From Idea to Script to Sale
True Stories 61: 20s—The Woman King
We’ve had three weeks of stories about men, haven’t we? Till, Thirteen Lives, and The Tender Bar. This week we tell a story about a woman—but a woman king? How is that possible?
The Woman King [2022] by Dana Stevens, story by Maria Bello, tells us it’s based on a true story about a female tribe in Africa, the Dahomey, a female tribe who, as the film portrays them, fought to end the slave trade in Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Take a look at the trailer for the film.
The only problem with this film is that it’s inaccurate. TOTALLY inaccurate.
The Dahomey were, indeed, a female tribe—referred to as the Dahomey Amazons—but not only did they not work to end the slave trade, they were major participants in the slave trade.
For decades, the Dahomey would raid neighboring tribes, kidnap women, children and men, then sell them to the slavers in Brazil, France, Portugal, the U.K. and the U.S.. They would also keep some slaves to work in their own villages.
The Woman King becomes an action film about training a young recruit to join this freedom-fighting force. There’s a romance thrown in too. And lots of shaky camera work that’s, I suppose, meant to enhance the action.
For me, this film is frustrating on multiple levels. But the most important one is historical accuracy.
Hey, if you want to make a fictional film about a female tribe bent on justice, super. Go to it. But to claim that there’s an iota of historical accuracy in this film is absolutely shocking.
To put this in perspective, imagine if you wrote a script about how Nazi Germany worked to overcome those putting Jews in concentration camps and stop the bad buys from taking over the world? The Nazis, thus, become the good guys trying to free the world from the horrible people persecuting and murdering the Jews.
But the Nazis WERE the people trying to take over the world and murder all the Jews. They were the villains, not the heroes! Can you imagine the uproar if someone produced such a film and said it was based on a true story?
Who would buy your script if you wrote it that way? You’d be laughed out of town and no one would probably want to read any of your future work!
Bottom line, as a writer, what’s your job? You’re not an historian. You weren’t there a century or two ago when you write a script so, of course, you can’t possibly know exactly what happened. But you need to have an ethical backbone. You need to know the true story and try and TELL that story, embellishing as needed. Sure, you might change a bit of the order of events and create some people that could have been part of that story and those times, but you need to be true to the overall story. You don’t claim as true something that is absolute fiction.
Next week, a true story that’s actually true—Air.
Copyright © Diane Lake
13Aug23
Email
Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com