I remember the incident and, yes, Canada was there. Cut to: An outpouring of gratitude from south-of-the-border. Could all those Americans have been wrong?
Some folk chalk up the current controversy, certainly pumped-up since Argo's Oscar win as Best Picture (just what is a "Best Picture", anyway?), and they are probably on the right hill right now, to this hard cold fact: Hollywood is Hollywood. Any movie fan can tell you that scripts are extruded to entertain efficiently and effectively over a limited allotment of time (generally two hours). Now, this doesn't mean the resulting films are entertaining; after all, most movies are bad, but they are engineered as such to increase the chances of excelling at the box office. The business' biz trumps reality.
Now, having said all that, there is more to complicate the issue. The subject of the 'Canadian Caper' had previously been committed to motion picture film. I remember even if I did not watch the broadcast (I had already grown out of watching prime-time television). A co-production between Canada's CTV network, and CBS, Escape from Iran: The Canadian Caper aired on May 17, 1981 to... bottom-of-the-barrel ratings; one of the lowest rated programs of the night. I remember being surprised when I heard the news of the TV movie's poor performance. The flick had been produced and broadcast a little less than a year and a half after the true-life event. "Has interest cooled down that much in sixteen months?", I probably asked at the time.
You may know where I'm going with this. Escape from Iran was much closer to the truth in its storytelling than was Argo thirty-one years later. (Escape's script was provided by British born, Canadian expat and super-proud-Republican, Lionel Chetwynd.) Maybe the pieces are fitting together. While television movies and theatrical features are slightly different animals, the comparison warrants some analysis in that one version succeeded in the numbers column where the other did not.
Maybe 'Hollywood' is right. Do most people, those who part with their hard-earned cash, really care about the truth? It's not as though they're going to read a book on the subject after hearing, if they hear anything at all, about the playing-with-the-facts of Argo.
Time for me to watch both Escape from Iran: The Canadian Caper and Argo. Then I can really talk.
4 comments:
Well, in the past week or so, no less than Jimmy Carter was on TV stating how inaccurate "Argo" was, and also gave credit to the Canadians who rescued these people. This is ironic, since the Hostage Crisis was during his administration, but it took Ronald Raygun to put an end to the Hostage Crisis. I've seen "Argo", and it is very good. Truthfully I was less bothered by the fictional characters they added (Alan Arkin's role is basically a hodgepodge of other people) than the "down to the wire, just in the nick of time" rescue climax, which just screamed agitprop to me. Having said that though, Ben Affleck did a marvellous job- the first quarter of this film is outstanding. The whole sequence where they storm the Embassy, shot with gritty docu-realism is as thrilling as anything shot by Costa-Gavras. No question- Ben Affleck is going to be a world-class filmmaker. Forget about all that "Bennifer / Gigli" crap.
Also, "Argo" is based upon source material that Bill Clinton de-classified during his administration. Since I haven't seen the Canadian TV movie, I'm wondering if or how that script touches upon things that would've been classified in the US at the time. Undoubtedly the 1981 telefilm is closer to the truth in that the resolution was far less breakneck exciting than Hollywood would allow.
Yeah, good for Carter; he has been going overtime promoting the truth... closer to the truth.
Thanks for your comment.
Excellent post, Barry!
Many thanks, DonaldAR!
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