More romance than history

[Photo: AP] During the actual Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, three U.S. battleships were hit. From left, they are the USS West Virginia, which was severely damaged, the USS Tennessee, which was damaged, and the USS Arizona, which sank.

By STEVE PERSALL

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 27, 2001

At a preview of Pearl Harbor, 55 veterans who were there say Hollywood's version of events sacrifices accuracy for love scenes.

PINELLAS PARK -- Winners write history. Hollywood wins by stealing history and re-writing it.

Filmmakers have always preferred myth over fact, even in movies allegedly rooted in history. Audiences typically don't care as long as they have a good time at the theater.

Historians call it a crime. This time, however, there are witnesses.

Touchstone Pictures' Pearl Harbor, which opened Friday, purports to tell the tale of Japan's Dec. 7, 1941, attack on U.S. military posts in Hawaii. But an estimated 4,000 Americans who survived that day are still alive, and nearly one-tenth of them reside in Florida.

Wednesday night, 55 survivors were among hundreds of moviegoers at Pearl Harbor's Tampa Bay-area premiere at R/C Theatres Parkside 16. Some veterans felt as if they watched someone else's life pass before their eyes.

"Too much Hollywood," said James Crocker, 85, of Clearwater. "Too many love scenes for a picture named Pearl Harbor. I think the history angle has been lost with all the love scenes for younger people to enjoy."

Only 35 minutes of director Michael Bay's three-hour movie depict the assault on Pearl Harbor. Survivors generally praised the spectacular mix of computerized images and real-life demolition for accurately depicting the intensity and confusion of the attack.

"It's very close to what actually happened. I'll give it that much," said Alexander Buiel, 79, of Largo, an Army signal corpsman at Wheeler Field, one of the invaders' first strategic strikes.

"The war scenes were very close, but I think there was too much build-up for them. I couldn't understand the beginning of the show. What the hell does the first 30 minutes of that movie have to do with Pearl Harbor?"

Or, the final half-hour when Col. Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin) leads an April 1942 bombing raid on Tokyo in retaliation?

[Times photo: Bill Serne] Following a preview of Pearl Harbor at R/C Theatres Parkside 16, James Crocker of Clearwater, left, and Alexander Buiel of Largo say the movie has too much Hollywood and not enough history.

Asked before the film what they expected from Pearl Harbor, many survivors wished for a memorial to inform young audiences about the event. On that count, Bay's $135-million movie may have missed its target.

"We had some young people sitting in front of us and they couldn't have cared less about the history angle," Buiel said.

"The bombing of Pearl Harbor meant nothing to these kids," Buiel said. "The only thing that hurt them was when that nurse got killed. The whole bunch of them went "aaaaaw.' That was the biggest reaction from them during the whole show."

Survivor reaction to the film Wednesday night was subdued, compared with the emotional outpouring that some veterans felt after seeing Steven Spielberg's World War II epic Saving Private Ryan for the first time. There were no cheers or weeping this time around.

In Pearl Harbor the movie, the war seems almost like an intrusion on the love triangle among ace pilot Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck), his childhood pal Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) and an Army nurse, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale).

Only the lavish 1940s period design in clothes, sets and props appears authentic. Chapters of history books are boiled down to newsreel snippets and details worthy of grade-school essays. Pressure during production from Japanese-American advocates led to Randall Wallace's screenplay seeming to suggest that Japan was reluctantly cornered into a sneak attack.

So, steps that likely will make the movie more popular with overseas audiences and Hollywood's most dependable U.S. audience -- teens and young adults -- also sacrifice historical accuracy.

"That's a problem," said Pearl Harbor historian and author Donald Goldstein (The Way It Was, The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside the Japanese Plans).

"Tora! Tora! Tora! (the 1970 film) was kind to (the Japanese), I thought. But, my God, these guys look even nicer. If you're going to tell a story, tell it.

"What they're trying to do here is have good taste, a history movie with a cockamamie love story," he said. "They can't do it because of these politically correct restraints. (The producers) would be better off saying this is based on a true story and let it go. Instead, they kind of lead you to believe this is the real thing."

Goldstein knows how movies can replace the historical record. He was an adviser for Tora! Tora! Tora!, which included a climactic line from Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto: "I fear that all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant." The same line is delivered by Yamamoto's character in Pearl Harbor.

"People refer to it all the time," he said, "but I've been working on this stuff for 30 years, and I can't find any proof that he said it. It doesn't matter much, but things like that become imbedded in folklore and history, and that's what's bad."

Goldstein also noted that some of Pearl Harbor's true-life characters are misrepresented for dramatic purposes. Navy cook Dorie Miller told the author in an interview that he "may have gotten one" enemy aircraft with artillery fire. The movie depicts Miller, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., hitting several and blowing one to smithereens.

Pearl Harbor's commander, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, wasn't relaxing on a golf course when the attack commenced, Goldstein asserted. Servicemen weren't sunbathing at 7:45 a.m., either. Bay's movie also credits Affleck's and Hartnett's characters with acts performed by pilots George Welch and Kenneth Taylor, who engaged Zero fighters in air combat, downing six Japanese planes.

Affleck and Hartnett one-up the real-life heroes with seven kills.

"They make this guy Rafe look like a superman," Goldstein complained. "He's here, he's there, he gets shot down in Germany, then he's flying planes at Pearl Harbor, then, by God, we're going to take him out of a fighter plane and put him into a bomber in a mission that's very tough and let him star in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo."

Sure, and Leonardo DiCaprio didn't win passage on Titanic in a poker game, either. Goldstein and the survivors Wednesday night sounded resigned to the idea that, as they did for Titanic, audiences will flock to Pearl Harbor for romance, not historical accuracy.

"The difference is -- and this is where (the filmmakers) miscalculated -- in Titanic, there weren't enough people around to argue," he said. "But with this thing, you've got all the guys still living who were there. They'll pick this movie apart."

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