The makers of the film about the founding of RIM (Research In Motion) and inventors of the Blackberry heap contempt on the idea that the story should be even reasonably accurate. “The Sound of Music” was not accurate, and it won eight Oscars, they say.
“The Sound of Music” was a piece of well-polished saccharine kitsch, and did you really mean to say that winning an Oscar proves anything but that your promotional machinery is working?
Maria Von Trapp, we know, did not actually love the Captain.
And Leonard Nimoy was not actually a Vulcan.
Seriously, what bothers me about the way Hollywood changes the facts is not that stories are edited but that the edits invariably cater to the cheesiest preferences and prejudices of mass audiences. If you want to make up a story, just make up a story. Yes, that requires talent and creativity and imagination. But if you are not just a generic pop factory and you want to claim your story is “based” on truth, you owe it to history to tell the truth with reasonable accuracy. Oh, don’t pooh-pooh the idea that there is a social responsibility side to pop culture. There is, and you are contemptible for ignoring it.
Audiences want to believe that their fantasies have a weird kind of “truthiness” as Stephen Colbert would describe it. Like pornography.
It’s saccharine.