A Complete Pantsload
January 3, 2025
A Complete Pantsload: Hollywood’s Latest Biopic (Dylan)
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Poster for A Complete Unknown.
A COMPLETE PANTSLOAD (starring Willy Wonka) doesn’t pass even the most casual fact-check. Hollywood has never made biographies of musicians or songwriters that came within six time zones of truth; film buffs who also follow the music industry often get into extended discussions about which film about a famous singer, songwriter or musician is the worst.
The saving grace is that a bad movie bio is almost always pretty easy to spot. Lyricist Lorenz Hart was gay (mostly closeted) but he lived with his controlling mother (who knew what her son liked) after his father died. People debate about which psychiatric illness he had (manic-depression, depression or even schizophrenia). He was a blackout drunk who often had episodes (which make a good fix on his psyche especially hard to get). The biopic of his partnership with Richard Rodgers (WORDS AND MUSIC) was made by MGM– by far the company that produced the most saccharine movies.
Who did they pick to play a German Jew who wrote lyrics for songs with titles like “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”? Mickey Rooney, of course. You see that expecting truth and that’s on you.
Cole Porter was a wealthy, spendthrift pansexual from Indiana, who attended Harvard Law and roomed with future Secretary of State Dean Acheson until he dropped out. Warner’s chose a reformed cockney acrobat– who’d been born Archie Leach– to depict him. Other than the flamboyance and charm, “Cary Grant” didn’t bring much to that part. (Certainly not singing; Grant, who had some of the same demons that drove Porter, balked at even oblique illustrations of Porter’s sketchiness in NIGHT AND DAY).
If you were making a movie, in 1964, about Hiram King “Hank” Williams– a violent alcoholic who abused drugs and beat his wife (some of that due to a congenital, untreatable spinal condition, which led many patients to self-medicate for relief)– which actor would you choose? Williams’s family who bowdlerized the script) picked George Hamilton– and a director of some of Elvis Presley’s worst movies.
There’s never been a point where things got appreciably better. Diana Ross works very hard in LADY SINGS THE BLUES– and if you’re willing to grant enough indulgences because Billie Holliday’s life was so tragic– the film succeeds pretty well. Motown didn’t scrimp on the soap opera elements, though– nor did it emphasize any of the interesting details.
The best thing you can say for THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY is that it insisted on having the actors learn to play the music and perform live (except for some dubbed-in leads– which were played live). It makes absolutely everything up (to name just one, Holly had a producer– and Norman Petty stole most of his royalties and many of his copyrights). Also, Gary Busey doesn’t even try to mimic Holly’s style.
I was a huge Doors fan; I saw almost all the recordings of their live performances and interviews. I would have given Val Kilmer the Best Actor Oscar (thought I would have thought about Robin Williams or Jeff Bridges for THE FISHER KING– and certainly not Anthony Hopkins, with a nice Chianti). Oliver Stone did his usual hackwork on the story (basing the movie on a book written by a teenage staffer of Jim’s didn’t help any, either.)
I’m considerably less charitable about JUDY– most likely because I worked in a revival house owned by a gay man during my teens and early 20’s. We played dozens of Judy Garland movies; I grew enormously sick of listening to drunken queens mythologize her– while they played fast and loose with the facts. (The movie is based on a play by a gay man who doesn’t seem to have cared much for the truth; it has a performance by a marginally talented actress who desperately wanted an Oscar– and got one.)
DE-LOVELY, the 2004 take on Porter, has the considerable asset of Kevin Kline (Cole Porter used to chew the scenery of every room he entered as well). but the film rather charitably suggests that nothing that happened to Porter was his fault. I SAW THE LIGHT at least admits that Hank Williams drank and he was a hot mess as a human being. It manages to leave the audience with the notion that the prodigiously-gifted songwriter– who battered down the barriers between country blues and pop music– was a marginally-talented hack who got lucky.
MAESTRO made my brain hurt. It’s better than the hot messes that are ROCKETMAN and BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY, in that it makes you believe Leonard Bernstein has talent. It’s not terribly good at identifying what his talents were.
There is no golden era– no period when movies about musical artists did a great job of depicting their subjects. If you were making a top ten list, you might have to put Jimmy Stewart (in THE GLENN MILLER STORY) or Jennifer Lopez (SELENA) on it.
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A COMPLETE PANTSLOAD had warning signs all over it. The possibility that any film would be able to capture– much less explore– the myriad contradictions that are Robert Allen Zimmerman was about the same as the odds of the the Cleveland Browns going 17-0 in the 2025 NFL season. You’d have difficulty doing it in a 10-episode miniseries.
There’s also the problem with the protagonist. You can endlessly admire his work– and still note that the man who would become Bob Dylan has more than a little of James Gatz in him. If you want to be truly uncharitable, substitute Sammy Glick… or even Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes. To get where he wanted to go, Bobby Zimmerman was prepared to stomp over anyone who got in his way (hiring Albert Grossman was an indicator of what he was willing to do).
Young Dylan was documentarized more than once– and he shows a decidedly mean streak in his behavior. Even genuine admirers (Al Kooper, to name one) say that Dylan treated people who did nothing other than admire him beyond measure very badly.
And since the movie was directed by James Mangled, you knew there was zero chance of honesty or accuracy.
A COMPLTE PANTSLOAD marked the third time Mangled played played fast and loose with real life. People who know the life story of Johnny Cash have few kind words to say about WALK THE LINE. Racing fans detest FORD V FERRARI with a passion that’s almost startling.
Mangled uses the same approach to historical drama as Stone– he comes to his subject matter with his mind made up. If the facts get in his way, he alters them (or just makes stuff up) to communicate what he wants to say.
Mangled is also too much of an immature dipshit to be able to depict any event that features human beings. One party is always required to be unredeemably evil– the other is pure and good. Giving his hero a few tragic flaws entirely beyong his control is about as far as Mangled goes. he likes simplistic depictions– he lives to give you soap opera plots or TV movie nonsense.
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People who make bullcrap about real people always say “the audience won’t notice.” My take– from spending long hours in theaters with people who buy tickets– is that they damned well do. Filmgoers might not KNOW they’re being fed a pile of doctored swill– much less be able to identify what is wrong or why. But they can sense that a movie is playing fast and loose with the facts.
Distortions made to serve the filmmaker’s purposes almost always give the resulting show an perceptible aura of unreality and lack of substance. As the audience watches events unfold, it has questions– most often about why the character(s) are behaving that way. A movie that makes things up doesn’t answer them– or it pawns off superficial cliches. Often the audience detects a similarity to a play, movie or TV show they’ve already seen. They can’t be positive that something is wrong– but they sense something is being massaged, and the film begins to lose them.
When you watch a movie about a famous person that seems to go downhill in the second act, that’s usually the reason why. It can be because the story of how the person made it is more engrossing than what happens after getting there. But often it’s the collective impact of falsehoods great and small mucking up the suspension of your disbelief.
My wife knew virtually nothing about the life of Leonard Bernstein, for example, but she knew I did. She kept pausing MAESTRO to ask me specific questions about events. Usually in spots where Bradley Cooper had played fast and loose with the truth. My wife is not a typical viewer (living with me for 20+ years will warp anyone), but I’ve watched moviegoers do post-mortems. In viewing after viewing of Jim Sheridan’s IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, they’d exit talking to themselves about whether the events shown on screen really happened. (Spoiler alert: Mostly they didn’t.)
Mangled always responds to people who raise these points with him– he throws a hissy-fit and says they don’t understand filmmaking, or what he was trying to do.
My take: They understand exactly what he did. Bullshit is pretty easy to spot.
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Let me give you an example– a relatively minor story element from the movie one could call WHITE RAY. Vivian Liberto was a Sicilian Catholic from San Antonio. She was born into a mixed marriage. Her dad’s parents had immigrated to New Orleans from Palermo, Sicily; mom was the daughter of a German-Irish man and a black woman.
(This can all be substantiated. There was a TV show that had celebrities taking DNA tests. One of the episodes featured Roseanne Cash.)
Vivian’s parents considered her Sicilian-American; she attended white schools– in Texas, so the bar was high. She met a soldier named John Cash when she was 17– when he got sent overseas for three years, they exchanged letters almost every day. He returned to the US when she was 20. She married him and eventually gave him three kids.
Cash dragged her to Memphis, Tennessee. Seven years later, he took her to a bucolic region of California, because he’d bought a trailer park in Casitas that he hired his parents to manage. His profession meant he was rarely home– while he was out on tour, he spent most of his time drinking. doing drugs and cheating with every woman he could wrangle.
Time passed. Cash made money and his addictions spiraled out of control. Eventually he got arrested on drug charges. On the advice of his manager, Vivian went with him to court; her job was to pretend that they had a happy marriage, and that her husband had just made a minor-one-time mistake.
That caused Vivian an endless amount of trouble. Pictures of her were published– and because she was a dark-skinned Italian (who also possessed some of the genes of her mom’s people), she began to get hate mail from Ku Klux Klan types for marrying a white man in an era when interracial marriage was illegal in many states at.
(If you want to get a fix on this, check her Wikipedia page– there’s a 1961 photo that gives you an idea why the meme got traction.)
Cash dumped her. You can argue this was for the best– that the marriage had been over for years. They never saw each other, they’d stopped liking each other by the early 60’s– and she knew damned well what he was doing. You can also say that Cash had been more than happy to maintain the charade for years– that unless and until he got to pork June Carter, he would have been willing to maintain the fiction endlessly
(By the way, Ray Charles Robinson– given the existence of the boxer, you can understand why he dropped his last name– married Della Beatrice Howard in 1955. They didn’t stay married for life– she divorced him in 1977. Contrary to what the movie suggests, he never stopped drinking or smoking dope. Some sources say he only moderated the heroin intake. He had 12 kids, so he never stopped sleeping around.)
A less charitable view of what transpired is that Cash and his managers believed that being married to a woman that crackers thought was black was killing his career by making it hard for him to get booked down south. He tried to explain that Texas (not exactly a blue state) considered Vivian white– but people who believe that “one drop of negro blood pollutes you” weren’t buying that
Anyway, Cash ended the marriage, left her with the kids and went off with a woman he’d been pursuing for years. He occasionally saw the kids– and virtually never paid child support. Vivian remarried in 1968; since her husband was a cop, the odds against that marriage being happy seem remote. But they stayed married and she wasn’t impoverished anymore.
How closely does the real Vivian Cash track James Mangled’s portrait of her? He cast Ginnifer Goodwin (about as WASPy as an actress as you can get) and Goowin plays an utterly unsupportive, full-on shrew. At one point. she even belittles River Phoenix about his decision to have everyone in the band wear black.
Mangled claims he never intended to make a documentary– he was portraying the growing love affair between Cash and June Carter. Coulda fooled me. I’ll leave all the other issues for you to investigate, if you choose.
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I’m not even gonna touch FORD V FERRARI. Racing fans are obsessive by nature; many of them had been dreaming of seeing the story dramatized for decades. Mangled’s depiction spawned many articles– even whole sites– about the liberties taken with the events of the lives of Ken Miles, Carroll Shelby, Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca, and their personalities and behavior.
Mangled had the same response: “I made the movie that matched the story as I saw it.” The possibility that he had his vision circumscribed by the interior of his sigmoid colon has yet to enter Mangled’s mind
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My take on this– as someone who reads and writes history and enjoys movies and TV– is pretty simple: Don’t go to movies looking for truth.
If you want to see a movie– but not get immersed in lies– before you see it, check the Internet. If the person is famous, you probably know enough that you can’t have the story spoiled. People who study the lives of famous folks will explain what the movie gets right (usually wrong) at great length, so you can decide.
I’m willing to grant a fair amount of license– because it is difficult to condense a full life into two hours. I do require that at least 50% of a movie be accurate before I give the people who made it my money. If they don’t meet that standard, I’ll stream the movie and they can have whatever they sold it to the service for. But they don’t get my money directly.
My advice to filmmakers? If you don’t want to stick to the facts– if you want to (as the newspaper guy says in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE) “print the legend”, do what Hollywood used to do (or LAW & ORDER– is that is still on the air?– does): Make a movie BASED on the story where you change all the names, so nobody gets the impression this is what actually happened.
There’s nothing wrong with that– you can make a pretty decent film. INHERIT THE WIND isn’t even close to “Tennessee v John Scopes”– but thanks to Spencer Tracy, Frederic March, Gene Kelly and Henry Morgan, it’s still a corking good show.
But I object like hell to what Mangled does. It isn’t comparable to what Donald Trump does, but he’s another form of the sustained assault on the truth people have to wade through.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/03/a-complete-pantsload-hollywoods-latest-biopic-dylan/
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