Screenwriting & Authenticity

 When I think about authenticity, I wonder if it is not overdone. That authenticity can be a fetish. Are Shakespeare's authentic Italians or authentic human beings? I think the latter is more important.

But How Oscar-nominated screenwriters attempt to craft authentic dialogue, dialects and accents (The Conversation) makes a slightly different point, that probably close to my own views.

Several commented that there’s been more commitment to hiring writers who represent the characters’ voices and backgrounds. There’s also more “freedom to include diverse characters and worlds… but a commensurate emphasis on authenticity and a higher bar for what that means,” as one writer explained.

“Authenticity” was consistently cited in our survey as a principal consideration when writing dialogue. Other concerns included scripts’ intelligibility, historical accuracy and believability.

There is a point where the wrong world, the wrong image, undermines the story.

If one watches Close Encounters of the Third Kind gets a laugh out of me when I see the hilly terrain surrounding its Muncie.  

I have trouble watching the Charlie Chan movies, not just for the yellowface, but for the pidgin English given to the Asian actors. I do not recall the novels having the same problem, so it is a movie thing, and that opens all sorts of avenues for speculation.

That Gal Gadot was not the authentic figure for Wonder Woman seems stupid to me.

There seems to me an authenticity that contributes to the story and one that distracts from the story. Shakespeare's audience did not know Italians. We do. When we watch, or read, Shakespeare we do not read his foreigners for ethnographic details. The original and the remake of The Departed have their own authenticity. That is the authenticity that is important.

sch 4/22