Recently my Netflix rentals included "Under the Tuscan Sun", which I wanted to see in the theatre but never got around to. I ended up reading the book first, which had the unfortunate effect of ruining the movie for me. The movie has very little in common with the book - a true story of a San Francisco writer who goes through a painful divorce and ends up buying a villa in Tuscany.
In the movie - the reel story - the writer buys the villa on a whim, alone, fixes it up herself (with the help of contractors), never goes back to San Francisco and only finds her new love in the end. Oh, and of course everyone is movie-star Hollywood gorgeous.
In the book - the real story - the writer finds her new love first and they buy the villa together, spend their summers there fixing it up and the rest of the year back in San Francisco working to pay for it (while the contractors continue their work). I don't know what the writer looked like when she bought the villa, but the bonus features on the DVD showed a recent interview with her and she looks just fine, but average.
Would anyone have paid to see a movie that told the real story, with actors who actually looked like average people and not Hollywood's ideal of beauty? Probably not. After all, the point of going to the movies is to escape your own life for a couple of hours and live in a fantasy.
I guess I am just disappointed that a true story had to get so distorted on film in order for anyone to be interested in it. Disappointed, but not surprised.
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