Warning: "Recount" Contains Total Fabrications

There's an obvious need for compression -- there were two Supreme Court hearings, not one -- in telling the tangled tale of the 36-day Florida court battle that gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush. And dialogue can't be verbatim when there's no way of knowing everything that was said in back rooms. But while dramatic license might support exaggeration, it can hardly justify some of the wholesale creation in which the movie indulges.

The makers of "Recount" tout their reliance on several books about the crisis, and hired as consultants CNN's Jeffrey Toobin, ABC's Jake Tapper, Time's Mark Halperin and David Von Drehle and Newsweek's David Kaplan.

In an interview airing tomorrow on CNN's "Reliable Sources," director Jay Roach tells me of the invented Klain dialogue: "We wanted, as with a lot of moments in the film, to capture the essence of a certain attitude in the Gore team." The movie, he said, "wasn't 100 percent accurate, but it was very true to what went on. . . . That's what dramatizations do: stitch together the big ideas with, sometimes, constructs that have to stand for a larger truth." He cites as an example "All the President's Men," in which Hal Holbrook's Deep Throat tells Robert Redford's Bob Woodward to "follow the money," although the real Throat never used those words.