Well, it seems near-fiction-over-fact makes the Canadians a bit edgy, eh?
The Toronto Star printed an interesting piece a day or so ago about the Oscar-winning film Argo. Here's a snippet:
"Argo’s Oscar-winning rewrite of history simply doesn’t bother Americans, and to be honest, I can’t say I blame them. If the real heroes of Argo had been British, say, or Belgian, I might not fret either. I just happen to be Canadian and I’m old enough to remember the true story of Argo — which everybody, Americans included, used to call “the Canadian Caper.”"
Slate's article about the film, Argo, from four months ago is equally as fascinating and less testy. It's worthy to take some time to read. In part it reads:
"Once Mendez got the go-ahead for the fake movie plan, he needed a real movie idea that his fake film company could pretend to have in production. In Argo, Mendez and the Oscar-winning makeup artist John Chambers—amusingly played by his actual doppelganger, John Goodman—go through dozens of scripts with a veteran Hollywood producer played by Alan Arkin (about whom more below), and Mendez spots a movie called Argo buried in the pile. In fact, Chambers thought of a script they could use soon after Mendez told him the idea. It was called Lord of Light, after the best-selling sci-fi novel by Roger Zelazny that it was based on. The Lord of Light script was part of a wildly ambitious scheme called Science Fiction Land, which would have been the first sci-fi theme park. In order to make that dream a reality, the script’s author, Barry Ira Geller, managed to enlist support not only from Chambers, but from Buckminster Fuller, Ray Bradbury, Paolo Soleri, and Jack Kirby—who made production drawings for the film. You can see one of them (above). (In Argo, Mendez commissions storyboards himself, which are quite different from Kirby’s drawings.)"
The video comments by Tony Mendez (the character played by Ben Affleck is also remarkable in its brevity and cogency. He simply makes the case for the "caper". And he does it well. I suppose the name "Argo" (and reason it was called that, based on an age-old nasty joke) could be the Canadians last comment on the historicity of the film: Argo (blank) yourself.
Not classy, but fully understandable, many folks from Canada might suppose.
Den
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