Differences From The Film Adaptation
- Ron Kovic is shown to have confessed his supposed role in the Marine Corporal's accidental death to the deceased man's sympathethic parents and widowed wife, who admits that she cannot find it in her heart to forgive him, but God might do so. In reality, this meeting never happened, but director Stone admits this was done to add to the inner conflict Kovic was going through and to give him some closure.
- Kyra Sedgwick's character of Donna, Ron's on-screen high school sweetheart, never existed and did not inspire him to become an anti-war activist. The film portrays Kovic watching her protest after the Kent State Shootings and get beaten up by police. Although Kovic did not witness the protest in person, he nevertheless did watch the event on television, and the memoir states that he was outraged by the treatment of the protestors, much like his feelings towards the treatment of his fellow veterans.
Read more about this topic: Born On The Fourth Of July
Famous quotes containing the words differences, film and/or adaptation:
“When was it that the particles became
The whole man, that tempers and beliefs became
Temper and belief and that differences lost
Difference and were one? It had to be
In the presence of a solitude of the self....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)