Any big-budget movie about an event as world-changing and emotionally charged as the attack on Pearl Harbor is bound to stir concerns about its historical accuracy, portrayal of real individuals and characterizations of various groups.
And since the upcoming "Pearl Harbor" was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer ("Coyote Ugly"), directed by Michael Bay ("Armageddon") and written by Randall Wallace ("Braveheart," which did as much violence to English history as it did to Edward I's army), the pre-release alarms are going off loud and clear.
And let's face it: The movie's main poster image of Japanese planes flying over an Oahu field where kids are playing baseball before 8 a.m on a Sunday morning does not inspire confidence in the film's socio-historical accuracy.
"That was a true story," Bruckheimer insists. "One gunner on a Japanese plane waved these kids on a ball field away. Look, we're not saying that the movie's 100 percent accurate — believe me, it's not. But that happened to be a true story."
As for the rest, though few have actually seen the finished film yet, historians, veterans and Japanese-American groups who have had access to script drafts — and, in some cases, the filmmakers and their shooting locations — are understandably worried about how "Pearl Harbor" depicts their cherished and vital interests.
"It's their movie, it's not mine, I was purely an adviser," says Jack Green, a staff curator for the Naval Historical Center and a retired Air Force captain, who was a technical adviser throughout the production. "They could take my advice or not, and that's the way it was."
While acknowledging that innumerable historical details were changed due to his and many other advisers' input, and that their opinions were sought and respectfully heard on a daily basis, Green notes several major examples of factual conflict.
One involves Ben Affleck's Army Air Corps pilot character helping Britain's Royal Air Force fight Hitler's Luftwaffe before America entered the war. Trouble is, only U.S. civilians could volunteer while America was still neutral.
"In 1941, this would have been a major, major issue," Green wryly notes. "I offered an alternative, but Jerry thought it was too complicated, so they stuck with this."
Perhaps the most upsetting inaccuracies have to do with some script drafts' depiction of Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle. Bruckheimer dearly wanted to end the film on an "up" note, and the first one to come about in the wake of Japan's many early victories was the Doolittle-led B-25 raid on Tokyo in April 1942.
When Wallace first added this sequence to the script, he evidently depicted the highly refined and brainy Doolittle as a foul-mouthed vulgarian. In one scene, the colonel, who had a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering from MIT, was even characterized as not knowing what a slide rule was. When survivors of the Doolittle raid got a look at this, they were understandably livid.
"The writer was too lazy to do any proper research," recalls Roy Stork, a co-pilot on one of the 16 bombers that took part in the first Allied attack on the Japanese homeland. "Doolittle was not a hellfire-and-brimstone type; he was a very humble man. We're totally disgusted with that, and some of the facts about the raid aren't accurate, either.
"The writer said he was trying to make it more dramatic," adds Stork, who along with eight other surviving Raiders, met with Wallace at Disney's Burbank headquarters to voice their concerns. "I said, 'You've got 80 men on an apparent suicide mission for their country, and that isn't dramatic enough?' He said, 'You don't understand the Hollywood audience.' I said, 'Yes, I do — I worked in makeup for 34 years, and this is gonna be another lousy Hollywood production.' Then he changed the subject."
But, apparently, the subject wasn't the only thing changed. Green reports that lobbying efforts on the part of advisers, Raiders and Doolittle's family convinced Bay to remedy some of the inaccuracies.
Still, "Pearl Harbor" remains a movie in which two fighter pilot heroes of the December disaster end up as part of a highly specialized B-25 crew — a military impossibility. And a report from Honolulu last week confirmed that Alec Baldwin's Doolittle still cusses a time or two.
"It's not a historical movie," deadpans Doolittle's granddaughter, Jonna Hoppes, who, like Stork, is attending "Pearl Harbor's" $5 million world premiere in Oahu on Monday. "I can't give you my reaction to it until I actually see it, but I can tell you that Mr. Bay and I disagreed strongly over a particular scene in which Doolittle decides to personally go on the raid at the last minute, on the boat, even though the War Department feels he's too valuable and doesn't want him to. That portrayed him with insubordination and also with conceit, neither of which were his character."
One person who has seen the film, Japanese American Citizens League national executive director John Tateishi, notes that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor strike, is presented as being more gung ho about war with America than he actually was.
But Tateishi has more immediate worries than that.
"My concern really is the effect seeing the movie might have on people's views of Japanese-Americans and Asian-Americans," says Tateishi, who was imprisoned with his family at a U.S. government internment camp during the war. "Having seen the movie, I think it will have some impact. I hope the majority who see it will come out, as I did, with the sense that this is a very wonderful love story. But I think some people will come out wanting to stir up the old World War II emotions again."
Guy Aoki, president of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, feels that "Pearl Harbor" distributor Disney — which is emphasizing the love story aspect of the picture in Japan, where it hopes to strike the same romantic chords that contributed more than $100 million to "Titanic's" coffers — has been more concerned about not offending Japanese sensibilities than acknowledging Japanese-American patriotism.
"At least on paper, they didn't portray the Japanese pilots as maniacal, which was a pleasant surprise," notes Aoki, whose parents and grandparents were born in Hawaii before the war. "But if every Japanese face you see in the movie is the enemy, it has a side effect. People look at people like me and think, 'Yeah, you're like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor.' We're never looked at as being loyal, and my main concern is that there's hardly anything in this movie to counterbalance all that's come before about Japanese-Americans being just about the same as Japanese nationals."
While acknowledging facts were changed for dramatic purposes and many omissions were inevitable, Bay points out that veterans and historians from both sides of the conflict were constantly on hand during production. And they often had different opinions.
"A lot of historians disagree about Pearl Harbor, and I've met a lot of them," the director notes. "There's stuff that historians say never happened, but when you're looking into the tearful eyes of an 80-year-old guy who tells you it happened to him, who are you going to believe?"
As for that early-morning baseball game, curator Green sees it as an apt metaphor for Hollywood's questionable relationship with history.
"Can you emphatically tell me that absolutely nobody on Oahu was hanging up their laundry or playing baseball at 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941?" Green says with a chuckle. "No, you can't. I know I would've been sleeping, but hey, I'm not everybody."