The great victory this year of Oppenheimer on Oscar night he restored some order to Hollywood. The members of the American Film Academy had awarded in 2023 Everything at once everywherea martial arts film about parallel universes that at its core had a message about the importance of the family unit, and that victory came after in 2022 and 2021 the organization distinguished The Green Book and CODA, considered by critics to be two of the weakest best picture winners in recent years. Now, the seven statuettes that he has taken Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s portrait of the father of the atomic bomb, give new life to the industry’s romance with the biopica genre that has accompanied cinema since its beginnings and that has not always been respected although it is now enjoying a good moment.
In 2024, a biopic about Bob Marley, and there are two other great productions underway that will give people something to talk about. Timothée Chalamet has started filming A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s long-awaited film about Bob Dylan’s early years. The actor is expected to sing versions of the folk idol, and the characters of Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, who will be played by Edward Norton, will also appear in the film.
On the other hand, the 27-year-old singer and dancer Jaafar Jackson will step into the shoes of his uncle, the controversial Michael Jackson. The blockbuster will premiere in April 2025 and has the same producers behind it. Bohemian Rhapsody. The director is Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) and has a script by John Logan, three-time Oscar nominee, one of them for The Aviator, based on the life of tycoon Howard Hughes. A year after its arrival in theaters, the film has already been criticized for trying to whitewash the image of Jackson, a figure who was subject to serious accusations of pedophilia collected in the documentary. Leaving Neverland.
The truth is that the power and influence of biographical films is widely documented in the United States. He biopic It was one of the favorite genres of producers in the golden age of Hollywood. The academic George Custer, author of Bio/Pics How Hollywood Constructed Public History (1992), states that the eight major studios made 291 biographical films between 1927 and 1960. Eighty-nine of these, 30%, were focused on female figures. “In the early years, films focused on production idols, people who had done something for society. Kings, statesmen, soldiers, scientists and inventors. The determination of these characters was a tonic for audiences during the Great Depression and World War II. Then movies began to celebrate actors and artists, athletes, people who are themselves a product,” says Professor Dennis Bingham, the director of Film Studies at Purdue University (Indiana).
Historians and critics have also described how Richard Nixon, a president who always attacked the intellectual power of the media, saw several times patton in the White House. George C. Scott won the Oscar for playing the legendary general in Franklin Schaffner’s 1970 war classic, although he refused to accept the award, considering the gala a “parade of meat.” In any case, since then, biographical films have become the best vehicle for actors to receive awards in Hollywood.
A gift for actors
Since the 1980s, 47 actors and actresses have won an Oscar for playing a person who existed in real life. The bill comes out to just over one statuette per year. In 2022, for example, the two acting awards went to biopics: Will Smith, for playing the father of the tennis player sisters Venus and Serena Williams, and Jessica Chastain, for becoming the televangelist Tammy Faye. Between 1936 and 1979 there were 22 artists awarded for portraying celebrities. And between 1927 and 1935 there were only two, George Arliss for playing Benjamin Disraeli and Charles Laughton, who was Henry VIII.
But biopic He has not always been the great darling of the Oscars. Between 1944 and 1960 there were only four films of this genre nominated for best picture. None won. The drought worsened in the 1970s, when the genre became synonymous with low-quality TV movies. The trend began to reverse in 1980, the year of Coal Miner’s Daughterthe life of singer Loretta Lynn, Wild bullby boxer Jake LaMotta and The elephant Manabout Joseph Merrick.
Now, the formula of biopic It has worked for Christopher Nolan, one of the most original voices in commercial Hollywood cinema and who had been denied the statuette in five previous nominations for filming the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. “Oppenheimer It is the film that the Academy would like to award every year. A film by a prestigious, well-known director, preferably someone who has long deserved the award, like Nolan, about a real person but with a topic of deep public interest. With a lot of drama, but also an epic approach that will span many years. With good performances and a very well written script. In many ways, it is the perfect movie,” says Bingham.
Bingham compares Nolan’s triumph to the moment Steven Spielberg experienced in 1994 when he won his first directing Oscar for Schindler’s List, which was also taken best film. The recognition had been slow in coming, since the director of The color purple He had been nominated five times since 1977. Oppenheimer It was conceived, according to Nolan, when his producer, Charles Roven, gave him to read the biography written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It is a monumental investigation that turned 50,000 pages of interviews, declassified documents, transcripts, correspondence and diary entries, all collected over 25 years, into a Pulitzer Prize-winning book. This served as the source of an adaptation that Universal turned into a blockbuster that has grossed $950 million.
A genre fighting with the truth?
The truth has always been a complex issue for biopics. The legendary Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox always believed that the creative needs and demands of producers came before fidelity to the facts. “In Rothschild I made Rothschild an English baron and it was the king of England who gave him the title, when at that time there was no monarch, because he was admitted to an asylum… The film received the same good reviews in England that it had in the United States and no one noticed,” wrote Zanuck.
On other occasions, documentation has been a strong point. In 1938, the MGM studio premiered its biopic of Marie Antoinette. The audience received in premiere a pamphlet where it was presumed that researchers had answered nearly 60,000 questions about the monarch. In four years they had compiled 1,500 volumes on the figure and some 10,600 images, photographs of paintings. One of the anecdotes told at that time, according to George Custen, was that the director, WS Van Dyke, refused to film a sequence because an extra, among a group of 250, was wearing the wrong pants for the time.
“Truth has always been a slippery term,” Bingham says by phone. He uses as an example the films about Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, whom he had imprisoned for 19 years and later ordered executed. The tapes almost always show a scene with the two when they never met in real life. “A biopic You can take this license as long as you convey the truth of the biographical subject. And I think that Oppenheimer transmits it. Maybe it is not the truth because no one can know what that is, but it does not feel false, but rather thorough and exhaustive,” she says. The Academy and audiences around the world seem to agree.
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