My eye dr. tells me that some people are Physically Unable to wear contacts if their eyes don't produce enough tears. I don't know how common it is, though. But now here's the thing, in my lifetime, I think I've seen Michael Caine WITHOUT glasses more often than with. So what's up with that?

But Alex brings up a good point which sort of refers back to my comments in Thread 1 about Reba McEntire playing Annie Oakley... she didn't try to look like her or talk like her in the least, and what's more, portrayed her as an uppity little snob! The Annie Oakley I have read about seemed to have a great sense of fun and delight about her.

Also in Buffalo Girls, Russell Means portrayed Sitting Bull as a mean old man. I don't know enough about Sitting Bull to say one way or the other... but I did read that while he was traveling with Buffalo Bill in the US, he gave money to the shoeshine boys because he didn't understand how these children could have so little in a land of so much. Hardly a mean spiteful old man.

And Anjelica Huston was WAY too pretty to play Calamity Jane. And they played hell with the real-life love story of Teddy Blue Abbott and Granville Stuart's daughter. And while I loved Lonesome Dove, I have to say that Larry McMurtry gets really low marks from me in the history department. In one of his books he has Judge Roy Bean killed off by a bad outlaw, which was not what happened to Bean at all! In another he kills off Big Foot Wallace in a Mexican Black Bean lottery.... while Wallace was captured and subjected to such a game, he drew a white bean and lived to be an old man. (Maybe McMurtry has a thing about beans.)

Speaking of Calamity Jane... I was telling Mister about this thread, and he said, Didja mention Wild Bill?

Oh my, I had tried to forget about that.

Jeff Bridges played Wild Bill in a movie of the same name several years ago... while he was a very convincing Hickok, the rest of the movie fairly sucked. Ellen Barkin was Calamity Jane - again, too cute. And the script was something totally out of a writer's imagination. But I guess that's what writers get paid to do, huh?

I don't generally have a problem with putting real historical figures into plausible fictional situations. It can add a lot to a novel or a movie. But I don't like blatant aberrations.