Fake Is for Fun

Facts vs. feelings, journalists v. screenwriters, and the cinematic julienning of the truth.

The day after they carried Luigi, I was on 4chan seeing if the /pol/lacks had any new intel on the case. Since its popular emergence with discourse Big Bang, Gamergate, visiting the semi-moderated imageboard is like dumpster diving for a scene detective such as yours truly. Whereas legions of legacy media have labeled it an orc forge for trolls, incels, and their ilk (and often with good reason), when a major global event takes place, few outlets are as dynamic, organized, or readable. Compare it to Reddit, where the self-proclaimed experts moderate information into a popularity contest. Or Twitter, which emerged nobly enough, but has become a Barbary Coast of bad-faith actors. No, I may be but a humble lurker, but when it comes to the raw human excretion that churns in the immediate wake of An Event, I find no better resources than among the anons who give the good platform its bad name.

My instincts were correct last Monday, for thence came my discovery of Luigi’s words. Purple, typo-riddled, and simplistic in both sourcing and summation, this seemed to be a different side of the shooter than that who had been discovered on X and Goodreads. Citing “Gladiator I” instead of The Unabomber, his yarn implicated the insurance companies in a mother’s torment, and none of what had been cited by the authorities from materials found with Luigi. Nevertheless, it was angry and commanding, frequently tender and, as a whole, captivating. It was the work of a folk hero. Something everyone could understand. A story. Was it THE MANIFESTO? No one could be sure—but it was provocative.

Which is why I decided to post it, with a disclaimer that made it clear I didn’t know if it was the real McCoy. A few people pushed back on my decision to share the unverified article, but from our hasty conversations came the kernel I’ve been lolling around ever since, that today forms our subject: the difference between fact and information, in the hands of a screenwriter.

According to Wikipedia, the first journalist to become a screenwriter was also the film business’s first pro. After getting his start at Maryland’s Evening Times where his father was the editor (um, nepo?), by 1900, former New York World staffer Roy McCardell was writing scores of scenarios per year for former Edison lab pioneer William Kennedy Dickson’s American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. The Front Page scribe Ben Hecht, the eminent screenwriter of Hollywood’s Golden Age, began as a war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. In the 1970s, the rise of the New Journalism coincided with the ascension of the New Hollywood, and from it, the careers of journalists-cum-screenwriters Joan Didion, John Dunne, Joe Eszterhas, and Oliver Stone.

What makes a journalist a good screenwriter? Simply, the ability to tell a story. To faithfully represent the characters; relay significant events; tune out superfluous details; and to tell it in such a way as to be captivating to the largest possible audiences. Where they differ, most importantly, is in the necessity of isolating and expanding on the larger themes at play. The zeitgeisty ones. The ones that aren’t apparent, or even inherent, in the truth.

The contradiction is that truth in a newspaper and truth in a film are often at odds, and nowhere is this more apparent than in films “Based on a True Story.”

Here’s a quiz for all you film history nerds. The 18-second short film above is:

A.) The first film to use trained actors

B.) The first film to use special effects

C.) The first biographical film

D.) All of the above

If you answered D, here’s a bonus question: Why is the first biographical film also the first to use an editing trick? The answer, is that the alternative would have required producer Thomas Edison and director Alfred Clark to go where they had only dared before with circus elephants. Executing a historical execution without executing an actress necessitated a creative solution, so the substitution splice was born, and with it, the actual truth was split in twain. On one side remained the body, bloody and inert, call it history—and on the other, raised up for all to see, was the cinematic moment, more true than the truth, because, what was contained it was a feeling.

Facts may not care about your feelings, but feelings don’t change so easily.

The trailer above was cut entirely from footage not contained in the movie F for Fake. In the longer film, Orson Welles, himself an admitted beneficiary of fakery, exposes the contradictions inherent real vs. fake in the case of inauthentic art. At least that’s where it starts. Over the course of a near-ninety, it tells two true stories and a lie; that of a professional forger, a forged-biographer, and a suite of forged paintings (you decide). What are the odds that the world’s first film essay concerns the same question as The Execution of Mary Stuart? For the medium of storytelling to chart a new course into truth, it seems, you gotta chop off another piece.

To tell both a good story and an accurate one, the humble screenwriter needs not be concerned with reinventing the form—though it helps to understand one’s own tolerance for it. Consider the recent wave of biopics, including Elvis, Oppenheimer, Napoleon, and Barbie and their respective needs to reshape history to maximize the experience on-screen. The latter in particular features Ruth Leitman played by a professional actor in a way that presents her as the Barbie doll’s actual mother, both in the film and in real life. Say what you will about the major authors of our post-truth society: we’ve all taken some part in the willing of fiction into existence.

Hitman-styled assassins, mercenary kommandos, cartoonishly evil capitalists; each day, reality is become more like the movies—and for this journalist turned screenwriter, that’s exciting. If storytelling is a technology, and evolutionary psychology suggests it is, then screenwriters are its engineers.

This is ultimately why I never deleted the “fake manifesto”: what’s fact will be decided tomorrow, but how information makes you feel happens today. That’s a bigger truth than the truth those who say we have a responsibility to it are willing to admit. Where the journalist works to establish the facts of today, the screenwriter engineers the world of tomorrow. What do you want the future to feel like?

Next subscribers-only post: Fake News on the March!