Transcript
History Channel Awards
March 17, 2001
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Next Friday the History Channel bestows its third annual Harry Awards for films that contribute to the understanding and appreciation of history. This year instead of a panel of historians, viewers picked the winner. Joining me is Josh Binswanger, co-anchor for the series This Week in History on the History Channel. Josh, welcome to On the Media!
MAN: Pleasure to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And Steve Gillon who is the anchor of the History Channel program History Center. Welcome to you!
STEVE GILLON: Thanks.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why do we need a Harry Award, and what is it? Josh?
MAN: What it does is it honors those films that contribute the most to the knowledge, appreciation and understanding of history during the past year. The awards are named for Herodotus who is widely considered to be the Greek father of History. We have shortened that in the 21st Century to the more familiar Harry, and this year's five nominees include U571; Men of Honor which focuses on the first African-American to enter the Navy diving program; 13 Days which takes a look back at the Cuban Missile Crisis; The Patriot and Gladiator.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Steven in a July 2000 article of The Scotsman entitled The History of Unreality in Hollywood Tradition writer Stuart Kirkpatrick suggested that historical Hollywood films do little to undermine the United States' title as quote "the most ignorant nation on earth." What -how do you think Hollywood does?
STEVEN GILLON: My feeling is if they produce a movie that makes some effort to convey to viewers a sense of what the times were like then, that's a very little thing. No one expects Hollywood to produce historically accurate movies! If they did, nobody would watch them!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well let's see how this year's slate of nominees stack up.
JOAQUIN PHOENIX AS ROMAN EMPEROR:A general became a slave; a slave who became a gladiator; a gladiator who defied an emperor. Striking story. Now that people want to know how the story ends.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:It's generally understood by historians that the villain in the film, Commodus, was probably not killed by the gladiator and the former general Maximus but was probably poisoned by his wife.
STEVE GILLON: You can go through and pick out all the things that are fictitious in the movie. There was no Maximus. In the gladiator scenes you have tigers coming out while two men are battling. That would never have happened in a gladiator ring. In that wonderful battle scene in the beginning of the movie the people riding horses had stirrups and there were no stirrups. The catapulter from a different century. So you can go through and pick out all these things, but I think overall, after you watch that movie, you get a good sense of what Roman society was like during this time, and that opening battle scene, despite some of the technical problems, it's probably the best depiction of what military confrontation was like at that time!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Gladiator didn't infuriate our European friends as much as some of the other nominees have, notably The Patriot and U571. The Patriot because it takes place during the Revolutionary War and it shows the British as veritable Nazis, storm troopers who would herd innocent women and children into a church and then burn it down! BRITISH OFFICER: Didn't you say all those who stand against England deserve to die a traitor's death? [PAUSE] Burn the church, captain.
STEVE GILLON: They exaggerate the importance of the militia on the American side and they exaggerate the brutality of the British on the other side. They also missed the fact that most of the fighting that took place in the Southern Campaign was not between British Redcoats and American Militia but between different groups of Americans -- those who were loyal to the crown and those who were loyal to America. I think the biggest problem with this film is not the way it depicts the British -- it's with the way it depicts slavery.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What disturbs you about the way it depicts Slavery?
STEVE GILLON:Well Mel Gibson is portrayed as a Southern plantation owner who paid his African-American workers, and if that were the case, he's the only one. [LAUGHS]
JOSH BINSWANGER: As Joel Siegel said it was sort of like a, a Revolutionary War kibbutz.
STEVE GILLON: Yeah. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] But having said that, what it does convey is a sense of the local nature of the war. I mean in the Southern Campaign this war really was fought in people's back yards, and also the type of military arrangement where you have these American soldiers and British soldiers walking in formation and standing there while they load their guns and shoot volleys.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Still it sounds like we can extrapolate from Gladiator and-- The Patriot that Hollywood tends to get the facts wrong but the fights right! [LAUGHTER]
STEVE GILLON: Well, not always.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Now the one that really irritates the British, U571. Now here you have the Enigma Machine--
MAN: An Enigma Code Machine--; it allows the German Navy to communicate with its submarines in secret.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This was a great event in World War II, but--the capture of the Enigma Machine was achieved by the British!-- not by the American as depicted in this film! What was Hollywood thinking?! Did they think they could get away with that?!
JOSH BINSWANGER: The British were the first ones to capture the Enigma Machine-- and that's certainly true. But who's going to go watch a movie about Brits? So [LAUGHS] you make it an American thing. But the question is at the end of the film do you learn something?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Yeah, but if you have to take in a lot of sheer garbage along with some of the good information, shouldn't that have a countervailing effect when you decide who wins the award?
STEVE GILLON: It can, but other than sort of switching roles between the American and the British, I don't think there's a lot of other things that this film gets wrong.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And do you have any-- any handicapping on the winners here? Anyplace where we should put our money? [LAUGHTER]
JOSH BINSWANGER: [LAUGHS] No, no comment, but suffice to say we were surprised by the winner.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well thank you both very much!
STEVE GILLON: Thank you.
JOSH BINSWANGER: Pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Historian Steven Gillon hosts the program History Center and Josh Binswanger co-anchors the series This Week in History. He'll also host the Harry Awards which airs Friday at 8 on the History Channel.