Getting Reel: A Social Science Perspective on Film By Michael D. ...

• Top Gun, Rocky, Days of Thunder had impossible feats?

• Ron Kovic didn’t accidentally kill one of his own men as Tom Cruise portrayed him doing in Born on the Fourth of July?

• Jim Morrison really did graduate from UCLA, and he didn’t start a fire or smash a television as depicted in The Doors?

• Linda Hunt played a man in Year of Living Dangerously?

• Euro-Americans portrayed most of the native Americans in westerns prior to Dances with Wolves?

• Electroshock therapy and prefrontal lobotomies are rarely used and certainly not with the results suggested by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

• The relation of deeply repressed memories does not directly lead to psychological cures?

• Field of Dreams led you to cry for Shoeless Joe Jackson whereas there is overwhelming evidence that he did throw the Black Sox Series and there is no evidence he ever “repented”?

• Courtroom scenes were seriously misrepresented in The Verdict?

• The music led you to believe Robin Williams (Dead Poet’s Society) had been triumphant at movie’s end when in fact he had lost his job and all that the students who had lied about him under oath did was futilely stand on their desks?

• The script led you to believe Tucker felt OK about going out of business since he’d proven his car design?

• The script of Wall Street led you to believe the Charlie Sheen character had atoned for himself when in fact he’d betrayed his father; only felt bad about getting caught; and merely wore a wire tap to entrap Gekko?

• In The Hunt for Red October the Scott Glen character, captain of the American sub, had one and only one opportunity to keep Sean Connery from perhaps destroying New York, and resisted that opportunity (and presumed orders) on a hunch?

• Diane Fossey wasn’t nearly as pretty as Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist?