Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (2^nd ed., 2003)

Placing historical events into a sequence, in a history textbook, employs the conventions of fiction, and few historians would dispute that writing a history involves constructing a narrative that is of necessity a selective interpretation of the occurrences it describes.

Hollywood movies are, however, fictions before they are histories: the Bounty is shaped by a set of narrative and generic conventions little from those that shape The Call of the Wild. Hollywood's biographical pictures (or biopics) frequently adopted plots derived from a successful fictional movie. In devising The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), Darryl Zanuck insisted that Bell's invention of the telephone had to be motivated by something more than "mechanical and scientific dreams." The script had to make Bell "so real, so human, so down to earth and such a regular guy" that the audience would “root for" him. The solution, borrowed from the studio's recent hits Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and In Old Chicago (1938), was to intertwine the invention with the movie's love story. . . . Every great biopic life resembled every other. Lamar Trotti, one of the screenwriters for The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, declared: "In every great character story on the screen - Rothschild, Zola, Pasteur – the principal character, or characters, have battled against something great for something great.” More recently, screenwriter Steve de Souza has identified a similar "all-purpose formula [that] covers every Oscar-winning film or contender known to Halliwell’s Film Companion"': "show a protagonist overcoming adversity against a background that exorcises the audience's guilt about an uncomfortable subject.”

Custen suggests that Hollywood's version of history, constructed around the story of "great characters'" whom an audience is encouraged to "root for,” has had a considerable influence on public perceptions of both history and fame. Hollywood's history can be criticized not merely because of its inaccuracies, but also because the biopic reduces the ambiguities of historical process to "a mechanical view of the universe," in which the past is compressed into a single, linear chain of cause and effect, with a single interpretation of events. (438)

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Vivian Sobchack, "’Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,” Representations, No. 29 (Winter, 1990), pp. 24-49

Playing "great" historical figures from Antony and Cleopatra to John Reed and Louise Bryant as passionate livers, lovers, and major historical agents who destroy and build empires (whether Roman or Red), stars both dramatize and construct Hollywood's particular idea of History--lending the past a present stature, attributing its production to select individuals (most of them Charlton Heston) and (T. E. Lawrence aside) providing the literal "embodiment of Hollywood's faith that historical events rise to the occasion of exceptional human romance." (24)

Thus, stars not only exceed the representation or "represencing" of past historical figures to remind us that the representation is a repetition, but additionally serve to generalize historical specificity through their own iconographic presence. Stars are cast not as characters, but in character--as "types" who, however physically particular and concrete, signify universal and general characteristics. Thus, while not embodying historical figures in any way that could be called "accurate" by a historian's standards, stars nonetheless contribute to an expansive, excessive, and multileveled temporality that can be experienced by the spectator as subjectively transcendent and objectively significant. Indeed, the very presence of stars in the historical epic mimetically represents not real historical figures but rather the real significance of historical figures. Stars literally lend magnitude to the representation. (36)