When Professor of Latin Kathleen M. Coleman finally saw the finished product after months of work as a historical consultant for the film Gladiator, it was not quite what she expected.

Coleman had put in hundreds of hours helping screenwriter David H. Franzoni create a script that accurately represented the Roman Empire at the time of Emperor Commodus.

But at the preview, Coleman was surprised to discover that much of her hard work had fallen by the wayside, and that the final version of the film bore little resemblance to the last version of the script that she reviewed.

Coleman told the studio not to list her in the credits.

But some still held her responsible for the film's inauthenticity.

David Lupher, a classics professor at the University of Puget Sound, criticized her over "classics-l," an informal e-mail list of academics, because she was "thanked" in the credits.

"I trust she blushes all the way to the bank," Lupher wrote.

Coleman, who specializes in early Roman literature and spectacle, says she felt Lupher had unjustly misrepresented her and she had to repond.

"I felt it necessary to state precisely the extent of the labor I had put into this job, and to emphasize that as a consultant I was powerless to exercise any control over the use that was made of my advice," she says. "That is a foreign feeling to a scholar."

But Franzoni, who also produced the film, says that logistical problems at times hindered their precision.

"When we got in full swing of production there were script problems and we were rewriting. Cries for accuracy were lost in the thunder of this being made," Franzoni says. "Most historians have an agenda and are willing to bend the facts to make the agenda work...So it's not just filmakers."

Coleman saw three versions of the script, but emphasizes that the last version she saw only somewhat resembled the eventual film.

"I was not aware of the extent to which the script would be rewritten," she says.

Franzoni, whose wife found Coleman while watching a Learning Channel documentary on original Roman gladiators, says he recognizes where the film went wrong.

"If the movie had been entirely prepared beforehand we could have done a better job," he says. "We were trying to get the overall picture correct."