Distory: beware of Hollywood true stories

[mistrtoad]

J and I watched quite a few movies over the holidays. Most of them were pretty light and fluffy, but a few rose to the level of good honest entertainment, like Calendar Girls and The Goodbye Girl. At one point, we saw the trailer for a recent Hollywood epic, Hidalgo. It looked interesting and I picked it up on the next trip to the video store

Comments

[elizilla]

Weren't pretty much all the characters in the Buffalo Bill shows fakes?

[mistrtoad]

Not all. Annie Oakley, for instance, was definitely the genuine article. I did some pretty exhaustive research on her for a historical marker in Greenville, Ohio, her home town. Promotions during that era tended to be a little shrill, but the fakes didn't last long. The Buffalo Bill's Wild West show ran more than thirty years, from 1882 until WWI. It was revived in the 1970s and continues today.

BBWW was the bridge between history and the romanticized view of the West prevalent through the 20th century. I suppose it's what gave us singing cowboys and horse operas. Yes, the battle reenactments were fake, of course. The Indians were degraded too. But BBWW was largely about performance art, and it's hard to fake marksmanship and equestrian skills.

I suppose from the standpoint of fakery, though, the inclusion of the Buffalo Bill scenes is appropriate for Hidalgo. I'm not sure why I feel more tolerant towards this mangling of history. Perhaps because it's such a unique and unlikely cultural artfact on its own merits.