Edward R. Murrow
To this day, I think of Dog Day Afternoon as the apotheosis of fact-based drama. Director Sidney Lumet so completely recreates the few minutes of street theater that were caught on national TV during Sonny Wortzik’s bungled bank heist – Sonny literally dancing around the sidewalk chanting “Attica! Attica!” to the thousands of curious onlookers as his partner held patrons & employees inside at gunpoint – in 1972 that to see it play on the big screen just three years later with Al Pacino as Sonny (with John Cazale, the hapless brother Fredo from the Godfather trilogy, as his sidekick¹) enabled Lumet to unveil an unsuspected – & in 1975 all-but-unimaginable – back story that is the real heart of the movie’s transgender love story.
That, of course, is the secret of fact-based drama: get the few details that the audience can identify right & you have permission to take your story anywhere. Patty Jenkins, in her 2003 Charlize Theron vehicle, Monster, works from the same premise, knowing this case that her audience will mostly have seen prostitute-turned-serial killer Aileen Wournos from her courtroom photographs, clad in an orange jumpsuit, bad teeth, bad skin, bad attitude, or from her subsequent death house interviews that have fueled the cable crime channels gleeful to have a female serial killer to profile. At 5’9”-plus, the South African model Theron is a far cry from the stockier Wournos, but 30 pounds & contemporary makeup artists can work amazing transformations. Theron’s Wournos is a hulking wreck of rage, having been raped more or less continuously from the age of eight onward, a mother & hooker both at the age of 13, so raw with hurt & fury that hardly anyone can get close until she runs into a young lesbian by the name of Selby, played by Christina Ricci as a dependant pliable wounded puppy with just a touch of Addams Family creepiness. Jenkins steers away from many of Wournos’ wilder claims², giving us just enough to sense the thrashing, psychologically caged woman underneath.
Jenkins follows Lumet in transforming the crime spree into a love story, in fact making it at least partly a consequence of the affair between Aileen & Selby. Yet “Selby” is Jenkins’ fictional version of Wournos’ real-life partner with whom Wournos had been involved for several years before the first killing. So that while Jenkins goes to great lengths to recreate settings, for example, holding the arrest scene in the same Harbor Oaks bar where it occurred (the real-life bartender is an extra in the film), the actual arc of the affair & its relationship to the killings is strictly speculative. It’s a movie, tho a powerful & sad one, much of whose dynamism is governed by an economy of fear, Aileen’s fear of everyone & our fear of the events & a conclusion we already know before setting foot in the theater.
Another fact-based drama making the rounds right now that also uses fear – or at least suspense – as a governor of narrative motion is George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, the recreation of a series of See It Now broadcasts by Edward R. Murrow in 1953, pitting Murrow & his immediate boss, Fred Friendly, against Senator Joe McCarthy, the alcoholic senator from Wisconsin who poster boy for irresponsible rightwing character assassination long before Scooter Libby showed up. This is Clooney’s second film as director & his second “fact-based drama,” if Chuck Barris’ memoirs of life as a Gong Show host by day, CIA assassin by night (the crux of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) are to be believed. Like Confessions, Good Night is a motion picture at least partly about television. Clooney himself is the son of a television newscaster turned (less than successful) politician, & the apple, as they say, has not fallen far.
Clooney has a problem tho. Something that happened 52 years ago is not going to be remembered by anybody under the age of 65, if that. Clooney also has an advantage that neither Jenkins or Lumet had – his story took place to a much larger extent on TV than either the bank robbery or Wournos’ killings (indeed, her trial itself largely preceded the days of Court TV). The amount of archival footage available is a lot & Clooney uses so much of it that it’s not impossible that the late Senator McCarthy might himself get a supporting actor nomination for his representation of unrelieved villainy. I can’t think of a major motion picture, outside of the documentary category itself, that has ever made this much use of the real footage. Not only do we get McCarthy & other members of the US Senate sparring, but one sequence shows David Strathairn as Murrow – like Theron, appearing taller than the original – interviewing the real (but late) Liberace, asking coy questions about would he like to get married.³ In addition to the footage, many of Murrow’s statements at banquets & over the air are themselves available to the public, reducing “original” text to something like maybe 40 percent of the film.
One of the most interesting elements of the film, in fact, is the language. It is impossible to imagine any broadcaster today with the scope of vocabulary & love of complex syntax that flows forth from Murrow in his public statements. Indeed his private dialog, at least in the hands of screenwriter Grant Heslov, tends toward the taciturn. More than one scene ends with another character looking to Murrow for comment, only to get a silent drag on a cigarette in response.
As a whole, Good Night is a spare production, predominantly talking heads (& often talking heads editorializing, as such). At one level, it sounds like an infomercial for the American Civil Liberties Union – and that’s not accidental. At another, Murrow’s analysis of McCarthy’s tactics is spot on. And in the process, what Clooney (not Murrow) is doing is telling us how to listen to the likes of Bill O’Reilly, to separate out allegation & innuendo from documentable fact.* The narrative around the talking heads reveals some of the human cost of such actions.
The overall film feels much shorter than its 93 minutes – Clooney’s pacing echoes television’s short attention span. In black & white, it’s also a very male film, with only Patricia Clarkson having a role of any size at all – the exact opposite of Monster, in which Bruce Dern has the one serious male spot. In fact, one of Good Night’s weaknesses, I think, is that it doesn’t do nearly enough with the superb supporting cast that have been assembled for this project. When Robert Downey, Jr., one of the most gifted character actors now going, is restrained to a half dozen lines & otherwise squinting through the cigarette smoke, you’re leaving the best batter on the bench.
There is, of course, a degree of fiction in this film as well as Monster or Dog Day Afternoon. Unless you understand the importance of the Army-McCarthy hearings, you won’t really understand that it was the Army & Dwight D. Eisenhower who ultimately brought McCarthy down, not TV newscasters. McCarthy, in attacking the army in his ongoing witch-hunt for reds, was taking on not just a major institution, but one that the sitting president, the head of McCarthy’s own party, felt more loyal to than he did to the GOP.
At one level, Good Night is the most factual of any of these films, since so much of it is the original footage. On the other, it is also a parable about what happens to a society when witch hunts are afoot and institutions of power are willing to sidestep the constitution in the name of combating an enemy that is ill-defined at best. Dog Day & Monster use facts to offer us back stories of love under difficult circumstances. Good Night wants us to look not at anyone’s psyche – this is the least psychological picture imaginable – but at the consequences of words, power, capital & media, both then & now.
¹ Cazale made exactly five motion pictures in his brief career before dying of cancer at the age of 43 – the first two Godfather films, The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola’s best motion picture), Dog Day Afternoon & The Deer Hunter.
² Having had sex with a quarter million johns, for one.
³ Liberace’s answer, which goes by so fast that hardly anybody in the 1953 audience would have caught it, sounds at first like the flamboyant pianist is thinking of Princess Margaret when in fact he says he hopes, like her, someday to find the right man.
* Consider how, in his most recent op-ed submission to the LA Times, Bill O’Reilly manages to associate Gary Trudeau with Joseph Goebbels, characterizing Trudeau’s treatment of Doonesbury character B.D.’s loss of a leg in Iraq as “attempting to sap the morale of Americans.”
