Alexander the Great as Portrayed by Plutarch and Oliver Stone "My intention is not to write histories, but lives. Sometimes small incidents, rather than glorious exploits, give us the best evidence of character. So, as portrait painters are more exact in doing the face (where the character is revealed) than the rest of the body, I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks of the souls of men. By these, rather than the historical events they participated in, I try to portray their lives. I leave the task of a more complete historical chronicle to others."

Plutarch began the life of Alexander with this disclaimer. Writing in an age when manuscripts were copied painstakingly by hand on relatively expensive parchment or vellum, writers had to strive to be brief and succinct. Plutarch's life of Alexander runs to a little...

Action and dialog may appear to run swiftly, but is always slower than the speed of reading. The director must decide what to include based on, 1) what he thinks is important to the story he is trying to tell and, 2) the entertainment value, which often boils down to a decision of how much action vs. how many lines of dialog to include.
The writer of history is concerned with elegance of style, the moviemaker with evoking the appearance of past times and visual beauty. For the sake of economy of time, a moviemaker must choose what to include and what to leave out. Separate incidents and characters are often combined into composites. The historian has the luxury of giving more than…