"It's 1971 in Alexandria, Virginia and successful high school football coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton) has just been deprived of the head coaching job at the new integrated T.C. Williams High School to make way for equally successful black coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington). Yoast debates pursuing opportunities elsewhere, but when most of his white players vow to sit out the season unless he coaches, he changes his mind and stays on as Boone's assistant. Throughout training camp and the season, Boone and Yoast's black and white players learn to accept each other, to work together, and that football knows no race. As they learn from each other, Boone and Yoast also learn from them and in turn, the whole town learns from the team, the Titans. Thus, they are prepared to pursue the State Championship and to deal with an unthinkable tragedy that threatens to sink their perfect season" (IMDb.com).
As I remembered the film to be incredibly touching, I always was curious to find out how much of the story was actually altered for entertainment value. Much to my surprise, it turns out that the majority of the film's most powerful and touching moments happened to be purely of artistic creation by the film's writers, as the events depicted never actually occurred in real life. In researching the REAL true story further, I stumbled across a website that had a great deal of information for all films that are said to be based on true stories: http://www.chasingthefrog.com/reelfaces/rememberthetitans.php
The website poses and answers many interesting questions about the story the film portrays. A few are about the real-life-characters themselves, but most are about the issues of race and whether or not the events were portrayed accurately. In discovering that the majority of the highly emotive scenes were exaggerated or even fabricated, it makes me wonder why Disney chose the story of T.C. Williams at all instead of another southern high school that surely had race and the love of football at its center. One major fault of the film was that the story portrayed T.C. Williams to break the racial barrier in 1971 in correlation to the football team's victory, even though the high school in reality integrated black and white students in 1965. According to EPSN website on the story, former students claim that all racial barriers had been broken down by 1971, and a communal divide between black and white really didn't exist anymore; the team's victory only made it that much more apparent as the community was captured by the media as an integrated society. Similarly, according to Bill Yoast, the T.C. Williams football coach, "Disney had taken liberties with the facts, suggesting an overheated atmosphere of racial animosities and fears at the school and in the community that just hadn't existed". Why did Disney feel they had to change these historic events? Why did they feel they needed to highlight a friendship between a black and white player as a significant brotherly bond, when in fact the players were merely comrades in real life and their relationship was not out of the ordinary amongst teammates? Why all the tension?
Like most true stories made for blockbuster hits, Disney took many liberties with the film in order to play up the drama. Yet, they also played down a few real life events that were profoundly meaningful to the real-life characters. For example, the incident where a brick was thrown in Coach Boone's window was a very hurtful act of racism. However, the true incident was far more hurtful- though Disney chose not to show it: "There wasn't a brick thrown through my window," Herman Boone says. "It was something far more devastating to any human being than a brick could be. I guess Disney, being the family movie production company that it is, felt that to depict a toilet stool coming through your window was a bit much... I've never gotten over that incident that particular night, because I could never understand how anybody could feel so bad about another human being as to through a toilet commode through a window".
My question to everyone is, how do you truly convince an audience to not only take their viewing experience with a grain of salt, but to also investigate the true story? So frequently do people take what they see at face value to be fact. When these facts are relating to historic events, I think the production companies should leave the creative licensing to the story line's "fluff"... not applying it to historical events.
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