Show Biz Arithmetic 101: Biography + Hollywood = Biofiction

Mark Twain: Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself can not be written.

…Or rarely filmed.


The earliest biographies were about various rulers of ancient kingdoms, chiseled by scribes into stone or clay tablets. Some people even regard prehistoric cave paintings as the first biographies, pictorially chronicling an individual’s life. During the early Middle Ages, monks and priests of the Roman Catholic Church wrote the first modern biographies, not surprisingly of holy fathers, martyrs, and saints. Biographies became less religious-oriented in the late Middle Ages, recounting the lives of kings, knights, even tyrants. The Renaissance, encouraged by the development of the printing press and an increase in literacy, promoted such biographical subjects as artists and poets.

The late 18th century ushered in a golden age of English biography, a period in which the word "biography" itself, along with "autobiography," entered the lexicon. In America, from 1840 to 1860, nearly ten times as many biographies were published than had been during the first two decades of the century. The 1920s witnessed a boom in biographies, and in 1929, nearly 700 such books were published in the U.S., while the first dictionary of American biography appeared.

In book form, there is usually not much that can go wrong with a biography, unless the work is an outright hoax, as was the case with the notorious 1970 "autobiography" of reclusive moneybags Howard Hughes, concocted by writer Clifford Irving and pal, children’s author Richard Suskind, along with Clifford’s wife Edith. The jig was up in 1972, and the Irvings and Suskind were found guilty of fraud. Clifford returned the $765,000 advance to his publishers and served 17 months at a federal correctional facility.

In 1983, German journalist Gerd Heidemann declared to have uncovered the Hitler Diaries, endorsed as being authentic by such notable historians as England’s Hugh Trevor-Roper. In just two weeks, the discovery was revealed as "grotesquely superficial fakes," written on modern paper with modern ink and filled with historical inaccuracies. The sham diary was actually penned by infamous forger Konrad Kujau, who, along with Heidemann, went to trial, where both were sentenced to 42 months, while Trevor-Roper’s standing as a reliable historian was irreparably damaged.

Go Ask Alice, the supposed 1971 diary of a teen overdose victim, was actually written by a psychologist and Mormon youth counselor who based the cautionary tale on stories from her students. The Education of Little Tree, published as a 1977 memoir by a Cherokee orphan who contended with racism while struggling to find his heritage, was, in fact, authored by Asa Carter, a white supremacist and KKK member noted as a speech writer for Alabama Governor George Wallace and as the writer of the novel on which the Clint Eastwood film "The Outlaw Josey Wales" was based. In recent reprints, The Education of Little Tree has been published as a work of fiction.

Apart from literary hoaxes, mention must be made of gossipy, mean-spirited, unauthorized biographies of celebrities and politicians, many of them perpetrated by the queen of mudslinging, Kitty Kelley, whose unflattering portraits of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Nancy Reagan, the British royals, the Bush family, and, most scandalously, Frank Sinatra, bafflingly became best sellers. Although she has never been successfully sued for libel or pressured into publishing retractions, she has been described as a "professional sensationalist" by journalists who dismiss her fodder as "Kitty litter."

But why is it, when it comes to film biographies - popularly known as biopics - Hollywood, more often than not, just can’t seem to get it right?

For decades, 1948’s "The Babe Ruth Story" flared like a festering boil as the nadir of nauseatingly maudlin screen biographies. In a cast that included Claire Trevor (John Ford’s "Stagecoach"), Charles Bickford ("The Song of Bernadette"), and William Frawley ("I Love Lucy"), lantern-jawed character actor William Bendix (Hitchcock’s "Lifeboat") portrayed Ruth as a likable, lumbering oaf in an unforgivably sanitized whitewash that blindly glossed over the Babe’s renowned excesses. In real life, for one example, Ruth was fined by the Yankess thousands of dollars for various infractions; in the movie, he is fined for missing a game because he was taking an injured dog to a hospital.

Bendix reportedly viewed endless footage of Ruth, until he could copy his stance, run and unique mannerisms. Some accounts say that Ruth, who was dying of throat cancer at the time, coached Bendix. At movie’s end, an ailing Bendix agrees to a new treatment if it will ultimately benefit humanity. As he is wheeled into the operating room (to "make his greatest play far from the baseball crowds"), he is accompanied by sobs and an angelic chorus.

The film was rushed into theaters so it could be released before Ruth’s death. The onetime baseball great, now skinny and haggard from the cancer, attended the premiere on July 26, 1948. Less than a month later, he was dead, age 53.

The New York Times hailed Babe Ruth as "a figure unprecedented in American life. A born showman off the field and a marvelous performer on it, he had an amazing flair for doing the spectacular at the most dramatic moment," a tribute certainly undeserving of the dimwitted lummox depicted in "The Babe Ruth Story."

Over four decades later, Hollywood added insult to injury with "The Babe" (1992), starring an embarrassingly miscast John Goodman (who admitted on "Inside the Actors Studio" that he himself was disappointed in his performance). According to critic Roger Ebert, the script "doesn’t seem to like Babe very much," presenting him as "a pathetic orphan, lacking in all social graces, who grew up into a self-destructive bore who hit a lot of home runs…and, in the end, when time caught up with him, never got the message, and almost destroyed the myth that had grown up around him."

The film took as many liberties - if not more (and all of them depressingly mushy) - as the 1948 biopic, although director Arthur Hiller maintained a basis in truth. A box-office turkey, "The Babe" was yanked from theaters after only five weeks. Ebert noted, "Spending these 115 minutes with the Babe is a little like being jammed into the window seat on a long-distance bus, next to a big guy with beer and cigars on his breath and nothing to talk about but his next meal and his last broad."

Director Hiller, a Hollywood ham-and-egger whose workmanlike career also included "Love Story," "The Hospital" and the original "The In-Laws," was earlier responsible for the cinematic snow-job known as "W.C. Fields and Me" (1976), based on the highly suspect memoir of Carlotta Monti, a would-be starlet who was one of Fields’ mistresses during the latter years of his life. After Universal bought the rights to her 1971 book, Rod Steiger (Academy Award winner for 1967’s "In the Heat of the Night") campaigned for the opportunity to portray his personal hero. "He represented the individual in a vicious society," Steiger proclaimed. "Fields was a great street fighter. He was one of the few men who hit this town and became successful without kissing anyone’s rear end." Continuing his breathless pontificating, the actor pointed out "the remarkable similarities in our lives. Fields left home at 11, I left home at 12. He worked delivering ice in Philly, I worked delivering ice in Newark."

Worried that Fields, especially as portrayed by Steiger, would turn into so dislikable a curmudgeon that wouldn’t appeal to ticket-buyers, Universal suits sanitized and fictionalized the screenplay to the extent that it became so sickeningly saccharine as to bear no semblance to reality.

Steiger, according to Saturday Review’s Judith Crist, who particularly noted the star’s "death-mask-and-pancake variety" of makeup, "has presumably kept many a cocktail party in stitches with his Fields impersonation. On screen it comes out as wearying secondhand Rich Little." Critic Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "dreadful," adding, "It holds up a wax dummy of a character intended to represent the great misanthropic comedian and expects us to feel compassion but only traps us in embarrassment." Canby continued, "Most prominent in this mess is Rod Steiger, who…reads all of his lines with the monotonous sing-song manner used by third-rate nightclub comics doing Fields imitations."

Mr. Canby concluded that "W.C. Fields and Me" was a "dreary exhibition of incompetence beside which the recent ‘Gable and Lombard’ becomes one of the towering achievements of the world cinema."

Which, fortuitously, brings us to that self-same "Gable and Lombard" (1976). When they married in 1939, Clark Gable had just completed filming "Gone with the Wind" and was widely regarded as the "King of Hollywood," while Carole Lombard had established herself as a gifted film comedienne and the industry’s highest paid female star. Their lustrous love story reached its tragic conclusion in 1942, when, on a fund drive for America’s World War II effort, Carole perished in an airplane accident.

Burt Reynolds was offered the role of Clark Gable but turned it down. Warren Beatty allegedly agreed to star but on the conditions that he could rewrite the script and that his character be given a fictitious name. When Steve McQueen was approached, he said flatly, "I’m no Gable." The role ultimately went to James Brolin, most noted then for his co-starring role on TV’s "Marcus Welby, M.D." and most famous now as the father of "No Country for Old Men" star Josh Brolin. Director Sidney J. Furie, who proclaimed to the press, "I feel I was born to make this movie," praised his star by declaring, "He is Gable. He doesn’t imitate him, but when he says a line, I find myself saying, ‘God, that’s the way Gable would have said it!’"

Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, noted, "Mr. Brolin doesn’t act. He gives an impersonation of the sort that makes you wonder if he can also do James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson." With a nod to Jill Clayburgh’s appearance as Ms. Lombard, Canby pointed out that "there are always problems when small performers try to portray the kind of giant legends that Gable and Lombard were," ultimately referring to the stars as "stand-ins." John Simon, of New York magazine, said, "There is the abysmal performance by James Brolin as Gable, who may not have been a great actor, but who was charming, sexy and shrewd. Brolin comes out lumpish, loutish and faintly imbecile." Newsweek’s Jack Kroll lamented, "Poor James Brolin, plucked from television to play the King himself, suffers through close-ups that plainly show his pinned-forward ears, sucks his pipe noisily and twitches his face muscles in an apoplectic attempt to approximate the eloquent smirks of Clark Gable."

London’s "Time Out" called Brolin a "wax dummy," while TV Guide said he "has none of the charisma that made Gable a premier screen idol." Roger Ebert admitted, "Brolin does, indeed, look a lot like Gable - but imitation here has nothing to do with flattery." (New Times critic Richard Corliss remarked, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flatulence.") In the end, Ebert described the film as a "mushy, old-fashioned extravaganza," while a not-so-kind-hearted Judith Crist panned it as a "131-minute history of fornication between a department store dummy (James Brolin with putty ears) and a foul-mouthed floozy (Jill Clayburgh without her usual talent)."

Nearly three decades later, James Brolin was cast as the 40th President of the U.S. in the controversial 2003 miniseries "The Reagans," featuring acclaimed actress Judy Davis as Nancy Reagan. Slammed for bias at the onset, presumably because Brolin’s wife, Barbra Streisand, is stridently anti-Republican, others grumbled that such a quintessentially American saga was actually filmed in Canada.

Variety’s Brian Lowry stated, "Although some will criticize James Brolin’s portrayal as cartoonish, he has deftly captured the man’s public image while providing no hint of what resides behind those twinkling eyes. In that respect, he conveys the notion of Reagan as a genial but near-impenetrable vessel."

Following weeks of criticism from outspoken conservatives, based solely on early drafts of the teleplay (although it should be noted that, according to Ronald’s stepdaughter Patti Davis, no family member or close friend of the Reagans’ was consulted throughout the production), CBS unceremoniously dumped the project on its sister cable channel, Showtime.

"By caving in to conservative pressure," Robert Bianco noted in USA Today, "CBS turned ‘The Reagans’ into a cultural cause celebre…Neither a deification or a demonization of President Reagan, ‘The Reagans’ is exactly the film CBS says it was promised: An impeccably produced movie propelled by a strong performance from James Brolin and an extraordinary one from Judy Davis." Bianco added, "Reagan is portrayed as a man of strong beliefs, and Brolin ably conveys both his convictions and his communicative skills."

One source flatly summarized "Wired" as a "1989 film biography of John Belushi…adapted from the book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, which was written by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward and published in 1984…’Wired’ was a critical and commercial failure." All in all, a blunt way of saying the movie stunk to high heaven. The book itself was initially dismissed by those close to Belushi as lurid sensationalism. Chevy Chase characterized the warts-and-all expose as an account of who puked where and how much they puked.

Not surprisingly, Belushi’s family and friends - among them widow Judith, brother Jim, and best friend Dan Aykroyd - boycotted the film. Two years after the movie’s release, Judith wrote the book Samurai Widow to rebuke the portrayal of her late husband in the earlier book and its screen version.

It is widely known that John Belushi, age 33, died from a lethal combination of cocaine and heroin in 1982. Departing from the book, the film fancifully presents an Hispanic angel dropping in on Belushi’s ghost in the morgue and guiding the departed comedian in a taxi through a tableau of flashbacks. In the meantime, reporter Bob Woodward is depicted interviewing witnesses to Belushi’s self-destructive addictions as research for a book he’s preparing.

The movie was directed by Larry Peerce, a filmmaker more warmly regarded for such personable dramas as "Goodbye, Columbus," "A Separate Peace," and "The Other Side of the Mountain." The script was written by Earl Mac Rauch, who holds a special place in the hearts of cult film fans as the screenwriter of 1984’s "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension." ("Wired" was denied access to the rights
of Belushi’s original "Saturday Night Live" sketches, forcing Rauch to concoct lame imitations.) Bob Woodward was portrayed by J.T. Walsh, an esteemed character actor who sadly passed away at the age of 54 in 1998. The absurdly inspired guardian angel was played by Ray Sharkey (best known as Sonny Steelgrave on TV’s "Wiseguy"), who died in 1993 from AIDS as a result of his own indiscriminate addiction to cocaine and heroin.

Making his big screen debut as John Belushi was Michael Chiklis (winning the role over 200 other actors), who went on to greater acclaim and fame on TV’s "The Shield" and in the "Fantastic Four" films. Washington Post critic Desson Howe said of his performance, "Despite a histrionic outpouring of growls, snorts, yells and re-creations of familiar Belushi shticks…Chiklis seems to miss every opportunity to redeem himself." Roger Ebert noted, "He never gives us a living Belushi, and so why should we care about the movie’s dead Belushi?" According to Ebert, "Belushi made millions of people laugh and broke the hearts of those who loved him, and there is little in this film to explain how, or why, he did either of those things."

Rolling Stone called the film a "howling dog," declaring it "packs all the investigative wallop of a Care Bears flick." Rita Kempley, in the Washington Post, deemed it "a biography without an ounce of soul or shred of dignity. Billed as a fantasy-comedy-drama, it manages to be none of those. The drama is laughable, the comedy lame, the fantasy without wings." She dismissed the movie as "the silliest celebrity bio since ‘Mommie Dearest.’"

Which, obviously, brings us to the mother of all film biographies, 1981’s "Mommie Dearest." The scandalous memoir Mommie Dearest, written by movie star Joan Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina Crawford, emerged as a worldwide best seller with its voyeuristic depiction of the Hollywood icon (who won an Oscar for her starring role in 1945’s "Mildred Pierce" and later appeared in campy horror flicks like "Strait-Jacket," "Circus of Terror" and "Trog") as, to quote Roger Ebert, "a grasping, sadistic, alcoholic wretch whose own insecurites and monstrous ego made life miserable for everyone around her."

In the role that was originally intended for Anne Bancroft ("The Graduate"), Faye Dunaway claimed that she felt the presence of Ms. Crawford several times during the production. Nathan Rabin, of the A.V. Club, observed, "Like a true horror-movie villain, Crawford reached out from beyond the grave and claimed Dunaway's once thriving career as her last victim." Interviewed after the film’s release, Christina Crawford said of Dunaway, "Her portrayal was absolutely ludicrous. I’ve read she is saying she has been haunted by the ghost of Joan Crawford, and after seeing her performance, I can see why."

Variety noted, "Dunaway does not chew scenery. Dunaway starts neatly at each corner of the set in every scene and swallows it whole, co-stars and all." Her makeup, according to one reviewer, made her look like Groucho Marx "as a female impersonator." She went on to receive a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress, while the film also garnered Razzies for Worst Picture of the Year, Worst Screenplay, Worst Supporting Actor, Worst Supporting Actress, not to mention Worst Picture of the Decade.

Faye Dunaway later publicly declared her wish that she had never appeared in the film and would blame the role for ruining her career. In her autobiography, she mentioned only briefly her desire that the director had had enough experience to see when actors needed to rein in their performances. Never mind the fact that director Frank Perry was a respected filmmaker whose resume included such powerful dramas as "David and Lisa," "The Swimmer," "Last Summer," and "Diary of a Mad Housewife."

"Mommie Dearest" became a surprising hit as a cult comedy. Moviegoers memorized lines such as "No wire hangers - ever!" and, like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" zealots, shouted along with the dialogue. Audiences came to theaters with wire closet hangers and cans of Dutch Boy cleanser to act out scenes as they unfolded on screen. Patrons donned Crawford-esque shoulder pads and heavy lipstick, while others arrived decked out as the curly-blonde Christina. Christina herself appeared at various "Mommie Dearest"-themed public events and drag shows across the U.S.

Studio brass decided to cash in on the unforeseen reaction to the movie by launching a new ad campaign, heralding it as "The Biggest Mother of Them All." Producer Frank Yablans was not amused and sued Paramount, describing the new ads as "obscene, vulgar, offensive, salicious," adjectives that could be used to precisely describe his production.

To add to the film’s kitsch appeal, the 2006 DVD release featured audio commentary by director John Waters, the high priest of camp ("Pink Flamingos," "Hairspray"), who referred to the film as "the first comedy about child abuse."

Giving Mr. Ebert the last word, he wondered, "I can’t imagine who would want to subject themselves to this movie…a painful experience that drones on endlessly." He concluded, "The movie is faithful in one key sense: It made life miserable for me."