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Q. What are the biggest historical inaccuracies in Saving Private Ryan?D-Day historian: 'Ryan' not best war film (cnn.com)Explore The Historical Accuracy Of Steven Spielberg's 'Saving Private Ryan’ (Best)The real, surprising message of "Saving Private Ryan"15 Fascinating Facts About Saving Private Ryan (mentalfloss.com)Saving Private Ryan (1998) 21 factual errors (moviemistakes.com)11 Crazy Behind-The-Scenes Facts About 'Saving Private Ryan'10 movie mistakes: Saving Private RyanD-Day historian: 'Ryan' not best war film (cnn.com)STORY HIGHLIGHTSAntony Beevor, author of new book on D-Day, not a fan of "Saving Private Ryan"Beevor admires the opening, but calls the rest "ghastly"Beevor's pick for best Hollywood D-Day work: "Band of Brothers"(CNN) -- Some reviewers have called "Saving Private Ryan," Steven Spielberg's World War II film about D-Day and the search for a soldier, one of the greatest war movies.Military historian Antony Beevor begs to differ.Not only is it not the greatest war movie, it's not even the best cinematic depiction of D-Day, says Beevor, author of the newly published "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy" (Viking).He admires the famed Omaha Beach opening -- "Probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed," he said -- but described the rest of "Saving Private Ryan" as "ghastly.""It's sort of a 'Dirty Dozen' cliche of the worst form," he said.He has expanded on the criticism in a lecture. "Spielberg's basic storyline had great potential. It shows the tension between patriotic and therefore collective loyalty, and the struggle of the individual for survival: those mutually contradictory pressures, which in many ways lie at the heart of war," Beevor observed in the talk.If any filmmakers wish to take on D-Day again, Beevor's book provides enough material for a dozen screenplays. Making use of first-person accounts stored in the National Archives, as well as a wealth of other material, Beevor depicts in painstaking detail not only the D-Day landings by American, British, Canadian and Free French forces, but also the subsequent battle for the whole of Normandy that proved pivotal in defeating Nazi Germany.Beevor says a director would do well to remember that the Allied effort to retake the continent extended well beyond that single day of June 6, 1944."D-Day, although an iconic moment, was not actually the end of it. Films like 'The Longest Day' and 'Saving Private Ryan' almost give the impression that D-Day was 'it' and then the next thing people know about was the liberation of Paris," he said. "But in fact, it was the fighting in Normandy which was far worse. Casualties on D-Day were far lighter than expected -- [military leaders] had expected 10,000 dead and only 3,000 died."The real fighting and the real casualties," he added, "came in the Battle of Normandy."So what does Beevor prefer in the way of a Hollywood treatment of D-Day? Another project Spielberg had a hand in, "Band of Brothers.""On the whole, I think [it] was pretty close to the truth," Beevor said of the 2001 HBO miniseries, which Spielberg and Tom Hanks executive produced. He called it "incomparably more realistic" than "Saving Private Ryan.""The improvement was presumably due to the fact that it was a pretty faithful adaptation of the book by Stephen Ambrose," he said.A major problem with "Ryan," Beevor said, is the climax of the film. "The U.S. Air Force arrives in the nick of time just like the U.S. cavalry in 1950s cowboy films. And to cap it all, the final frames are of Pvt. Ryan, standing in old age amid the rows of white crosses in a military cemetery, saluting his fallen comrades as tears run down his cheeks."That's Spielberg "milking our tear ducts with both hands," Beevor said.But then again, the historian believes Hollywood is not well cast in the role of purveyor of history."The central problem is that historical truth and the needs of the movie and television industry remain fundamentally incompatible. Hollywood has to simplify World War II according to set formulae," Beevor said in his lecture. "Its films have to have heroes and of course baddies. There are seldom shades of gray."Among WWII films, Beevor praises two from 2006 directed by Clint Eastwood (and produced by Spielberg), "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima"."But they are the exception which proves the rule that you do not need to resort to the tricks, the false claims of truth and even the clichés of the platoon movie," he said.And the best war movie? Beevor looks away from Hollywood for his answer: 1965's "The 317th Platoon," a French film set during that country's war in Indochina.Review: The Vietnam War, as Fought by the French, in ‘The 317th Platoon’Pierre Schoendoerffer was a war photographer in what was known as Indochina in the early ’50s, and was a prisoner of war at Dien Bien Phu. The experience was, it can be inferred, a defining one for Mr. Schoendoerffer, who died at 83 in 2012. He first wrote “The 317th Platoon” as a novel, and made it into a film in 1964, traveling to Cambodia to shoot at authentic locations.Trailer: ‘The 317th Platoon’The cinematographer he brought with him was Raoul Coutard, one of the seminal forces of the Nouvelle Vague, and an ace at capturing striking imagery under tough conditions. The movie’s story is a plain one of war and survival. A French platoon, made up of both French and Laotian soldiers, is ordered to abandon a highland outpost and rejoin larger French forces. The soldiers soon discover that they’re walking right into a growing Viet Minh offensive.The commanding officer, Torrens (Jacques Perrin), is a young lieutenant who’s been in country a little over two weeks. The platoon’s adjutant, Willsdorf (the great Bruno Cremer), is a battle veteran who, as an Alsatian, was forced into the German Army in World War II. The two have conflicting tactical ideas, but enough respect for each other that their differences never come to a head.And they don’t have to. This is a staggeringly engrossing and effective movie, its settings both beautiful and oppressive, its incidents tense and eye-opening. There are no philosophical musings, no what-are-we-fighting-for debates. It’s all about getting out in one piece as the odds of doing so get worse every hour. A terse text at the film’s end is a gruesome, ironic twist on the adage about living to fight another day. Screening officially in New York for the first time, this is a genuinely revelatory war movie.Review: The Vietnam War, as Fought by the French, in ‘The 317th Platoon’Explore The Historical Accuracy Of Steven Spielberg's 'Saving Private Ryan'The folks over at History Buffs have put together a video essay that lays out the historical context for Steven Spielberg’s war epic and reviews the film’s accuracy. The 23-minute “History Buffs: ‘Saving Private Ryan’” dives into the chaotic complexity involved in the invasion of Normandy, highlighting just what the allied soldiers were up against and how Spielberg and co. evoked the reality of war to an unprecedented degree. As the video points out, “Saving Private Ryan” does not avoid historic discrepancies common to gigantic, serious-minded Hollywood productions, but which do little to overshadow the research and accuracy injected throughout the film. If anything, “Saving Private Ryan” does what’s necessary to make a movie a movie —flubbing facts here and there to craft a narrative and build tension— in order to provide a vehicle for the emotional authenticity Spielberg was clearly interested in.The real, surprising message of "Saving Private Ryan"When it was released 16 years ago, I didn't get it.I knew Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan was supposed to be a masterpiece. The best-known film critics in the country said so. Janet Maslin, for example, hailed it as "the finest war movie of our time." The film and its director both won Golden Globes, Spielberg received an Academy Award for directing, and more than 60 critics named Saving Private Ryan the best picture of the year.The most serious students of the Second World War shared the enthusiasm for the film. Historian Stephen Ambrose, author of D-Day and Citizen Soldiers, thought it "the finest World War II movie ever made." The Secretary of the Army presented the filmmaker with the military's highest civilian decoration, the Distinguished Civilian Service Award. The New York Times even devoted a respectful editorial to "Spielberg's War."And I knew that almost everybody else agreed with them. Along with 6.5 million other Americans, I saw Saving Private Ryan its opening weekend back in 1998, joining a mostly elderly crowd of the "Greatest" generation at a suburban multiplex. Moved to tears by the powerful film, the audience gave it an ovation as the final credits rolled. But as my wife and I filed out of the theater, I wondered what they were applauding, exactly, this darkened room full of veterans and their spouses.Like everyone else in the theater, I spent most of three hours wincing involuntarily in my seat, shocked by the unrelenting mayhem of a daylight amphibious assault across a barren killing field, sickened by the sudden hash that light artillery can make of human bodies, groaning at the grotesque wounds and the grisly mutilations of whimpering casualties, and—in the end—twitching at even the slightest clatter of mechanized warfare.Like everyone else, I wondered at the courage or desperation or whatever it was that drove American soldiers across a French beach, codenamed Omaha, under the withering spray of German machine-gun rounds from hilltop fortifications and the flesh-shredding explosions of 105mm howitzer shells lobbed by inland artillery.And like everyone else, I had to agree that it was brilliant filmmaking—except for the beginning and the end. Spielberg actually opens and closes the film twice, employing two pairs of images to bracket the war movie everyone praised. The first and last thing we see pulsing across the entire screen is a faded, translucent American flag. Can we understand the flag as anything but an announcement of the subject of his epic: patriotism? The fluttering flag, denatured of its color and perhaps of its vitality, is the image with which the film begins and ends. But Spielberg wraps not only the war in the flag but also the cloyingly sentimental frame story of an elderly veteran, followed by his wife, son, and grandchildren, on his pilgrimage to the vast cemetery overlooking the Normandy beachhead, now marked by row after row of simple Christian and Jewish headstones.Nearly every commentator criticized this prologue and epilogue. Janet Maslin conceded that these scenes are among the film's "few false notes." Others derided this opening and closing as "maudlin," "completely unnecessary," and "a burst of schmaltzy ritual." In fact, most writers simply ignored the prologue. Anthony Lane, for example, writing in The New Yorker, described the first half-hour of the film as "the most telling battle scenes ever made" without bothering to note that one must first wade through five minutes of schmaltz to get to Omaha Beach. (Later in his essay, Mr. Lane did make quite clear that he had no patience for Spielberg's "sappy epilogue.")So this is what I didn't get. The opening and the closing of any work should be the two moments of greatest emphasis (as Spielberg's English-teacher hero, Captain John Miller, would no doubt have taught his high-school students back home in Addley, Pennsylvania). How could such a formidable filmmaker have botched the beginning and the end of his film?But now, looking back as the 70th anniversary of D-Day approaches, I've begun to doubt that the opening and the closing of Saving Private Ryan are missteps. In fact, I've come to think that, even if maudlin, they are the whole point of the war story they introduce and conclude.What is that story? Surviving the bloodbath of Omaha Beach, a handpicked squad of Rangers are sent to extricate a paratrooper, James Ryan, from the intense fighting behind enemy lines because his three brothers have been killed in combat. Despite the efforts of his subordinates to dissuade him from authorizing the mission, General George C. Marshall determines to save Ryan's mother from a fourth telegram of condolence, quoting as his rationale, at times from memory, a worn letter to a Mrs. Lydia Bixby:Executive MansionWashington, Nov. 21, 1864To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass.Dear Madam,I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.Yours very sincerely and respectfully,A. LincolnLincoln, unlike Marshall, does not hint that her grief deserves greater respect than that of any other mother deprived by the war of a son, nor that he would risk, even after Gettysburg, a single other soldier to preserve her from such loss. His eloquent letter expresses the sentiment, not sentimentality. Spielberg's Marshall, on the other hand, seems unable to distinguish between sentimentality and morality.In fact, Lincoln had been misinformed. Mrs. Bixby had protested the enlistment of her sons, and while two were killed in combat, another returned safely home after an exchange of prisoners of war. The final two sons deserted, one even fleeing the country. And, as M. Lincoln Schuster points out in A Treasury of the World's Great Letters, the widely circulated letter was denounced by Lincoln's opponents as "cheap and ostentatious." One paper even questioned Lincoln's right to pen such words while his own two sons, one still a child but the other 21, were "kept at home in luxury, far from the dangers of the field."These details—absent, of course, from the film—are not merely curious footnotes. The great bulk of dialogue in Saving Private Ryan not directly connected to the prosecution of battles is dedicated to an ongoing debate about the morality of the squad's mission. No one makes a case that their mission is heroic. It is idiocy and, as far as the soldiers are concerned, immoral idiocy. What of the grief of their mothers, they wonder. The true story behind the eloquent words and heroic sentiments with which General Marshall sends these soldiers to their deaths makes clear that Lincoln's letter is empty, as it turns out, of everything except rhetoric. But soldiers don't need a history lesson to recognize the emptiness of rhetoric when they are about to become its victims. The morality of risking eight men to save one is an equation that makes no sense to a soldier.Over and over again, the fundamental theorem of war—that one is sacrificed to save many—is examined. When the squad encounters a downed pilot whose troop transport crashed, killing 22 men, because his plane had been made unflyable by the steel plates added to its belly to protect from ground fire a brigadier general on board, everyone understands that to risk the safety of many to protect one (even if he is a general) is wrong and, in war, always dangerous.Approaching the climactic battle, Spielberg billets his soldiers in an abandoned church. While his men talk about their own mothers, Captain Miller defends the loss of 94 soldiers, one by one, under his command. Reminiscent of Shakespeare's disguised Henry V debating with English yeomen anxiously awaiting dawn at Agincourt a commander's responsibility for the death of his men in battle, Miller justifies his actions to his sergeant (and, obviously, to himself) by insisting upon the 10 or even 20 times more men he has saved by sacrificing one man. That's what allows him to choose the mission over the man, he explains. But this time, the sergeant responds, the mission is the man. Spielberg could not be more explicit in condemning the effort to save Private Ryan as immoral, at least in terms of the morality of the battlefield.Henry V is a useful comparison in another regard, as well. The most stirring of battle eve addresses, Henry's St. Crispin's Day speech rallies "we happy few" on to victory against overwhelming odds with images of glory, honor, and patriotic fervor. Despite the flapping flag and swelling music as the credits roll, Spielberg puts in the mouth of his commander, Captain Miller, no praise of homeland, no defense of democracy, no attack on fascism in rallying his troops. Instead, their commander simply says he just wants to go home to his wife. As his men have made clear repeatedly, as far as they are concerned, Private Ryan can go to hell. But if going to hell to save Ryan earns Miller the right to go back to his wife, then he'll go to hell. And hell, a French village named Ramelle is exactly where he finds the boy, guarding the last remaining bridge across the River Styx, a little stream the French call the Merderet.The absence of patriotic principles in his defense of the mission becomes quite striking when one compares Miller's speech about the war and his wife to another Civil War letter. A week before his death at the first battle of Bull Run, Major Sullivan Ballou of the Second Rhode Island addressed these words to his wife: "I have no misgivings about or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt." Major Ballou goes on to affirm, "Sarah my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break, and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield."No less in love with his wife than Miller seems to be, the Union officer finds the words to assert his devotion to the flag under which he fights. However, in nearly three hours, apart from the letter by Lincoln that General Marshall reads and the one that he himself writes to Ryan's mother, Saving Private Ryan offers not a single word about love of country. Generals may still talk like their Civil War counterparts, but soldiers in the field have ceased to cloak their duty in such sentiments.The Germans depicted are just as bewildered, terrified, and anxious to return to their families as the Americans. Of course, there is no shortage of cruelty and brutality. Nazis move through battle-scarred streets indifferently finishing off wounded Americans, but, early in the film, we have witnessed callous GIs mowing down surrendering Germans with a laugh. And the transformation of a cowardly American interpreter who coldly butchers a captured German he earlier has argued to spare is one of the most troubling moments in the film. Spielberg never suggests that we are any better than our enemy or, to put it more generously, that they are any worse than we are. On the contrary, he seems to be at pains to show the equality of men under any flag when the shooting begins. So this is not a patriotic film; if anything, it argues that patriotism is beside the point in modern warfare. Even the mission itself has no heroic or patriotic aim; there is no hill to be taken, no redoubt to be stormed. Its goal, according to Captain Miller, is public relations.Why then does the film begin and end with Spielberg's flag-waving and a tearful old grandfather mourning at the graves of fallen comrades? Are they merely hedges against the insidious argument of the film that even our last "good" war was as meaningless in its brutality and empty in its heroism as the conflict in Vietnam? Though Saving Private Ryan amply documents the extraordinary courage of men under fire and suggests the tide of grief their families endured, it never addresses the point of their heroism. How can it honor the horrendous sacrifices our parents and grandparents made when the film seems to demonstrate that neither glory, morality, patriotism, nor any clear meaning attended the slaughter of millions?Spielberg, aware of this contradiction, told a 1998 gathering of entertainment writers in Los Angeles that the movie is really about how two opposing things can both be true. The mission can't be justified on moral or patriotic grounds, and yet the toughest soldier in the squad, Sergeant Horvath, says saving Private Ryan might be the one decent thing they "were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess."This is not the only contradiction in the director's historical works. If one considers Spielberg's efforts in the 1990s to turn from the hugely successful entertainments that made his reputation to cinematic examinations of the most profound moral issues of the modern age, apparently inexplicable decisions on the part of the filmmaker seem to contradict the very arguments of those films, too.How can one explain Spielberg's choice, in his film on the Holocaust, to make its hero a German profiteer and, in his film on slavery, to make its hero a white leader of a slave economy? Of course, a Jewish clerk in Schindler's List prods his German employer to outwit the Final Solution and an enslaved African in Amistad goads a white former president of the United States to outmaneuver the very legal system (dedicated, as it was, to the preservation of slavery) that his oath of office had sworn him to uphold and defend. But the director leaves no doubt as to which character is the central focus of the narrative conflict: Since monstrous systems of exploitation constrain both Jew and African from independent action, only the beneficiaries of those inhumane systems are capable of change and, thus, able to serve as the protagonists of these dramas. Though we may assume these two films are about suffering—and presented with the vivid depiction of cruelty a camera can offer, an audience may find it difficult to look beyond such graphic images of misery to another, subtler subject—Schindler's List and Amistad are, in fact, about guilt and responsibility. They are not, as many imagine, noble memorials to the millions of victims of the Holocaust and slavery; rather, they are agonized meditations on all of those somehow implicated in those vast human tragedies.Saving Private Ryan, reviewA similar, though much more complex, contradiction beats at the very heart of Saving Private Ryan and accounts for the dissonance noted by virtually every critic between the body of the film and its opening and closing. How can the sentimental tableau of a weeping old man, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren possibly serve as a fit conclusion to so savage and unsentimental a film?Spielberg himself offered a clue when, continuing his conversation with those entertainment writers in Los Angeles, he described his father's own war stories: "I was supposed to wave the flag and be patriotic and say that without his efforts I wouldn't have the freedoms I had or even the freedom to have the bicycle I was riding." Only later did the director realize that it wasn't "a bunch of bunk he was telling me." John Miller, the high-school teacher from Pennsylvania, teaches Jimmy Ryan the same lesson.Private Ryan, a dazed kid surrounded by the bodies of men who were absurdly ordered to their deaths to save him, is given the equally absurd command by the dying hero, Captain Miller, to "earn this" and must now bear the terrible, impossible order until his own death.But don't we all struggle under Ryan's moral burden? And how can Ryan, or for that matter any of us, ever pay such a debt—and to whom? Spielberg had already once suggested the answer to that profound question. In the epilogue to Schindler's List, contemporary descendants of the Jews saved by Oskar Schindler process past his grave. Again at the end of Saving Private Ryan, as a grandfather and his son and grandchildren pay homage to those whose deaths we have just witnessed, the living are called not merely to bear witness to the achievement of fallen heroes; the living are, in fact, the achievement itself. Like Private Ryan, we cannot help but ask what we've done to deserve such sacrifice by others and beg their forgiveness for what we have cost them. And like James Ryan, all we can do to justify that sacrifice is to live our lives as well as we are able.This is not to suggest Spielberg has made a perfect film. There is a difference between virtuosity and genius, between a tour de force and a masterpiece. Saving Private Ryan is flawed, in part because it loses its nerve. Those surviving veterans who actually leapt into the reddened surf of Omaha Beach have attested to the accuracy of the film's depiction of modern war and, particularly, of the Normandy Invasion; for that artistic accomplishment, the director deserves all the accolades heaped upon him. On the other hand, the flag-waving patriotism it pretends at in its first and last shots is as transparent as the faded flag Spielberg waves across the screen.But the prologue and epilogue, even if they are embarrassingly sentimental in their presentation and do pander, perhaps, to their audience, pose what remains a fundamental question after the blood-drenched 20th century: What is our responsibility to those who have gone before us? Like Schindler's List and Amistad, Saving Private Ryan is not about those who suffered; it is about those who have been spared suffering. Spielberg's subject, in the end, is not the courage of the soldiers who fought at Normandy; his subject is the debt owed them by their children and their children's children. As we approach the 70th anniversary of the largest amphibious assault in history, we should remember that Mrs. Ryan's son was not the only child those brave men saved.We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected] BIGUENET is the Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. He is the author of six plays and seven books, including The Torturer’s Apprentice and Oyster, and a recipient of the O. Henry Award.15 Fascinating Facts About Saving Private Ryan (mentalfloss.com)It was up to eight men to save the life of one. Here are 15 things you may not have known about Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning World War II drama Saving Private Ryan, which arrived in theaters 20 years ago today.1. THE MOVIE CAME TOGETHER IN A SINGLE DAY.Saving Private Ryan was the only movie that Steven Spielberg directed up to that point in his career that he hadn’t developed on his own. Screenwriter Robert Rodat’s script was actually sent to Spielberg by his agent. In a stroke of luck, the script had also been sent to actor Tom Hanks, who also wanted to make the movie. Both Spielberg and Hanks, who had never worked with each other at that point (and would go on to work together again in Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, and Bridge of Spies, as well as the miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific), called each other up when they found out they were reading the same script and decided to collaborate on the movie all in the same day.2. STEVEN SPIELBERG WAS INSPIRED TO DIRECT THE MOVIE BECAUSE OF HIS FATHER.Spielberg directed Saving Private Ryan as a tribute to his father, Arnold Spielberg, who served in the U.S. Army and Signal Corps, and fought in Burma during World War II as a radio operator in a B-25 squad. Arnold also helped a young Steven to direct his first movies as a teenager, both of which involved plots that took place during World War II. Escape to Nowhere was a 40-minute behind enemy lines movie that a young Spielberg shot with his friends, while Fighter Squad was shot at the Sky Harbor Airport hangar in Phoenix, Arizona, which conveniently housed grounded former WWII fighter planes that the young Spielberg and his friends used, but didn’t fly.3. IT’S PARTLY BASED ON A TRUE STORY.PARAMOUNT HOME ENTERTAINMENTContrary to popular belief, Saving Private Ryan is not based on the Sullivan brothers, a group of five brothers who were all killed in action while serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II on the USS Juneau. The movie is actually based on the Niland brothers, four siblings who all served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Three brothers—Robert, Preston, and Edward—were supposedly killed in action, which caused their remaining brother, Fritz (whom the titular Private Ryan was based on), to be shipped back to America so that the Niland family wouldn’t lose all of their sons. Edward, who was originally thought dead, was actually found alive after escaping a Japanese prison camp in Burma, making two surviving brothers out of the four who fought in the war.Saving Private Ryan4. THE ACTORS ACTUALLY WENT THROUGH BOOT CAMP.To get an idea of what WWII soldiers actually went through, the main squad of actors portraying the lead soldiers participated in a 10-day boot camp led by the film’s military advisor, retired former USMC Captain Dale Dye. Dye led the actors on an intensive field combat situation, leading the group on marches, living in tents, and eating MREs. They also received tactical training that included learning how to clean, assemble, and fire period-appropriate weapons. Dye can be seen as a War Department Colonel who gives General George Marshall the Ryan brother death notifications toward the beginning of the movie.5. ROBIN WILLIAMS HELPED MATT DAMON GET THE PART OF PRIVATE RYAN.Williams introduced Damon to Steven Spielberg in Boston during rehearsals for the movie Good Will Hunting. The director was also in town around the same time shooting Amistad, and Williams brought Damon along to say hi to Spielberg, whom Williams had previously worked with on Hook. Two weeks later, Spielberg contacted Damon about the part of Private Ryan.6. TOM SIZEMORE WAS NEARLY FIRED.PARAMOUNT HOME ENTERTAINMENTThe actor, who plays Sergeant Horvath, was heavily addicted to heroin prior to filming Saving Private Ryan in 1997. In order to keep the movie in line, and to force Sizemore to kick the habit, Spielberg swore to Sizemore that if the actor tested positive for drugs on-set—even on the last day of shooting—“he would fire me on the spot and shoot all 58 days that I'd worked over again with someone else.”7. GARTH BROOKS NEARLY PLAYED PRIVATE JACKSON.Frank Darabont was hired to do uncredited rewrites on Saving Private Ryan, and created the role of the Bible-quoting sniper, Private Jackson, to be played by country singer Garth Brooks. Brooks dropped out of the movie after Spielberg came onboard and cast Tom Hanks in the lead role. Apparently Brooks didn’t want to play second fiddle to Hanks, but Spielberg offered him a chance to play another role of his choosing. Instead of a specific role, Brooks allegedly said he wanted to play the “bad guy,” but in Saving Private Ryan there is no real bad guy other than the entire Wehrmacht, so Spielberg ultimately decided to drop Brooks from the movie.8. THE LOOK OF THE MOVIE CAME FROM REAL LIFE PHOTOGRAPHY.Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski modeled the look of the film on actual newsreel footage from the era, and converted the modern lenses of the film’s shooting cameras to make them capture images more like cameras from the 1940s. They also modeled the look of the D-Day sequence on the bleached-out, grainy look of the D-Day photography shot by famed photojournalist Robert Capa.9. OMAHA BEACH WAS ACTUALLY IN IRELAND.Because the actual beaches in Normandy where Allied forces invaded France had strict filming restrictions, the opening D-Day scene needed to be shot elsewhere. Spielberg wanted an almost exact replica of the Omaha Beach landscape for the movie, including similar sand and a bluff similar to the one where German forces were stationed. A near match was found in Ireland at Ballinesker Beach, Curracloe Strand in Wexford. Over 2500 Irish Reserve Army troops were recruited to portray the Allied forces storming the beach.10. THE D-DAY SEQUENCE COST A WHOLE LOT OF MONEY.The D-Day scene alone cost $12 million because of the logistical difficulties and the realistic scope needed to complete the sequence. The entire budget of the movie was only $70 million. Spielberg didn’t storyboard any of the D-Day sequence.11. SPIELBERG HAD A BUSY YEAR BEFORE AND DURING FILMING.The director conducted the pre-production on Saving Private Ryan and the sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park at the same time in 1996, and was originally supposed to direct the films back to back. But a rewrite by screenwriter David Franzoni on Amistad, another project he was developing around the same time, turned out to be so successful that Spielberg decided to direct that movie in between the two other movies. Amistad was directed after a four-week break that ended The Lost World and a six-week prep time before Saving Private Ryan.12. THE BOMBED OUT FRENCH CITY WAS ACTUALLY A SET BUILT OUTSIDE OF LONDON.Because the logistics of shooting a completely destroyed French city would be impossible, the fictional bombed out city of Ramelle was created entirely at the Hatfield Aerodrome, a now-closed WWII air base located about 30 miles outside of London. The entire half-demolished city set took four months to build. To add more believability to the area, tons of rubble was purchased from nearby construction sites and added to the set.13. NEARLY ALL OF THE UNIFORMS WERE CUSTOM MADE.Costume designer Joanna Johnston wanted to originally use period uniforms for the primary soldiers, but found that authentic WWII-era uniforms were too costly to buy and maintain. So 3500 custom-made military uniforms were created to outfit all of the actors portraying soldiers throughout the entire film. For the D-Day sequence alone, 2000 weapons were created, 500 of which could shoot blanks while the remaining 1500 were rubber replicas.14. THE MEANING OF “FUBAR” IS NSFW.The meaning of the phrase the soldiers utter to each other throughout the movie as a form of camaraderie is never explained. FUBAR is actually military slang for “F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition.”15. FOR MANY VETERANS, THE MOVIE WAS TOO PAINFUL TO WATCH.The film’s battle scenes were so realistic to veterans in the audience that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs set up a nationwide toll-free hotline for veterans and their family members to call if they felt unsettled by the war depicted onscreen.Saving Private Ryan (1998) 21 factual errors (moviemistakes.com)Factual error: The Tiger tanks portrayed in the movie are actually Soviet T-34s. You could tell by looking at their wheels. Real Tigers had interleaved wheels. These Tigers had the T-34 suspension. Obviously, Tigers are so rare (only one operational Tiger left) that another tank had to be substituted. But an excellent job was done to make the T-34s look like Tigers.Factual error: In the end scene, after the final battle, Reiben is seen calling for a medic to assist Miller. When he gets up to go and find a medic, he picks up his BAR by the barrel. Having just fought in a fairly long action with a high rate of fire, his BAR barrel would be far too hot to touch, let alone pick the rifle up by. It would take 15 or 20 mins for it to cool down enough to handle. He should have picked it up by the foregrip (The wooden bit under the barrel).Factual error: In the scene where the Americans are fighting the Germans in Remelle, there are two Tiger 1 tanks. In reality, there were no Tiger tanks on the American front in Normandy. All Tigers in Normandy were placed on the British and Canadian front south of Caen.Factual error: The American troops at Ramelle bridge are supposed to be fighting the 2nd SS Panzer Division. Two things wrong: the 2nd SS never had Tiger tanks in Normandy, having turned over their Tiger battalion to another unit in Russia prior to being transferred to France. Second, in the scenes with the Tigers, a 1st SS Panzerkorps insignia (Crossed Keys) is seen on the front right hull of the Tigers; 2nd SS Panzer Division was never a part of 1st SS Panzerkorps.Factual error: In the scene where the American troops are storming the German radar station, you can see a few dead cows with oversized bellies provoked by putrefaction, which means that they were killed at least 12 hours ago. When one of the cows receives a bullet, you can see highly-oxigenated fully arterial red blood spurting from the wound, something impossible to happens in a dead body. Blood at this time of death should be nearly black or brown.Factual error: When Jackson takes out the German sniper, we see the German snipers point of view through his scope and he eventually spots Jackson who fires at him. First you see the flash, then the bang, and then the German sniper gets hit through his scope. This is wrong because bullets from a powerful sniper rifle travel much faster than sound, he couldn't have heard the shot before he got hit.Factual error: When the Americans arrive in the first village (the one where the family is marooned upstairs in what's left of their house) there is a car. The car's registration plate follows the post-war system, not introduced until 1950.Factual error: The "tank traps" (actually designed to flip landing craft, when submerged) on Omaha are back-to-front. The bottom of the pole that that rests on the other two should be nearest the sea and not as shown in the movie. Documentary footage of the actual landings will confirm this.Factual error: After the soldiers' initial disembarkment they are shown crouching in groups near the shore and later running towards the bunkers. Unlike the movie shows, anything even as simple as crouching behind the tank traps, let alone actually standing up and running, was impossible at Dog Green Sector and indeed for anyone when pinned down by a machine gun from a high far-away position. In the real-life landing at Dog Green within 7-10 minutes all the officers of the landing company were dead and the survivors inert. They could do nothing except throw away all their equipment and slowly crawl up the beach, shielded from bullets by the incoming tide and dead bodies. 1 hour 40 minutes after landing twelve (known) survivors made it to the base of the cliffs. Only 2 had enough strength left to go on and fight with another group. (The second wave, apart from one boat which was almost entirely killed, opted to land elsewhere when they saw the fate of the first wave.) In this way the movie rather poorly represents what it meant to make a properly opposed landing on D-Day - although whether this is justified or not is another matter.Factual error: During certain scenes in the movie, we see Jackson switching his Weaver M73B1 sniper scope on his M1903A4 sniper rifle with a Unertl sniper scope. The problem is that the Unertl scope was used exclusively by the U.S. Marines in the Pacific Theatre on their M1903A1 sniper rifle. Even if we accept the premise that the Unertl scope was a 'battlefield pickup', the mounts for the Weaver 73B1 and Unertl are entirely different. The Unertl mounts require modification of the upper handguard, and drilling and tapping of the barrel for a forward mounting block. In the bell tower (and other) scenes, it is clear the rifle has a stock upper handguard. Therefore, it could not accept the Unertl scope.Factual error: When Capt. Miller talks to the pilot of the crashed glider telling his story the guy says he lost 22 men in the crash. Only one problem: his glider is a Waco CG-4A (the similar-looking but larger Waco CG-13A wasn't used in the Normandy invasion). The maximum load for one of those was only 13 fully equipped troops and the two pilots, and that's without a jeep. As a jeep is visible in the rear of the fuselage, there couldn't possibly have been more than 6 men on that glider including the pilots, or it never would have gotten airborne.Factual error: When the group is trying to take the German radio tower and the medic gets killed, the American hiding behind the cow is watching through a small rifle scope. The adjustment knobs should be on the top and side of the scope when held level and upright. The American is holding them crooked which means the crosshairs should be crooked, but when it shows the view through the scope, the crosshairs are perfectly vertical and horizontal.Factual error: Some of the ammunition cans were made after World War II; they have smooth sides instead of a recessed border and "low area."Factual error: In the scene where the soldiers are going through the dog tags to try and find Ryan, they all have the smaller chains attached to the tags. When taking the dog tags off a dead body, the smaller link that you see attached is broken away from the necklace around the dead body. It would be rare, if ever, that a soldier would take the time to reconnect the smaller chain. More likely, he would simply take the tag.Factual error: During the final fight scene the German armour enters the town (a built up area) with open-topped AF V's and unbuttoned tanks. The Germans learned not to do this, greatly to their cost, at Stalingrad and other urban battles. It is very unlikely they would have risked their scarce armour in such a way without first securing the area with infantry.Factual error: The typing pool scene, in which we first learn about Private Ryan, features vintage typewriters of various makes and models being used to notify families of soldiers killed in action. One of the first typewriters we see is a Swiss-made Hermes Ambassador from the mid-1950's.Factual error: After Miller has been shot, whilst trying to reach the detonator to blow up the bridge, we see him sat against what is supposed to be a wartime German motorcycle and sidecar. The vehicle in question is actually a Russian Ural M66 which was only produced during the 1970s.Factual error: When Mellish and Henderson are fighting in the room in Romell, twice German Steilgrenates are thrown into the room. Both times they are picked up and thrown back and then the grenades explode. This is highly unlikely since the Steilgrenate had a short (4.5 sec) fuse and would likely have blown up in the hand of the person throwing it back. It was more common that Germans threw back American grenades which had a much longer fuse delay.Factual error: Miller and his men finally find Ryan in the scene where Ryan destroys a German half track with a bazooka. The camera does not show Ryan firing the bazooka, but you hear the blast and see the effect of the shot hitting the half track, firing twice in about a three second interval. The problem is that a bazooka is a single shot weapon, and must be reloaded by hand. This takes time, perhaps 20 seconds if not more.Factual error: Near the end, Melish fires through the wall and kills a German. The blood then streams round the corner way to quickly to be real. It moves at the consistency of water. It then stops abruptly. Not the characteristics of blood.Factual error: When Upham and Mellish are conversing before the fight at Ramelle, Mellish is seen placing Mk. 2 Pineapple grenades into Upham's helmet. The "spoon" on the grenades does not look to be the correct type. The ones in the film appear to be modern, folded, sheet metal painted dark green; World War II era ones are a simple piece of stamped, sheet steel. The modern ones are angular while World War II ones have a slight curve.Tom Hanks signs on to produce, act in veteran-supported D-Day film11 Crazy Behind-The-Scenes Facts About 'Saving Private Ryan'1. Matt Damon Had It EasyBut the other actors? Not so much. The main group of actors went through a grueling 10-day boot camp prior to filming, but Matt Damon was spared the hell week so that the other actors’ resent for him would show in their performances.Media Source2. Spielberg Would Have Re-Shot The Movie Because Of HeroinActor Tom Sizemore, who plays Sergeant Horvath, was a heroin addict prior to filming the movie. Spielberg forced Sizemore to take drug tests on set and vowed that if the actor tested positive for drugs, he would fire him. According to Sizemore, Spielberg said “he would fire me on the spot and shoot all 58 days that I’d worked over again with someone else.”Media Source3. D-Day Was Shot In IrelandThe Normandy beach where D-Day had actually occurred had strict filming restrictions, so the Omaha Beach sequence was actually filmed in Ireland. More than 2,000 Irish Reserve Army troops were recruited to storm the beach during the battle scenes.Media Source4. It Took Four Weeks To Film The Omaha Beach BattleTo this day, the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan is considered one of the best, most realistic battle scenes in cinema. To accomplish this feat, Spielberg spent four weeks filming the sequence, which cost an extraordinary 12 million dollars and was never storyboarded in order to enhance the realism of the battle.Media Source5. Damon Wasn’t The Only Actor Considered For Private RyanSpielberg wanted a relatively unknown actor for the part of Private Ryan, which ultimately backfired when Matt Damon skyrocketed to stardom right before Saving Private Ryan due to his role in Good Will Hunting. Another actor that was considered for the role of Private Ryan was Neil Patrick Harris.6. Other A-List Stars Were Also Considered For Tom Hanks’ RoleTom Hanks, who played Captain John Miller, received an Academy Award nomination for the lead role in Saving Private Ryan. He wasn’t the only high-profile actor considered for the part, though. Spielberg also considered Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson before choosing Hanks (definitely the right choice, in my book).Media Source7. It’s Loosely Based On A True StorySaving Private Ryan is partly based on the real-life story of the Niland brothers, who fought for the U.S. during World War II. Three of the brothers were thought to have been killed in action, so the last remaining Niland brother was shipped back home so the family wouldn’t lose all of the sons. One of the other Niland brothers, Edward, was ultimately found alive after surviving a Japanese prison camp.Media Source8. Matt Damon’s Ad-Lib Story Made It Into The MovieRemember that scene where Private Ryan rambles on about spying on his brother and an “ugly” in the barn? Well, none of it was in the script. Matt Damon ad-libbed the entire story, and Steven Spielberg felt that it was very true to Ryan’s character so he kept it in the movie.Media Source9. The Ammunition Was Made Of WoodThe spare ammunition hanging around the actors' necks during the battle scenes was made of wood instead of metal simply because the metal would have been too heavy.Media Source10. Actual Amputees Were Hired For The Landing SceneDuring the D-Day scene, somewhere between 20 and 30 actual amputees portrayed injured soldiers in order to make the scene more realistic. The maimed American soldiers that you see during the landing scene? They’re actually Irish amputees.Media Source11. Many Veterans Couldn’t Make It Through The FilmThe battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan were so realistic that many veterans walked out of theaters mid-movie. In preparation for the film’s release, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs also established a special hotline for veterans to call if the movie brought on PTSD.Media Source10 movie mistakes: Saving Private RyanSaving Private Ryan is a 1998 film set during the Invasion of Normandy in June 1944. It was directed by Steven Spielberg and stars Tom Hanks and Matt Damon.It won 5 Academy awards and a Golden Globe Award for best motion picture. It has been praised for the realistic way in which it filmed the battle scenes.The film magazine Empire described the sequence showing the landing of U.S. forces at Omaha Beach as the ‘best battle scene of all time.’The scene was named Number One on TV Guide’s ’50 Greatest Movie Moments.’Omaha Beach was the name given to one of two positions where U.S forces landed in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944. The other was Utah Beach.The action in the scene is indeed very close to actual historical events. As shown in the film, many soldiers suffered from sea sickness. Many were shot even before they could reach the shore.Once ashore it was difficult to join up with other units on account of the heavy enemy fire. German machine guns in fortified positions shot at them, and they were continually shelled by artillery.Spielberg meant to honor those who fought, and so he did not want the battle to look romantic as many World War II war films before had done. He wanted to show the real suffering and intense emotion of the soldiers.The Landing scene was enormously difficult to do. The cast had to be militarily trained to do as the actual soldiers would have done. Attention was paid to every little detail of costume and scenery and military equipment.Just for a bit of fun – our chums over at moviemistakes.com have listed 103 mistakes from Saving Private Ryan – we think that’s a bit obsessive, so we are only going to share 10 of them! Enjoy!!Helmet moving aroundAfter the Battle at the Beach is won and Captain Miller has his new orders, he goes to the group of translators and map readers to collect Upham.He tells him to leave everything but his helmet, and in his stress and confusion, Upham knocks his typewriter, helmet, and other stuff from the table on the floor.When Upham then picks up the German helmet by mistake and goes back to get his own helmet, all the stuff he knocked off the table has jumped back onto the table!Take 2In the climactic battle in the French Village of Ramelles, the Americans face an overwhelming amount of German Armor. Two tiger tanks, two Panther tanks and more.Without any adequate anti-tank weapons they are forced to use sticky bombs to immobilize the first Tiger and turn it into a roadblock.When the soldiers attach the sticky bombs to the roadwheels of the Tiger, watch closely, and you can see a chunk of rubber missing.Fast forward a bit when Captain Miller tries to take down the second Tiger which is then crossing the bridge. That tank too has a chunk of rubber missing, from the exact same roadwheel.Bullet effect packAt the beginning of the movie, Captain Miller wades through the sea with another man who has a rather weird looking object in his uniform pocket.This is unmistakably a charge because a second later the man is shot dead smack bang in the middle of that pocket.Helmet FlipNow at the end of the movie, Captain Miller has just died, Private Ryan is standing there staring down in disbelief at the corps and the upside down helmet next to his leg.The next shot, looking over Ryan’s shoulder, the helmet has flipped!Clean FaceAfter Captain Miller lands on Omaha Beach, a mortar round lands behind him. He kneels in the sand with a face that is covered in bloody water.This is immediately followed by a young soldier shouting at him, and Captain Miller is suddenly in chest deep water with a clean face!Color changeWhen the bridge at Ramelle needs to be defended, there is a soldier that tries to attach a sticky-bomb to a Tiger Tank.He walks out to the tank in his beige uniform but in the next shot his uniform has changed color and is now dark green.When he gets hit, you can see the puppet in the dark green uniform exploding.Disappearing woundBack to the beach, Captain Miller kneels behind a Czech Hedgehog and talks into his radio. A soldier in front of the obstacle gets hit three or four times.In the first scene he gets it in the upper leg area, but when Miller leaves the cover of the hedgehog, that bullet wound has disappeared!Changing positionBefore Miller and his patrol are going to take on the radar tower and bunker they discuss their attack strategy. Hiding behind some bushes, you can see Jackson being two feet on the left of Reiben.When the scene cuts to Jackson, he has moved and is now behind Reiben.Rifle hand changesWhen Captain Miller and his soldiers have reached the relative safety of the bunker on Omaha Beach, he orders Jackson to move to a crater.Jackson kisses his cross, which he brings to his mouth with his right hand. However, in the next shot, his rifle is in that hand.Chest prostheticWhen the medic gets shot, look for the part where Upham brings the bags to the injured medic. There is some fog which then reveals the wounded medic.Watch carefully at the neck in the shot when the soldier rips the medic’s shirt away. For a split second, the fake stomach vest he wears is visible, until the actor realises his mistake and quickly covers it back up.Soldier who was flown home after his five older brothers were killed

As documentary the film does a poor job on banking and banking policy. By and large Inside Job takes an inflammatory, biased tone. At times, it seems deliberately misleading or false. Bankers, will find it more mockumentary than serious analysis. It might still be useful as a case study in propaganda.Strike 1: The opening comparison is rank speculation.The film opens with the factual observation that Iceland's GDP at the start of the crisis was about US$13 billion per year. It then claims that Iceland banks lost US$100 billion.Such a provocative, audacious claim begs further research. Apparently, it has no factual basis. Instead, a speculative dollar figure for Iceland's foreign currency exposure morphed into a claim of loss.The real loss is unknown and the potential loss depends on the value of the assets and liabilities. As of 2Q2008, Iceland's banks had liabilities of about US$166 billion, but they had assets of US$176 billion. Like most banks, the assets have a long duration, while the liabilities have a short duration. Most of the assets and liabilities of the banking sector were denominated in foreign currency. That does not mean that the losses were the same as the foreign currency exposure.While we don't know exactly what the financial position of the Iceland banks was, we can do some judicious guessing based on the quarterly reports of the banks and the information releases of the Iceland Central Bank in the middle of 2008.The banks had assets and liabilities of about US$176 billion and US$166 billion, leaving equity of US$10 billion. About 21% of the assets and 15% of the liabilities were domestic. Refer to the table, below. That suggests (1) that the domestic portion of the bank was highly solvent, while the foreign portion was insolvent by a small amount.Kaupthing regularly published a table explaining the match between their short-term assets and liabilities. If we assume that the condition of Glitnir and Landsbanki was similar, in (2), we find a short term funding shortfall of US$10-$11 billion.Such a shortfall is typical for banks; they cover it in a variety of ways. As the nominal lender of last resort the Central Bank of Iceland was holding more than US$2.5 billion in foreign currency reserves in July 2008. The three main banks also had short-term lines of credit in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark of about US$4.9 billion. That left a further shortfall (3) of US$3.1 billion.The cost of the bank collapse itself should have been about $3 billion. That at least, is a verifiable number, discoverable from sources as varied in quality as Wikipedia and the NYT. http://www.americanscientist.org/After unwinding the banks' positions, another US$5-US$6 billion was owed to foreign depositors in the UK and Netherlands. The Central Bank of Iceland defaulted on those obligations. The home governments, primarily in the UK and the Netherlands, absorbed those costs subject to litigation.In other words, the lower bound on the actual loss to Iceland is about $3 billion. The upper bound is about US$9-US$10 billion. Iceland has said that they believe that the UK and Netherlands will eventually be paid US$9 billion from the receivership trust, i.e., a net gain, not a loss.In any event, the outcome is unknowable until the assets are either sold, mature, or are written off. What is known is that the losses will not be to Iceland or to Iceland's banks. If currently available public information is correct, most of the losses will not fall on depositors, either. As of 2012, other than some depositors in Germany, the depositors have been paid.That leaves the investors (mainly bondholders) holding the bag. The Iceland banks reportedly had little exposure to CDOs, and their asset quality was believed to have been very good.The film gives the impression that Iceland's bankers were uniformly dishonest and incompetent. The opposite is true. The bondholders may wind up doing very well. There is no choice but to wait and see.As of summer 2011, the original Kaupthing still existed. It was holding the bank's foreign assets/liabilities. It had not been declared bankrupt, but it wasn't fully operating. If ongoing legal investigations concerning the possibility of looting bear fruit, there may be some clawback potential. The eventual losses on the bank may turn out to be very small.*Strike 2: Goldilocks always thinks her porridge is just right.Talking heads from Iceland say: "We had the complete infrastructure of a modern society: clean energy, food production, fisheries with a quota system to manage them, good education, clean air, not much crime--a good place for families to live."That is a fair description of the situation immediately before the crisis, but not so great for twenty years ago, i.e., before they took steps to get their economic act together after 1990. Prior to that the situation was, at best, mixed.Iceland itself is economically marginal, constrained by climate, terrain, and resources. Iceland had decent economic growth in the post-WWII period, but it was punctuated by periods of hyperinflation. During the inflationary period in the 1970s and 1980s, the usury laws kept real interest rates negative. Under those circumstances, it's difficult to have a banking system, so what banking there was had to be state-owned, and housing loans amounted to gifts.That is, the government decided who had Christmas and who didn't, and there was a good deal of social resentment by those who didn't get houses of those who did. Among other things, that meant that there was substantial unfulfilled demand. There was a lot of corruption and not much capital formation; industrial projects were done with direct or indirect foreign investment, commonly with government guarantees. The krona was difficult to exchange with any other currency. Part of that was a consequence of uncontrolled inflation.After 1979, when the government legalized loan indexation, borrowers had to pay back the real value of their loans. That stimulated savings and investment. Once you realistically remunerate capital, it quickly becomes obvious that state-owned banking produces an inefficient allocation of a primary economic factor. When Utvegsbankinn (a state owned bank) collapsed, they combined its assets with those of three other banks to create Islandsbanki, the predecessor to Glitnir. (Glitner still exists, too. It has reverted to the older name, Islandsbanki)*Strike 3: Counterfactual use of language to imply victimizationNarrator: "They started by allowing multinational corporations like Alcoa to build giant aluminum smelting plants and exploit Iceland's geothermal energy sources."The government actively sponsored corporate investment in poor, eastern Iceland, which had been suffering from population losses. It was the biggest investment project in Iceland's history. The Ministry of Industry, the State Power Company, and the municipalities cooperated in pulling it off. They cut taxes at the same time.So… we have the privatization of a collapsed state-owned bank, public infrastructure development financed by deficit spending, and massive tax cuts. It amounted to a substantial Keynesian fiscal stimulus.Nevertheless, construction of the Alcoa smelter in east Iceland started after they had already completed the process of privatizing the failed state-owned banks, a process that took more than a decade. The plant came on line in 2007, seventeen years after they started the process of economic modernization.*Strike 4: False claim. "In February 2007 the rating agencies decided to upgrade the banks to the highest possible rate, AAA"Technically, one ratings agency, Moody's, reaffirmed its rating on sovereign Iceland itself, not its banks, Aaa. Moody's was blasted by the financial services industry for the rating. Also, since joint default analysis decreases power to discriminate between banks, that rendered Moody's ratings largely irrelevant.Fitch downgraded Iceland's sovereign debt in February 2006. By March 2006, Merrill Lynch and Den Danske Bank had issued negative reports about the banks and the spreads they had to pay widened to reflect emerging market risk. In March 2006, 5-year senior CDS spreads at Kaupthing and Landsbanki surprised the markets by breaking through 100 bps, 91-92 bps above iTraxx at that time; Glitnir was 38 bps over iTraxx. By August 2008, the spread over iTraxx had widened to 927, 602, and 954 bps over iTraxx at the three banks, respectively.In one sense, that's not a surprise; spreads widened throughout the system. However, at the time the Iceland banks were relatively profitable and liquid in addition to having growing deposits and relatively high capital ratios. That's not usually a recipe for extremely wide spreads, but the overriding concern was not about the banks, at all. It was about sovereign credit and government policy, much as it is today.Until early 2006 almost all of Iceland's bank borrowing occurred in the European debt markets. Unfortunately, after the downgrade the European debt markets largely cut them off. Isolated from their traditional sources of lending, they turned to the US debt markets, instead. They borrowed about US$6 billion in the US debt market in 2006, and a further US$2 billion in 2007. Perhaps predictably, most of that wound up in the CDO market.S&P raised the rating on Glitnir's *paper* from A- / negative to A- /stable in 2007, not AAA. Its short term paper was rated A2, which is to say that during periods of credit crunch, they were out of luck. It isn't always possible to float A2. Their rating on intermediate paper went back to A-/Watch negative in March 2008.In addition, the rating assigned to a bank's paper, or to its host country, is not the same as the rating on the bank itself. Moody's rated Kaupthing in summer 2007. It got a 'C.' In May 2007, Moody's rated Landsbanki Caa1/E/NP/Developing. Fitch rated it D/D/F/Evolving. It is useful to understand what that Fitch rating means:D: A bank that has weaknesses of internal and/or external origin. There are concerns regarding its profitability and balance sheet integrity, franchise, management, operating environment or prospects. Banks in emerging markets are necessarily faced with a greater number of potential deficiencies of external origin.F: A bank that has either defaulted or, in Fitch Ratings' opinion, would have defaulted if it had not received external support. Examples of such support include state or local government support, (deposit) insurance funds, acquisition by some other corporate entity or an injection of new funds from its shareholders or equivalent. In other words, these were shaky banks with serious problems of both internal and external origin, but with apparently reliable government guarantees that Fitch believed were necessary to keep the banks from defaulting.The claim that anyone with experience in banking thought that Iceland's banking system was tenable without a government commitment is not credible.Iceland's banks had access to mezzanine lending mainly because of support of the banks by the public sector and because, at least on paper, Iceland was complying with the requirements of their commitment to join the EEA, a process they started in 1990. That combination created a mismatch between their credit rating and the above-market interest rates they were paying. On paper, they were the cheapest game in town, and it seemed that one could use Iceland paper to both raise the quality rating of a pool of debt securities and its yield.Even the question is misspecified. The real question is how a tight-fisted sovereign, with little or no debt, and a fully funded pension plan gets a rating as low as A or BBB? The answer is pretty easy. It periodically imposes capital controls, allows hyperinflation, and has usury laws that keep real interest rates negative for long periods of time. That a country that does those things would have mediocre ratings on its paper and would have to pay spreads like an emerging market is no surprise at all.As of August 7, 2008 just before the ho-ho hit the fan, CreditSights summarized the prevailing ratings on the Icelandic bank's paper as:Kaupthing Glitnir LandsbankiMoody's/S&P/Fitch A1/NR/A- A2/BBB+/A- A2/NR/AAgain, not a AAA in the lot. What * is * surprising is that anyone would make such a claim as if no one could look up the publicly available information.*Strike 5: Misplaced liability. "American auditing companies like KPMG audited the Icelandic banks and investment firms and found nothing wrong."PwC-Iceland audited Glitnir and Landsbanki. KPMG audited Kaupthing. As for not finding anything wrong with the banks, that's not a surprise. The audit report is based on the information provided by the bank. In November 2010, the Big Four, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers, testified before the House of Lords in the UK to the effect that the auditor is never responsible for failing to detect the lies their clients tell. Sometimes the auditor gets held responsible anyway, but the basis is commonly flimsy.Interestingly, Iceland is suing PwC-Iceland for audit failure. The basis of the suit appears to be that the auditors didn't catch the banks' lies and shut them down sooner. I find that interesting because on the face of it, I thought the best case could be made against KPMG. As of November 2007, Kaupthing appears to have had a billion-Euro, fake line of credit set up for them by Deutsche. That is 'fake' in the sense that the terms are so punitive that the line would never be used. That strikes me as a detectable, deliberate potential fraud that KPMG could and perhaps, should have noticed.*Strike 6: Definitional mismatch. Banks encouraged depositors to shift to "money market funds"True in a weak sense, but misleading. Depositors disintermediate pretty quickly once they see the difference in return between bank interest and treasuries. Money market funds is in scare quotes because the CESR didn't adopt a standard definition until May 2010. I found the remark itself jarring; in the US money market funds are very tightly regulated to prevent them from breaking a dollar, so I wondered how disintermediation into them could have resulted in substantial investor losses. Surprise. The Iceland banks loaded their own stock into the alleged money market funds. Evidently, the depositors either didn't read the prospectus, or they didn't care.Disintermediation of deposits into US money market funds starting in 1971 forced deregulation of banks in the US, so it wouldn't have been a surprise if it hurt the banks; the surprise was that investors lost money on the funds themselves. They were not, however, the same sort of funds.*Strike 7: Materially false and misleading statement--Financial Supervisory Authority did nothing. The regulators were 'outlawyered?'Not quite true. As sources of borrowing dried up in Europe and the US, the Iceland banks increasingly used short term financing and foreign deposits to raise capital. Rolling over long term debt with short term instruments is very risky. Despite having almost no national debt, no one stepped up to provide bridge financing.You'd have to be very gullible to believe the Icelanders didn't see the potential train wreck. We know that because of what they did. As the amount of foreign exposure in the banks' portfolios rose, so did the currency exposure of their capital ratios. The central bank could have maintained its requirements for reserve balance. Instead, they authorized the banks to hold more foreign assets to dampen the effects of currency fluctuations. That made it possible for the banks to continue to pass stress tests without increasing their capital ratios. Meanwhile, after the shakeup in 2006, all three banks (but especially Kaupthing) were shedding risk, growing their deposits, and by-policy, maintaining sufficient liquidity to avoid going to the capital markets for twelve months.I had to wonder whether the claim about the regulators being outlawyered was even serious. It would have made more sense to claim that they were in on it. At least that would be consistent with the observation that: "1/3 of Iceland's regulators went to work for the banks."The reality is that the banks and their regulators did what people usually do. As the crisis deepened in 2008, they tried to stay ahead of the bear as long as they could. Usually, the bear gets tired, as it did in 2006.*Strike 8: Innuendo/guilt by association. "People are amazed at how much cocaine the workers on Wall Street can use and still go to work the next day."This is an obvious cheap shot. I knew one coke-head on Wall Street. I also knew one guy who was addicted to diet pills. There are also some people addicted to pain-killers, but the drug of choice is alcohol. It's a high stress job. As for the bit about prostitution, it might be true. New York has no shortage of cathouses. I knew one executive who was busted for solicitation of prostitution. The coke addict was also an obese alcoholic. What amazed me was that he was still alive every day; he may not be now.*Strike 9: Historical howler. The film claims that after the Great Depression the US had 40 years of economic growth without a financial crisisReally? It's a Wonderful Life. At 40 years, you would have to count the US hyperinflation in the late 1970s, and maybe the Reagan depression of 1981-82. You could get almost 35 years if you didn't count the collapse of the tech bubble in 1970-71, the Nixon shock and associated failure of the international currency mechanism, or the horrible stock market collapse in 1973-74, two oil crises, the waves of disintermediation in the thrift industry in 1966, 1969, and 1973, the deflationary depression during the mega drought in the 1950s, or the land speculation and bust in the 1950s, and so on.The latter event was so bad that states like California wrote non-recourse statutes to let property owners walk away from their mortgages. That, more than any other single factor, laid the groundwork for the form this crisis took (though I think that something would have broken regardless). Most of the speculative bubble, and most of the defaulted mortgages that account for more than half of the total US losses were issued in those states. Sharing risk with free riders is dangerous. A prudent policy change would be to ban the pooling of recourse and non-recourse mortgages.*Strike 10: Historical revisionism. Ronald Reagan appointed Donald Regan, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, who ushered in a 30-year period of financial deregulation.Barely in the ballpark. Currency issues that started during the Johnson administration triggered the first major round of banking deregulation in the US. Widening spreads between the interest rates paid on bank deposits and treasuries led to disintermediation of deposits from the S&L's that disrupted both home building and the mortgage markets in the 1960s. By 1970, there was substantial pressure to permit money market funds to operate, and the first such fund opened in 1971. Competitive pressure severely eroded capital quality at the S&L's.At the same time, rising inflation and widening quality spreads put pressure on the various state usury statutes. The Supreme Court's decision in Marquette v Mutual of Omaha (1978) set of a wave of competitive deregulation at the state level. Since banking in the US follows (what I think are outdated) federalist principles, the state and federally chartered banks face both different rules and different regulators. Along with ongoing disintermediation, easier terms at the state level put pressure on federally chartered banks, and the Carter administration responded by signing the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act in 1980 roughly fifteen years after the modern banking crisis got underway.On the investment banking side, the first wave of pension fund reform and deregulation pre-dates that by a further 10-15 years, back into the 1950s. Deregulation of brokerage fees went into effect on May 1, 1975, during the Ford administration.Notwithstanding overall equity market appreciation, the intermittent crises in banking go back a long way (to the 1200s at the latest) in human history. To date, no regulatory regime has been robust enough to survive the underlying economic and population fluctuations.*Anyway, it's a polished piece of shoddy research, with almost non-existent fact checking, and it's loaded with innuendo. On the whole, I found it entertaining, albeit more comedic than informative. Watch it as critically as you can, but do not expect that writing a competing narrative will make you popular.There is simply no such thing as a perfectly safe, stand-alone, deposit-taking bank at transaction costs low enough to serve most of the population, even if it has good quality assets and enough liquidity to cover normal operating variations in deposits and short term liabilities. Under tight regulations, the banking industry breaks and strains the treasury. Under looser constraints, the banks survive longer without breaking, but so far, they still eventually break and strain the treasury. One thing that we cannot say is which way strains the treasury less. We have only one history and it is path dependent.Banks are unpopular. They lend money expecting to be repaid. People like the idea that they can consume more than they earn today, but no one likes the repayment part. The film repeats an old saw: Banking doesn't *create* anything. It tallies credits and debits. That's somewhat true. Ultimately, what banks do is collect the best available information. On the other hand, banking doesn't destroy anything either. It is implausible as the cause of the crisis.The main macro cause is tucked away near the end of the film. Free trade has exposed the developed economies of the world to a massive, global labor surplus. Wages for commodity and semi-skilled labor are severely eroded, but wages for skilled and professional labor have been under pressure, too. To cope with global development, central banks have been releasing waves of liquidity to keep the system from melting down. These problems are not local. They will not be solved by the reimposition of failed regulatory regimes.