Steve Cuozzo

Steve Cuozzo

Opinion

From ‘The Crown’ to ‘The Irishman,’ Hollywood is the biggest author of fake news

Social media is the truth-killer of our time, according to just about everybody — a writhing bacterial swamp of falsehoods. Look at President Trump’s off-the-handle tweets, Facebook’s ads for phony AIDS cures, and YouTube’s innumerable hoaxes including the “death” of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg!

But where did the mass dissemination of fiction masquerading as fact have its start and the most pernicious impact? In Hollywood, the greatest falsifier of all.

While myths spread by social media often emanate from anonymous depths, the lies told by movies and TV enter our brains bathed in klieg lights and drenched in the legitimacy conferred by zillion-dollar production budgets and stars and writers skilled in the arts of persuasion.

Golden Globe nominees “The Crown,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “The Irishman” all include fancifully embellished and outright false depictions of actual historical events and individuals. Unlike ephemeral social-media posts, the works — and the fake impressions they make of recent history — will be with us indefinitely.

“The Crown” is a colorful, well-paced saga of the British royal family during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. But it’s so full of baloney that Princess Margaret’s biographer and Palace historian Christopher Warwick told Vanity Fair that the series is “chiefly entertainment. It’s certainly not based on fact.”

Among its tall tales: Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) is depicted in Season 3 as sweet-talking President Lyndon B. Johnson into providing the UK with a bailout for Britain’s World War II debt during her 1965 visit to America. In fact, Johnson had authorized the bailout two months prior to Margaret’s trip.

“The Crown” also portrays the Queen Mother and Lord Mountbatten as quashing Prince Charles’ early relationship with Camilla Shand in the 1970s; that Prince Philip tormented Charles, calling him “bloody weak” for not standing up to school bullies; and that Philip was to blame for his sister Cecilie’s decision to fly to Germany in 1937 in a plane that fatally crashed. Lies, all of them.

Closer to home, how many viewers will accept as truth that “Irishman” title character Frank Sheeran not only orchestrated union boss Jimmy Hoffa’s death but that he personally pulled the trigger? Hoffa disappeared for good in 1975.

In "Richard Jewell," Clint Eastwood takes liberties with the story of reporter Kathy Scruggs that family, friends and colleagues say was cruelly untrue.
In “Richard Jewell,” Clint Eastwood takes liberties with the story of reporter Kathy Scruggs that family, friends and colleagues say was cruelly untrue.CLAIRE FOLGER

The case was never solved. But director Martin Scorsese based his three-and-a-half hour opus on the word of Sheeran, whose near-every claim has been proven false — including one about a certain Michigan airport that had been turned into housing. In fact, it existed at the time and still does as Pontiac International Airport.

Carol Kaye, the “First Lady of Bass” who played with many great singers and rock bands from the 1950s to the ’70s — and who’s very much alive at 84 — had good reason to complain about her depiction in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” A character called “Carole Keen,” who’s immediately identifiable to music-world mavens as standing for Kaye, reduced an influential and seriously purposed musician to a funny-eyeglass-wearing, dirty-talking cartoon figure.

Women are often cheaply targeted. The Clint Eastwood-directed “Richard Jewell” depicts Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs as trading sex with an FBI agent in exchange for information on the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing — a tip that turned out to be wrong. Family, friends and journalistic colleagues of Scruggs, who died in 2001, say her depiction in the film was cruelly untrue.

Olivia Wilde, who played Scruggs, now claims to know that Scruggs never “ ‘traded sex for tips’ . . . it was never my intention to suggest she had.” Never mind that the part as written asserted precisely that.

Eastwood also made stuff up in “Sully,” about Capt. Chesley Sullenberger’s heroic safe-landing of a powerless airliner in the East River. His screenwriters concocted a grotesque, weeks-long interrogation of Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) in which National Transportation Safety Board officials accuse the pilot of incompetence and dereliction for not simply landing back at La Guardia (which was impossible).

Tom Hanks (left) and Aaron Eckhart in "Sully"
Tom Hanks (left) and Aaron Eckhart in “Sully”©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Problem was, no such inquisition took place. The NTSB conducted routine hearings but at no point tormented Sullenberger, much less accused him of lying.

“Argo,” Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning 2012 thriller, depicted the rescue of six American hostages hiding inside the Canadian embassy in Tehran after the 1979 storming of the US embassy. But there was no climactic chase where Iranian soldiers fired machine guns at the Swissair jet as it tried to take off. In fact, the hostages got out with no trouble at all.

Harmless fun? Not for “JFK,” Oliver Stone’s 1991 drama about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It implicated just about anyone alive in 1963 — the CIA, gangsters, defense companies, oil barons, shady women, Cuban exiles, US Army generals, Dallas cops and even innocent gay residents of New Orleans — in an infinitely extended conspiracy.

That more than 60 percent of Americans believe Lee Harvey Oswald either didn’t kill Kennedy or had only a minor role is surely due to “JFK’s” lumbering, three-hour “exposé” based on looney theories put forth by discredited New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.

Anytime I think that maybe people don’t believe everything on screen, I recall the tale of a late, Oxford-educated Post colleague and journalist friend of mine Bruce Rothwell, who lived in London before coming to New York.

Bruce told me that he was surprised to learn that it wasn’t a British pilot, but American Chuck Yeager, who first broke the sound barrier in 1947. He’d grown up with the 1952 David Lean-directed “The Sound Barrier,” the UK’s 12th-most popular film that year, which depicted RAF flight lieutenant Philip Peel as the holder of the sound-breaking record. But Peel and the movie’s plot are entirely fictional.

Hollywood is the world’s biggest teller of lies. And unlike with social media, we have to pay for them.