I hate it when movies do this...

I never saw Social Netwook so I can't help you there. I have, however, read accounts of this story - doesn't seem to be too much off the historical mark. Perhaps if you gave specific examples where the movie veered off the path it would help.

"Choice is the only thing you have, my friend."

Stefan Zweigs biography of Marie Antoinette dedicates three chapters to the affair of the diamond necklace. A lot of people don't like this biography much because Zweig's almost obsessive references to contemporary German psychology come across as dated to some readers. But Zweig did do his research, and he certainly knows how to tell a good story. He writes that the true events of the affair of the necklace were so extraordinary, far-fetched, melodramatic, sensational, etc., that no author of fiction could possibly do them justice. He cites that every adaptation, even by such masters as Goethe, come across as mundane in comparison to the true events, and that it is a prime example of one of those instances when the truth is stranger than fiction. His biography predates this movie by seventy years, but I think he is on the mark in this case.

The deviations from the facts are really no more glaring than in most historical movies. What have they done, really. Unduly romanticized a love story between Valois and Retaux de Villette. One would be hard pressed to find any historical or biographical film in which some character relationship hasn't been romanticized or even just plain invented. The other great deviation is in falsifying facts to make Valois appear as a heroine and martyr. It is hell bent on making her sympathetic at the cost of history. Once again, this is a fairly standard device in historical movies. When you take somebody atrociously despicable, like Hitler, and make him seem human (ala Downfall) it becomes interesting. When you take somebody who was delightfully wicked, like Valois, and make her seem heroic, you're just watering down champagne. The real Valois was an exploitative and unrepentant adventuress. She appears to have been utterly without scruples and to have had no serious motivation beyond the next big payoff. But she was entertaining in her own right without being sugar-coated.

Where the filmmakers err here is not in deviating from history more than many other films, but in watering down the sensational true events to make them easier for us to swallow, but consequently robbing them of so much entertainment value. They would have done better to leave the facts as they were, and produced the film on the same level of lavishness, letting the color remain in the costumes without seeping into the facts.

All the Ancient myths that are the foundation of Literature are embellishments of historical people, or at least people the authors believed where historical.

Quite a while since I saw it but it seems to me from waht I remember to be pretty awful and made De Valois seem like an innocnet, which she wasn't...

But do the film makers actually think that completely distorting the truth while hiding that you're doing so makes for a more interesting story than what really happened?

Doesn't it bother them that these were real people you're telling the story of?

Or is it just that they feel they've not "made it their own" if they don't change something just for the sake of changing it?

I totally agree with you.

If you're telling a story featuring real people, you should respect them. Whether they died yesterday or hundreds of years ago is indeed absolutely irrelevant.

Filmmakers distorting the truth should at least admit (e.g. in a disclaimer) that they produced a work of fiction that should not be construed as historical fact.

I think the filmmakers felt thy had to change let motte because the real de motte was no heroine. A film needs a heroine.