The Real Story: Free State of Jones

Posted on June 23, 2016 at 3:34 pm

The new film about group who refused to fight for the Confederacy and established a free community in Civil War-era Mississippi is based on a true story. Matthew McConaughey stars as Newton Knight, a nurse in the Confederate Army who deserted because he did not want to fight for slavery or for wealthy plantation owners. In “Free State of Jones,” co-written and directed by Gary Ross (“The Hunger Games”), Knight is a Robin Hood-like figure, with a swamp taking the place of Sherwood Forest.

There was a Newton Knight and he did lead a rebellion, one of several groups who seceded from the Confederacy as the Confederacy seceded from the United States. The story was filmed in 1948 as “Tap Roots,”with Van Heflin, Susan Hayward, and Boris Karloff (as an Indian).

“Free State of Jones” is based on more recent research that indicates that Knight was opposed to secession and considered his “Jones” state a part of the union. The film’s website has detailed information with citations explaining the historical basis for characters like the real-life Newton Knight and Rachel and characters like Moses who are based on several real-life former slaves. The Smithsonian has a comprehensive article with the history of the story and the film.

Incidents described in a book by Sally Jenkins, including Knight’s rescue of an “apprenticed” black child captured by a plantation owner during the post-Civil War period and his decision to live in an all-black community, are in the film. The film also depicts the 1948 miscegenation trial of one of Knight’s descendents, who, allegedly one-eighth black, had violated the law by marrying a white woman. The real story is not as romantic as the one portrayed in the film, but the film is correct in stating that the ruling against the couple was overturned on appeal on a technicality because the Mississippi court did not want a Constitutional challenge to its laws prohibiting marriage between people of different races. Those laws would remain in place for almost 20 more years, and a film based on that case, Loving v. Virginia, will be released later this year.

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The Real Story: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Posted on March 6, 2016 at 3:54 pm

Tina Fey’s new film, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, is “inspired by” not “based on” the true story of journalist Kim Barker, which is why the character’s name is one letter removed from her real-life inspiration: she is called Kim Baker.

The real Kim Barker was a print journalist, not a television correspondent. She wrote for the Chicago Tribune and she did go to Afghanistan planning to spend three months and she did stay for three years. Her book, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan describes her struggles to understand a culture that was very different from what she knew and yet in some ways similar to her home in Montana: men with beards and guns who hate their government. As we see in the film, the people she encountered included an official who made romantic overtures and the other correspondents who were sometime rivals, sometime friends, and who, caught up in the “Kabubble,” let off steam with some intense partying.

Visiting with her former Tribune colleagues to talk about the movie, Barker explained that unlike Fey’s version, she went to Kabul because she was a journalist, not because she was unhappy with her life at home and needed and adventure.

“I remember after 9/11 happened, (former Tribune reporter) Kirsten Scharnberg and I went to some Italian restaurant that had white butcher paper on the table and we mapped out how many women were getting sent out and how many men were getting sent out (to cover aftermath of the terrorist attacks),” she said. “As a journalist you don’t really think that much about the risk or of being terrified. It was just, ‘I want to be one of the people who get to see it.'”

She did become very close to her “fixer,” and says that if he and his family had not relocated to Canada she would not have been able to write the book because it would have put them at risk. You can read a sample of her Tribune coverage here.

Barker is now an investigative reporter for the New York Times. Here she talks about her book.

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The Real Story: Eddie the Eagle

Posted on February 26, 2016 at 9:49 pm

Here’s the real Eddie the Eagle telling his story.

Smithsonian Magazine wrote:

A quarter century ago British plasterer-turned-ski jumper Michael Edwards made a name for himself—Eddie the Eagle—by not skiing or jumping very well at the Winter Olympics in Calgary. Short on talent but long on panache and derring-do, he had no illusions about his ability, no dreams of gold or silver or even bronze. Blinking myopically behind the bottle glass of his pink-and-white-rimmed glasses, he told the press: “In my case, there are only two kinds of hope—Bob Hope and no hope.”

Undeterred, Edwards sluiced on. Wearing six pairs of socks inside hand-me-down ski boots, he stepped onto the slopes, pushed off down the steep ramp and rag-dolled through the air. When he touched down, broadcasters chorused: “The Eagle has landed!” By taking a huge leap of faith, Edwards captured the world’s imagination and achieved the sort of renown that can only come overnight….Edwards, after all, did what Englishmen do surpassingly well—coming in gloriously, irretrievably and spectacularly last. Of the 58 jumpers in the 70-meter event, he just missed being 59th. He also brought up the rear at 90 meters, though technically he aced out three jumpers who were scratched—one of whom, a Frenchman, failed to show because he had broken a leg on a practice run the day before.

He’s had something of a demi-celebrity life since, making two pop records, some reality television, and public appearances. This movie should keep that going for another few decades.

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The Real Story: “Race” and Jesse Owens

Posted on February 19, 2016 at 3:58 pm

This week, “Race” tells the story of Olympian Jesse Owens. His achievement of setting three world records and tying another in less than an hour at the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan has been called the greatest 45 minutes ever in sports and has never been equaled. As the top athlete of the 1936 Olympics, he provided a powerful response to Hitler’s efforts to use the games to show Nazi superiority. The Jesse Owens Award is USA Track and Field’s highest accolade for the year’s best track and field athlete. Owens was ranked by ESPN as the sixth greatest North American athlete of the twentieth century and the highest-ranked in his sport.

He said the secret to his success as a runner was “I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.”

Leni Riefenstahl, played by Carice van Houten, is still a controversial figure. She was an innovative and accomplished filmmaker who used her skill for Nazi propaganda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjgYS8uXwFk

Avery Brundage, played by Jeremy Irons, went on to become president of the International Olympic Committee.

Here is rare informal footage of Berchtesgarden and 1936 Berlin Olympics, including an interview with Jesse Owens and scenes with Hitler, Goebbels, von Ribbentrop and Albert Speer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1VNa8Jb_hY

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The Finest Hours — The Real Story

Posted on January 29, 2016 at 8:00 am

Left to right are Coast Guardsmen Bernard Webber, who piloted the rescue boat; Engineman second class Andrew Fitzgerald, Seaman Richard Livesey and Seaman Irving Maske. Photo by Richard Kelsey, Chatham." Photo credit: Copyright 1952 Cape Cod Community College. — Left to right are Coast Guardsmen Bernard Webber, who piloted the rescue boat; Engineman second class Andrew Fitzgerald, Seaman Richard Livesey and Seaman Irving Maske. Photo by Richard Kelsey, Chatham.”
Photo credit: Copyright 1952 Cape Cod Community College.

“The Finest Hours,” in theaters today, stars Chris Pine and Eric Bana in the fact-based story of the greatest small-boat rescue in Coast Guard history.

In February of 1952, two tanker ships were in distress during a terrible storm off the coast of Massachusetts. They were the SS Pendleton and SS Fort Mercer. Disastrously, both ships split in two within hours of each other, with many crewmen killed and the rest in dire peril, and only three hours before the crippled vessel would sink in freezing, storm-tossed water, drowning the rest.

Coxswain Bernard C. Webber and his crew, Andrew J. Fitzgerald, Richard P. Livese and Ervin E. Maske, all under 25 years old, went out on a 36-foot wooden boat to try to rescue the remaining crew of the Pendleton, and the movie, from Disney studios, is their story. These young men were the ones left behind when the most experienced men were sent in other boats to rescue the crew from the Fort Mercer. Maske was just passing through the station and had never been on a rescue mission before. Fitzgerald was an engine man who joined because Webber’s usual partner had the flu. Another engine man who played a key role was the Pendleton’s Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck), who made key decisions that kept the crew alive while the rescue boat was on the way.

Webber’s boat was brutally beaten back by the storm, pushed over so that it was entirely on its site. Its compass was smashed. Communications with the shore and the Pendleton were impossible for most of the rescue operation. Webber and his crew brought back all of the survivors of the Pendleton but one, a man who fell from the rope ladder trying to reach the small boat. The last surviving member of the Pendleton crew was there to visit the set of the film.

And a group has raised a quarter of a million dollars to restore and preserve the boat used in the rescue.

The movie is based on a book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman called The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Most Daring Sea Rescue.

Some of the film has been made more dramatic (Webber and his wife were already married when the rescue took place), but the heroics of the men involved are not in any way exaggerated, as this report from the Naval Institute’s Proceedings makes clear.

Webber and his crew arrive back safely at their base with 32 of the Pendleton's survivors on board the Coast Guard motor lifeboat. EN3 Andrew Fitzgerald is on the bow ready to handle the tie up at the pier. Photo by Richard C. Kelsey, Chatham, Mass. Photo credit: Cape Cod Community College. Copyright 1952 — Webber and his crew arrive back safely at their base with 32 of the Pendleton’s survivors on board the Coast Guard motor lifeboat. EN3 Andrew Fitzgerald is on the bow ready to handle the tie up at the pier. Photo by Richard C. Kelsey, Chatham, Mass. Photo credit: Cape Cod Community College. Copyright 1952

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