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Disney rides into trouble with story
of
cowboy who conquers the Middle East
By Andrew Gumbel
Los Angeles, California, Mar. 10— Once upon a time, a fabled
horseman from the Wild West accepted an unusual challenge from a Middle
Eastern businessman and rode his American mustang to victory against
the odds in an extraordinary 3,000-mile Arabian desert race known as
the Ocean of Fire.
That, at least, is the “true story” touted by the Walt Disney
Company as the basis for its film Hidalgo, which has just opened
in the United States.
The premise is certainly bringing in audiences beguiled by its old-fashioned
adventurism and daring-do sensibility. But it has also triggered a cultural
row of rare intensity, as historians, Native Americans and Arab and
Muslim interest groups have all piled into Disney, accusing the company
of giving credence to outrageous fabrications in the interests of promoting
a crude American cultural imperialism and making a fast buck.
“Phoney baloney,” one critic has called it. “Liar, liar,
chaps on fire,” intoned another.
The film stars Viggo Mortensen -- fresh from his triumph in The Lord
of the Rings -- as Frank Hopkins, who conquers the Middle East and
his hundred competing Bedouin riders with the sort of ease and bravado
the US military now hunkered down in Iraq can surely only fantasize
about.
The historical Hopkins, whose memoirs form the basis for the film script,
claimed to have been the son of a Sioux princess, a US Cavalry trooper
from the age of 12, a witness to the massacre at Wounded Knee, a buddy
of the Indian chieftain Black Elk and President Teddy Roosevelt, the
champion of hundreds of endurance races, including a 2,000-mile marathon
from Texas to Vermont, and a regular performer in Buffalo Bill’s
touring Wild West Show.
It was while performing with Buffalo Bill in Paris in 1889, he said,
that an Aden businessman, Rau Rasmussen, invited him to compete in the
Ocean of Fire, a 1,000-year-old race across Saudi Arabia’s Empty
Quarter and up through Mesopotamia into Syria. Despite the harshness
of the terrain and the physical disadvantages of his horse, Hidalgo,
he crossed the finish line in 68 days, anywhere between one and two
days ahead of the nearest competition. (The film, naturally, makes the
finale a lot tighter.)
The problem is, Frank Hopkins was almost certainly a fabulist and a
confidence man whose tales of heroic deeds were little more than tall
stories. There is no mention of him in US Cavalry records, or in accounts
of the Battle of Wounded Knee, or in the extensive records of Buffalo
Bill’s traveling show. His name does not crop up in Teddy Roosevelt’s
voluminous correspondence. There is no evidence that the Texas-Vermont
race was even run. He was never photographed in the saddle, except as
an old man “re-enacting” the exploits of his youth.
As for the Ocean of Fire, it too appears not to have taken place, either
in 1890 or in any other year of its supposedly glorious 1,000-year-old
history. The notion of a 3,000-mile race from Yemen to Syria is in itself
laughable.
As the Arab News newspaper wrote recently, a race of that length
starting in Aden would finish up “somewhere in Romania.” Even
following the most circuitous route, the horsemen would finish north
of Armenia.
Awad al-Badi, an authority on Western travelers to Arabia based at the
King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, put it bluntly:
“The idea of a historic trans-Arabian horse race ever having been
run is pure nonsense ... simply from a technical, logistical, cultural
and geopolitical point of view.”
Much of the damning evidence against Hopkins has been unearthed by an
equestrian exploration group called the Long Riders’ Guild, which
got wind of the Disney film early in the production process and took
huge offense at the notion of a big-budget production glorifying a horseback
exploit that never took place. “This movie is a massive distortion
of history, which further degrades the reputation of the Walt Disney
company,” say the Guild’s founders, Basha and CuChullaine
O’Reilly.
They recruited more than 70 academics and experts to look further into
the historical record and expose Frank Hopkins as a hoaxer.
Their research raised questions about just about everything, starting
with the year of Hopkins’ birth, variously reported as 1865 and
1884. They could find no evidence he had ever ridden a racehorse or
even set foot in the American West. The only known records of employment
that they found showed he was a shipyard boilermaker, a digger of subway
tunnels in Philadelphia and a horse handler for the Ringling Brothers
circus.
The fact that Disney has bought into Hopkins’ fantasies, all the
while promoting them as an “incredible true story” in its
movie trailers, has touched countless cultural raw nerves. One of the
world’s leading Native American scholars, Vine Deloria of the University
of Colorado, is furious at the uncritical repetition of Hopkins’
claims about his role in Sioux history. He wrote: “Hopkins’
claims are so outrageously false that one wonders why Disney were attracted
to this material at all, except of course the constant propensity to
make money under any conditions available.”
And the Council on American-Islamic Relations has written to Disney
to complain of negative stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs in the film.
Other Arab commentators, such as Hussein Ibish of the Arab American
Anti-Discrimination Committee, point to the uncomfortable parallels
between the film and the real-life fantasy of US domination in Iraq
and the rest of the Middle East. “The idea,” as Ibish puts
it, “that being a frontiersman in the United States prepares you
for dealing with another group of savages.”
Disney’s response to this barrage of criticism has been awkward,
not to say contradictory. The film’s screenwriter, John Fusco,
clings to the notion that his story is based on rigorously checked historical
sources, and has even started a website in his defense. But last week
a documentary aired on the History Channel, a Disney subsidiary, borrowed
much of the Long Riders’ research to trash Hopkins’ claims.
Disney’s executive director of international publicity, Nina Heyn,
was quoted last year as saying, in an apparent moment of unguarded honesty,
that “no one here really cares about the historical aspects,”
a line the company has been careful not to repeat since.
The company has a large investment to protect -- some $80 million in
production costs alone -- at a time when the Disney name has been mired
in controversy and its chief executive, Michael Eisner, has faced open
revolt from his shareholders, and from Roy Disney, nephew of the company’s
founder, Walt.
The film’s release date has been postponed twice, perhaps because
of the awkward resonance of last year’s Iraq war, when it was originally
set to hit the cinemas.
A tale of conquest of the Orient, based on entirely false pretenses
... Now where have we heard that one before?
Source: Independent (UK)
Hollywood disaster film set
to turn heat on Bush
By Dan Glaister
Los Angeles, California, Mar. 13— It sounds unlikely, but
this summer might see an alliance of commerce, populist entertainment
and feel-good concern combine to weaken President George Bush and hand
votes to his expected Democrat rival John Kerry. May 28 sees the worldwide
release of The Day After Tomorrow, the eco-armageddon story to
beat all others.
The first trailers for the film, released on the internet last week,
give a taste of the scale of the eco-horrors to come. Filmed in a combination
of slick computer generated special effects and faux newscast verité,
tidal waves sweep across cities and snow piles halfway up the towers
of Manhattan as disjointed voices articulate the chaos around them.
Filmed with a budget of more than $100 million and special effects said
to be the greatest thing since, well, since the last big budget movie,
the film has one other difference from other Hollywood blockbusters:
it has a conscience.
“At some point during the filming we looked around at all the lights,
generators and trucks and we realized the very process of making this
picture is contributing to the problem of global warming,” the
director and producers say in a statement on the film’s official
website. “We couldn’t avoid putting CO2 into the atmosphere
during the shoot, but we discovered we could do something to make up
for it; we could make the film carbon neutral.” By planting trees
they will take out the CO2 the production put in.
The film’s website includes a lengthy list of internet links to
organizations that have researched the effects of global warming. During
filming last year, Emmerich described the film as “a popcorn movie
that’s actually a little subversive.”
President Bush is known to be skeptical about the possibility of global
warming, while the environment is a traditional strong card for the
Democrats. With issues such as oil drilling rights in Alaska playing
strongly among some voters, the president’s opponents have regularly
attacked him for the favoritism he is perceived to have shown to the
fossil fuel giants that dominate the US economy.
The Pentagon even got in on the act, releasing a study last month that
suggested that one outcome of global warming could be the rise of mass
civil unrest. In one scenario, drought, famine and rioting erupt across
the world, spurred on by climate change. As countries face dwindling
food supplies and scarce natural resources, conflict becomes the norm.
But while it can be fortuitous for an event such as a mass appeal movie
to come along and propel an issue to the forefront of voters’ consciousness,
there are also pitfalls. “The danger is it could make it look more
trivial,” said Breit.
One US environmental pressure group has already enlisted the help of
one of the film’s stars, Jake Gyllenhaal, to help promote its agenda
while promoting the film.
The Day After Tomorrow’s advance publicity suggests a typical
Hollywood mix of fact, fantasy and hype: fake weather reports and testimonies
from fans about where they would like to be the day the world dies are
mixed with earnest exhortations to help avert global warming.
“In Independence Day Roland Emmerich brought you the near
destruction of the earth by aliens,” says the web site. “Now,
in The Day After Tomorrow, the enemy is an even more devastating
force: nature itself.” It’ll have them voting in the aisles.
Source: Guardian (UK)
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