While Costner has the starring role as O'Donnell, that character does not become the star of the missile crisis in the film. On-screen as in life, the key players are JFK, played skillfully by Bruce Greenwood, and RFK, played nicely by Steven Culp.

Questions about the cinematic verity of a film like "Thirteen Days," or any of the reality-based films, go back to the beginning of the movie business. They started with D.W. Griffith's 1915 "The Birth of a Nation," the silent film about the experiences of a Southern family during and after the American Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson said Griffith's account of the Civil War Reconstruction was "like history written in lightning."

Blacks, understandably, were outraged at the film's distorted and racist portrayal of history. The film produced a big box office -- and also caused race riots in Atlanta, Boston and Chicago.

Years ago, at a time when my book about the Nixon White House and Watergate, "Blind Ambition," was being made into a six-hour miniseries, novelist Irving Wallace told me the story of the most realistic movie ever made by Hollywood, which he later included in "The Book of Lists." In 1914, a Hollywood director wanted to depict an authentic Mexican revolution, so he hired the real thing, Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, who was paid $25,000 to stage a revolution for the cameras -- minus the killing, I assumed.

Wallace said they filmed for many days in Mexico, with guerrilla forces regularly stopping and starting for camera angles and the best light, and reported that "when the completed film was brought back to Hollywood, it was found too unbelievable to be released -- and most of it had to be reshot on the studio lot."

In short, it was too real. This is the dilemma of the filmmaker who deals with reality. If the story and pictures are too authentic it may be unbelievable, if not boring, on-screen. Yet, as Griffith showed, fabricated history can appear all too real. Today, it is widely understood by audiences that all films are, to some degree, fantasy. As Roger Ebert observed, "In a sense, of course, all films are fiction -- even documentaries, which filter the material through the sensibility of the filmmaker."

Steve James, one of the best in the business of documentaries, wrote and directed the acclaimed "Hoop Dreams," which follows two inner-city kids with dreams of professional basketball careers. He explained to the Denver Post, "When you collect 250 hours of material like we collected ..., you are out of necessity having to make some very tough decisions about what stays and what goes in. When you have that much material, you can shape it, have it say whatever you want it to say."

I mention this fictional aspect of filmmaking not to defend "Thirteen Days," for it needs no defense, but rather to make the point that all films must and do distort life. I mention it because it pains me to read the often thoughtless attacks on reality-based films, a genre that I particularly enjoy, since these films both entertain and inform. "JFK," "Mississippi Burning," "Nixon," "The People vs. Larry Flynt," "Ghosts of Mississippi," "Boys Don't Cry," "Amistad," "The Insider" and "The Hurricane" are just a few of the movies that, to varying degrees, have been attacked for altering history. Yet they are exceptionally well-made movies and captivating stories -- if given a chance.

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