The truth?

Davidson and Lytle talk about how directors make certain choices when creating a movie with historical truth in the excerpt read in class titled “Where Trouble Comes”. Some scenes actually happened, some were fabricated to make it interesting. They talk about how historians and filmmakers have different views. For example, historians stick to the truth and what really happened, while filmmakers will change everything disregarding truth-value to make their money. In fact one director, Michael Cimino, had openly admitted to doing so in an interview for this excerpt. He was questioned about a scene referred to as the roulette scene and said he wanted people to feel what it was like to be there. He said these “emotionally wrenching” scenes were used to sustain the viewers interest and make them feel what it was like to be there. The author said in this excerpt “Cimino was reluctant to talk, claiming he had only read about such games in a ‘newspaper report’.” So is this real? The authors consider this scene to be mythical.
Tim O’Brien can be considered a historian. Except this historian actually made the history and wrote his account of it. Davidson and Lytle would definitely consider O’Brien’s war stories as mythical because his reasoning was not to sustain interest but to feel what he felt, or what it was like to be there. We wonder throughout all the stories O’Brien is telling and we’re asking ourselves is he for real? Did these things actually happen? When we get to the chapter “Good Form” he says it was invented. Then he says “…I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present… Even that story was made up.” Earlier in his book he wrote a whole chapter on how he killed this man, the story was authentic though fictional. It was an account of things that happened during this war, even if he himself didn’t witness it, it happened to some G.I, sometime, somewhere during the years America was fighting. It is authentic.