8 Times Hollywood Got It Wrong (And It Made Films Better)

6. Good Morning, Vietnam

Can you even picture Good Morning, Vietnam with anyone besides Robin Williams in the lead role? His manic comic timing is what propels half of the movie, with his underrated abilities as a straight man guiding the rest of it. His "inventiveness" also played a large part in shaping the character of Adrian Cronauer, the real-life disc jockey for the Armed Forces Radio Network during the Vietnam War. In the film, Williams spends most of his time ranting and raving as an anti-establishment, anti-war liberal who had a serious issue with authority. His comedic bits were wrapped in razor wire, cutting to the core of the Army's suspect involvement in the Vietnam War. He was an outrageous personality, who spent most of his time off-air galavanting with Vietnamese nationals and generally thumbing his nose at the people he was working for. In the real world, though, Cronauer wasn't nearly as much fun. He did perform some comedy routines in the DJ booth, but they were certainly more restrained than the stuff Williams did on the set. And they were never anti-war because, according to the real Cronauer, that kind of thing would get a guy court-martialed by the US Military. And Cronauer liked his job. He supported the war, too, for the most part and is a lifelong Republican. (The guy worked for George W. Bush during his re-election campaign.) And he rarely interacted with Vietnamese locals like the film portrays. If Williams and the screenwriters hadn't pretty much made up every interesting aspect of Cronauer's tour with the Army, Good Morning, Vietnam would have been a 45-minute short film about a guy who says wacky, Military-approved jokes on the radio and then going home once his tour was finished. Not exactly Oscar-bait.