aisha Harris reports in Slate that “Woodroof was only a rodeo enthusiast, not a rider; these details, as Borten explained to me, were used as a metaphor for his character’s struggle and ability to survive far longer than his doctors said he would—a ‘lassoing of the bull.’” Two of the film’s most important characters, the sympathetic doctor played by Jennifer Garner and the transgender Rayon played by Jared Leto, each represent several different people who helped Woodroof.
What is true is the most improbable parts of the movie. A homophobic man who lived entirely for selfish, reckless pleasure became a passionately dedicated activist who challenged the medical and legal system to help people he would previously have feared or hated.
Harris notes that Woodroof’s family, a sister and daughter, were not included in the film. In an interview with The Daily Mail, his sister said that the photographs of the emaciated McConaughey as Woodroof are painful for her to see. “The pictures of Matthew are breathtaking though. They look so like what Ronnie looked like when he was sick and how the disease progressed. Matthew is definitely looking like he’s gone down that path. His eyes, that is the main thing, the way he is doing his eyes. I’m not looking at his body as much as his face and his face certainly taken on the look of someone with AIDS. Matthew is so in character it is unreal.”
Northup does write in his autobiography about Epps’ affection for Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) — and the jealousy aroused in Epp’s wife. However, he never writes anything about Mary (Sarah Paulson) becoming moved to violence or, as the movie shows, hurling a decanter at her face. Patsey did, however, suffer greatly from Epps’ alternative affection and rage, getting both raped and beaten, especially when Edwin was trying to prove to Mary his lack of affection for Patsy.
Northup was forced to whip Patsey
Ruling: Fact
Patsey leaves the plantation to borrow a bar of soap from a neighbor. Epps did not believe Patsey’s story and compelled Northup to whip her as punishment.
Northup is saved, thanks to a letter written by a kind-hearted carpenter named Bass
Ruling: Fact
Samuel Bass (Brad Pitt) did have a discussion with Epps about slavery as portrayed int he movie, leading Northup to believe he could trust Bass with a letter home. Bass sent the letter and had several nighttime meetings with Northup to report back on the letter’s progress. For a good deal of time, the letter received no response, and Bass even offered to go up to Saratoga himself and tell Northup’s friends about the situation once he could afford to do so. However, Northup’s friends received the letter sooner than that: they make the trip South and save Northup.
Of course, I would fail you as an astronaut and an amateur film critic if I did not touch on the big misconception of “Gravity.” A key plot point involves a space station falling out of orbit because it was hit by debris. But that just doesn’t happen. Likewise, blowing up stuff in orbit makes a big mess, but it doesn’t send a giant field of shrapnel hurtling at high velocity toward a spacecraft that is circulating Earth in an entirely different orbit.
I can say this with confidence, because I’ve dealt with my fair share of space junk. In January of 2007, China intentionally targeted and destroyed one of its satellites, and it made a big mess in orbit. Six months later, I commanded space shuttle Discovery on a mission to the international space station . As one can imagine, we were concerned about the additional space junk. But we knew that we only had to put some distance between us and the debris.
You also can’t just point at things in space, head off in that direction and expect to get there. In June of 1965, Jim McDivitt tried to rendezvous his Gemini 4 spacecraft with a spent rocket casing — and he failed.
At the time, NASA didn’t understand that by pointing at something and accelerating, you increase your altitude, slow down and instead move away.
Today, we know that the best way to join up with another spacecraft is a slow procedure that takes an entire day in the space shuttle — too long for the supercharged momentum of a movie.
But the truth is, most of this doesn’t matter. Cuarón has given us a glimpse of the awe that is the universe beyond our atmosphere. And physics aside, he does it remarkably well.
, tells the story the 1960’s folk music scene in Greenwich Village, with encounters with young stars-to-be like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and older luminaries like Woody Guthrie and Odetta. Isaac does not look or sing like the 6’5″ van Ronk. According to