Review of 'Doc'

As a movie it is a semi-interesting curiosity. What I find amusing is the comments of some people have made here, to the effect that unlike the romantic fantasies of previous Wyatt Earp movies, this movie finally reveals the ugly truth behind the legends. I have been studying frontier history for about forty years and to anyone who thinks the events in DOC (even allowing for dramatic license) have any connection to historic fact, I say: Only on the Bizarro Planet, Cheech. As someone else wrote, all it does it replace positive lies with negative lies. I remember when the movie came out, the producer-director was plugging it on TV boasting of how much research had gone into this movie; likewise, in a preface to a paperback edition of his screenplay (which, as I recall, was even stupider than the actual movie), Pete Hamill wrote solemnly about how he--crackerjack journalist that he is--had seemingly unearthed the long-hidden truth about the Wild West in general and Wyatt Earp in particular. What twaddle. Hamill seems to have read one book about the Earps--Frank Waters' discredited Earp BROTHERS OF TOMBSTONE--and then pretty much relied on the time-honored journalistic tradition of Making Stuff Up. He didn't even really follow Waters very closely.