For all the cynics out there re: the black hat issue:
I think it’s a common thing that everyone does. When they want to portray people from a previous generation, they automatically portray them according to contemporary ways (partly because they don’t really know how people dressed and/or acted and/or thought). It’s a natural thing to do, and people do it in all circles.
I don’t think that anyone was trying to make a point about black hats – I think it was an automatic thing. They don’t know how people dressed then, and this is how we dress, so that’s why they did it that way. If it was a stick figure, they obviously weren’t trying to be accurate. Avraham Avinu was not a stick figure.
Also, if you are not sure how Avraham Avinu really did dress (which I would imagine, few people are), I could hear that it may make more sense to just dress him like today, than to make something up.
It’s not only done in terms of dress. It is also done in terms of how people thought,etc.
I once saw a movie based on a book by a not-Frum Jew about a girl who lived in a shtetl in Europe. It was clear that the people making the movie were “rewriting” history (albeit it, unintentionally) as though Frum people in pre-War Europe thought the same as they (secularists in 20th century America).