Real Truth Versus Reel Truth
Please don’t try to be true-to-life in movies
My wife and I can tolerate about an hour of TV per night.
If we’ve settled in with a worthy series we’ll watch another episode. If it’s a movie, we’ll watch approximately the first half, catching up with the rest of it the following night.
A few years ago we watched a Netflix documentary series, The Andy Warhol Diaries.
Warhol preached that everybody on Earth gets fifteen minutes of fame.
My own run, however, lasted fifteen years.
I had a fancy-ass title at a fancy-ass institution, and a talent for providing provocative sound bites. I received a lot of invitations, therefore, to appear on political talk shows.
As a professor at a world class film school, I was expected to loathe Hollywood’s crass commercialism, its obsession with the bottom line, and its exploitation of programmatic content wallowing in express, explicit sex and violence.
In fact, however, my detractor characterized as a shill for Hollywood, a company man, an apologist for the filmed entertainment industry.
That I had detractors bothered me not a bit; you have to be pretty prominent to have detractors! What’s more, their criticism of me was not unfair.
