Hollywood is the unelected capitol of America. Passaic County got an eyeful of that this Oscar season when filmmakers marched into Paterson, glanced at a certain tragic mystery that's plagued the city for 34 years, and pretty much told everybody what to think about it.

So of course by now, we've all heard enough about Rubin ``Hurricane'' Carter to judge his guilt, his innocence, his child-rearing habits, his left hook and the way prison clothes made him look. . . oh, I might as well say it … dreamy.

We've seen the movie about his murder conviction. Then we heard reactions to the movie from the murder victims' families, then we heard reactions to the reactions, then the reactions to the reactions to the reactions to the reactions.... No, wait. We haven't heard the reactions to the reactions to the reactions to the reactions yet. This newspaper is supposed to print the reactions to the reactions to the reactions to the reactions in a week or two. It was supposed to be an exclusive, and I've given it away. Damn.

Still, we're never really going to know whether Rubin Carter and John Artis walked into the Lafayette Bar & Grill in Paterson 34 years ago and killed a bartender and two patrons. We will never know. Never. No matter what. Never, ever, ever, ever.

Except there's this freakin' movie about it.

Movies aren't bound by a lot of legal hooey that tie up, say, newspapers and lawyers and even one or two people on the Internet. Movies, like most things that interest the general public even slightly, are presumed to be partly fictitious, so they can fudge a little on facts and balance and all the rest of that. Movie producers just have to tack up ``Based on a true story'' in the opening credits, and they can cut right to a shot of cartoon gremlins parachuting out of a day-glo space carrot.

The producers of ``The Hurricane'' told us right up front that they changed the facts for a better story. They made up characters and left out significant details, and frankly they had to. The true annuls of a courtroom would make an audience so insanely bored they'd be gouging out their eyes with hatpins and setting kittens on fire with a butane lighter.

Besides, Hollywood's version of things may be essentially true. Rubin Carter may well have been a victim of police bias. It's not as if Passaic County has been running low on tension between cops and civilians, even right now. A pregnant Paterson woman recently accused police of slamming her head into a windshield. And that's, you know, not a good sign.

But if our newspaper operated the way the movies do, we would be so very, very sued.

While a movie can say, flat-out, ``Dorothy done killed the Wicked Witch of the North! Boy howdy!'' a newspaper has to qualify everything: ``Police said Esmerelda Blanchart, 58, expired Thursday. The state medical examiner has yet to confirm whether the cause of death was this big old farmhouse that landed on top of her. Though sources referred to Blanchart as `wicked,' representatives of the winged monkeys said Blanchart was in rehab and `was just about to get her life back on track.'''

Yet, ironically, the other difference between movies and newspapers is that movies reach more people. They tour the country's theaters for months, then head for the foreign markets. Producers are making billions of dollars and reaching billions of people and receiving a Golden Globe for deliberately getting it wrong. What a great gig.

And there's nothing we can do about it. Nor should there be. You can't make a law against historical reenactments. Those are some of our best movies – "Citizen Kane," "Raging Bull," "Lawrence of Arabia" and of course "Abbott and Costello Meet Dracula."

Still, it makes you wonder just how much history has been written -- and continues to be written -- around whatever makes the best story. At least that means we don't have to have bony old academics and museum curators coming up with all the textbooks anymore. We can finally have a really good screenplay doctor develop a simple, sexy plot line, not just for the Hurricane Carter incident, but for the entire civil rights movement. And punch it up with some gags.