The Four Color Media Monitor

This is what his granddaughter is saying, about the movie Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. And the director, Angela Robinson, practically admits in an interview with NY Vulture that she took "liberties" with the Wonder Woman creator's history:

Did you do interviews with surviving people who knew them, or members of the family?
Not extensively. I really made the decision early on that I didn’t want … I wanted to kind of be able to explore my own interpretation of what the story was. I didn’t want to — I was trying to figure out — I felt like their story had been kind of hidden from history for a long time, and I kind of wanted to excavate and interpret what I found and then write the film.

One component of that interpretation that got brought up at the panel was the queer relationship between Olive and Elizabeth. Was that based on research you’d done, or was that just your interpretation?
I mean, it’s both. This is one of those things that’s kind of tricky about history, especially history that has been obscured because of the relationships and because of society and many things. But there’s certain facts that are indisputable about the Marstons’ lives, which everybody agrees on, and there are certain ones that are open to interpretation. You know what I mean? It’s how you choose to interpret those facts. So that’s how I chose to interpret them. That, I don’t know how else to say except that it’s open to interpretation.

Oh really, is it? You can see her answer is stuttery, and not very coherent. If there's no proof Olive Byrne and Elizabeth Marston ever led a bisexual relationship, then you can't just go along and claim that there was. From what I can tell, this whole claim - along with at least a few others - seems to have turned up just 3-4 years ago, most likely spun by the NY Times and Jill Lepore, the same "journalist" who defended Woodrow Wilson despite his sordid record, all for the sake of attacking his conservative opponents. But if Byrne and Marston really did have such a thing going, the chances are very likely it would've been revealed at least 4 decades ago. So taking liberties with the lives of the subjects is monumentally absurd, though it's not the first time Hollywood's ever done that.

As noted, Bill Marston's granddaughter Christie already panned the rendition, and in an interview with Forbes, she gave the following statements:

Rob Salkowitz: What did the film get factually wrong?

Christie Marston: Two things stand out, in particular.

The relationship between Gram [Elizabeth Marston] and Dots [Olive Byrne] is wrong; they were as sisters, not lovers.

Of greater importance, the origin of the Wonder Woman comic is wrong. The film has William Moulton Marston presenting an idea for a female hero, and Elizabeth naysaying the idea, declaring that nobody would ever publish it. The reality is that when Charlie Gaines [publisher of DC Comics in the 1930s and 40s] semi-jokingly suggested to my grandfather that he write a comic (Marston was then a psychological advisor at the comic company, helping get comics to mainstream America), he went home and discussed it with my grandmother. She said to go ahead and do it, but that it had to be a woman.

So as I figured, even that part is false, and just tinkered with for the sake of pushing the liberal filmmaker's agenda. Why, that they even made Elizabeth speak negatively of his idea in the film when she was actually positive about it in real life speaks volumes about what the filmmakers had in mind.

Mrs. Marston also gave an extra interview to Big Fanboy providing more clarifications:

Mark – Hello Christie, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us, I think it’s very important to hear your side of things with the movie coming out this weekend. This film claims to tell the story of your grandfather William Marston, his wife Elizabeth, and their lover Olive Byrne. Before we get into those portrayals, I want to clarify something up front. At any point did the director, Angela Robinson, or anyone from the production reach out to you or anyone in the family for involvement or consent on this?

Christie Marston – No, there was no contact. In an interview, Angela Robinson said that she made the choice to not talk to anybody because she wanted to use her own ‘interpretation’. Both the depiction of the family and Wonder Woman’s origins are made up.

I might've guessed. Why, even the part about book burnings they bring up here, started by Wertham's misguided campaign, didn't begin until a while after Marston died in 1947. Although there is something eyebrow raising here:

Mark – I wanted to ask you about a few key moments depicted in the film. There’s a scene showing young folks burning copies of Wonder Woman in a big bonfire, which plays off the whole censorship angle of the story. Did anything like that actually happen, that you’re aware of?

Christie Marston – I believe that the comic book burning happened in 1948 (after my grandfather’s death, but it did happen… can’t say if WW was included).

I could certainly believe old folks might engage in something that ugly, but if it's only young folks seen doing it in the film, something is honestly disturbing. If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if the filmmakers were trying to set a bad example for the younger generation; it's hard to say. That aside, from what I know about any book burnings that may have happened during the early 50s, it was mainly horror genre comics like what the original EC publications turned out when Bill Gaines was running it before turning it into MAD magazine. Superhero comics were otherwise spared the indignity.

Anyway, the Marston family needn't worry too much as the film already seems to have bottomed out at the box office, earning less than $800,000 so far. Clearly, some people did recognize that something was rotten in Denmark, and too many leftist agendas were running amok, and into the screenplay, so it just wasn't worth the bother.

Labels: dc comics, msm propaganda, politics, Wonder Woman