6 Movies Based on a True Story (That Are Also Full of Shit)
As we pointed out in the previous installment, it seems the least we can ask of a movie that's based on a true story is that it, you know, be based on a true story.
We don't expect them to stick with every boring fact, but time and time again we find out that the entire point of the story has been totally fabricated. So what's the point of basing it on a true story at all?
We're talking about movies like ...
#6.
A Beautiful Mind
The Hollywood Version:
John Forbes Nash was really smart. He was also really, really crazy. When he wasn't working on the concept of governing dynamics, he was having hallucinations of Paul Bettany, seeing hidden messages in newspapers and getting recruited by Ed Harris to break codes for the government, all while running from Russian spies. Which is even weirder when you find out all of that shit happened in his head.
"On your mark. Get set. Crazy!"
The hallucinations became more frequent and, as hallucinations are prone to do, they drove him batshit insane. Fortunately, his loving wife stood by him, Nash committed to a medication regiment and, over time, learned to ignore his hallucinations just in time to win the Nobel Prize in Economics and Crazy in 1994.
In Reality...
There's no denying Nash was both brilliant and afflicted with a bad case of the crazies. But filmmaker Ron Howard was widely criticized for glossing over the life of Nash as well as making up the whole "seeing people who weren't really there" thing. Nash did hear voices, but that's it--his hallucinations were entirely auditory.
"Mr. Howard, 'auditory' doesn't mean he put shoes on his hands, it- OK, you don't care."
The movie completely ignores the fact that John and his wife divorced in 1963, just six years after being married, and never got remarried until 2001 (in addition to the whole insanity thing, the fact that the real Nash dabbled in boning dudes probably didn't help their marriage either). The film also manages to not mention his anti-Semitism, which the real Nash says must have been a side effect of his illness.
At the end of the film, Nash mentions to a friend that he is taking new medication, and he makes a heartfelt speech dedicated to his wife when he accepts his Nobel Prize.
The truth, however, is that both of those things were complete fabrications. Nash stopped taking any medication in 1970, and his continued instability--probably in large part due to that refusal to take medication--led to his not being allowed to make an acceptance speech for fear that he might whip out his dick and start screaming racial slurs at imaginary Jews.
So while the real Nash probably wouldn't have made the best protagonist of a Ron Howard film, we're definitely adding him to our list of "Celebrities Who Need to Get on Twitter."
#5.
Remember the Titans
The Hollywood Version:
The opening voiceover in Remember the Titans tells us (in a line they totally stole from James Van der Beek) that in Virginia, football is life. And in Alexandria in 1971, football and real life issues came crashing together when two high schools merged to form TC Williams, the first integrated school in the city.
At first there was racial tension between the white players and the black players, particularly when a black coach who liked to stomp around and scowl a lot (naturally, because he's played by Denzel Washington) was given the head coaching job while the white coach was demoted to a subservient role.
Sometimes racial tension looks like two dudes ready to kiss each other.
But thanks to competitive spirit, a rockin' 70s soundtrack and the good-natured obesity of Ethan Suplee, the team found racial harmony just in time to overcome every Southern stereotype in the book on its way to a dramatic run to the Virginia State Championship.
In Reality...
While TC Williams was in fact the product of several schools in Alexandria merging together to form one big behemoth of a high school, it didn't exactly play out the way it's portrayed in the movie. The key difference being the tiny little fact that TC Williams was formed and integrated six years before the movie takes place.
And though there was racial tension originally, by the time the championship season rolled around it had mostly subsided. No one protested on the first day of school, and while there were heated exchanges in practice, according to the actual players and coaches it was based purely on position battles, and not race.
The whole dramatic run in the middle of the night leading to Denzel's even more dramatic speech about Gettysburg? Yep, totally fabricated.
"Wait, what?"
Despite what Denzel tried to tell us in a big pregame speech in the movie, TC Williams wasn't the only school that had been dealing with some of the racial issues of the day. The Titans weren't, as he declares, the only integrated team in their league. In real life, every single team in TC Williams' league was integrated by the 1971 season.
And what about the big climactic game, where the Titans have to overcome the better team and pull out a ridiculous 80 yard reverse for a touchdown to win? That really happened, right? Actually, they won in a rout, trouncing their opponent 27-0.
In fact, no one put up much of a fight all year for the Titans, who cruised to the championship and finished the year ranked number two nationally. Apparently, watching a team hand out an ass stomping just isn't "cinematic" enough for Disney. Obviously they hadn't seen the sports genre's Citizen Kane, a little film called Rocky III.
#4.
Mississippi Burning
The Hollywood Version:
In the midst of the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, a trio of freedom riders made their way along the back roads of Mississippi where, as you might expect on the back roads of Mississippi, they encounter members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Needless to say, the Klan members--which included a police officer--are less than cordial to the boys, promptly forcing them off the road and murdering them without provocation.
"Y'know, those poor bastards probably never saw it coming..."
Enter Willem Dafoe, a by the book FBI Agent (you can tell he's by the book because wears glasses); and Gene Hackman, a guy who thinks that the only way to get the job done is to grab and punch as many nuts as possible. Soon enough, Dafoe learns that Hackman justice is the only justice that works and the boys secure victory over the racist Klan, putting the murderers behind bars one nut shot at a time.
"That's all the balls, there are no more balls, you punched all of the balls!"
In Reality...
The tragic story of the three murdered freedom riders is, sadly, very real.
In the film, upon learning of this tragic event, Dafoe asks for more manpower and the FBI quickly obliges, sending hundreds of agents to help bring the killers to justice. The real life J. Edgar Hoover, while under pressure from LBJ to bring the murderers to justice thanks to a surprising amount of national attention, still wasn't so much inclined to offer up so much help.
"Meh."
You see, in addition to thinking that frilly things made him look pretty, Hoover also thought that the Civil Rights movement was a load of Communist bullshit and wasn't worth the full power of the federal government. Initially, he sent just 11 agents to the town, and not the hundreds depicted in the film.
In the film, the FBI agents swarm into the city hell bent on finding the killers and preventing any further violence; but in reality most of them simply couldn't give less of a shit. Allegedly, the members of the FBI and Justice Department only intervened when absolutely necessary, and in some cases they supposedly stood by while beatings took place right in front of them. Your tax dollars at work, folks!
"I gotta be honest I thought there was gonna be a lot more nut-punching when I signed up for this."
So what really happened? How did the killers finally get brought to justice? Was it all about Hackman-style bully tactics?
We're sad to report that no KKK testicles were actually harmed on the road to justice. Instead, the FBI made their case the same way it's always been done: good old fashioned bribery. The Bureau paid Klan informant James Jordan for information on what happened to the activists, and he obliged. Not as cinematic as the nut-punching thing, we suppose.
I don't understand what the disparity between Frost/Nixon and the actual interviews were. I know Nixon was basically incapable of expressing an emotion, but I still don't quite grasp why the interviews were so successful if Nixon barely admitted anything. Did he lay anything bare in the interviews? Did ANYTHING happen in those interviews that would have justified what a snake Nixon was?
ReplyCinderella Man: Max Baer was a funny guy, a cut up....not a bully like in the movie...he gave future winnings to the guy he "killed in the ring"...
Reply"Baer, ever the showman "brought gales of laughter from the crowd with his antics" the night he stepped between the ropes to meet Braddock. "
The rest is history...
I've read this article many times (often in Flashbacks), but it wasn't until this time around that I took a look at the picture of the medical student in The Last King of Scotland and thought, "Wait.. is that?--no, it can't be. But.. he's so hot! It HAS to be..."
Reply*Googles*
"It is! IT'S CHARLES XAVIER! (courtesy of X-Men: First Class)"
Ahhah. Now I need to watch that movie.
uuhh... no mention of The Hurricane. That movie was almost entirely made up, but passed off as true.
ReplyThey have that in another article somewhere on here.
'Hey Richard, what are you making for dinner?'
Reply'I am not a cook!!!'
Almost every Titanic film also features mostly fictional characters, which isn't even a problem. The problem is, a lot of these characters' details are often impossible because of their inaccuracy. Also, every Titanic film before the James Cameron version featured the ship sinking like a normal ship, instead of going up, splitting in half and freezing thousands of people to death like a nightmare, leaving behind only one romantic couple because the director thought it would make sense. I think you should have put "Every Titanic Film" in the list, but other than that, good article, as is almost every other Cracked article.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesI'm lifting this straight from a BBC news article, but - there are five major Titanic myths which everyone believes thanks to the films, and Cameron's film contains every single one.
1) The band playing "Nearer My God to Thee" as the ship sinks - actually from the 1958 film "A Night to Remember." In reality, there were some musicians and they did play some songs. It's unknown what songs they were playing, or if they heroically "went down with the ship" as the movies suggest.
2) The "unsinkable" Titanic - The most popular myth and it's not even true. The Titanic was never advertised as unsinkable - in fact, its sister ship, the Olympia, which was launched first, was the flagship, not the Titanic. In fact, a lot of the "Titanic" footage and photos that get passed around are actually of the Olympia.
3) The heroic, noble Captain Smith going down with the ship, doing his best in an impossible situation.
In reality, the Captain was the one primarily responsible for the ship crashing into the iceberg - he had plenty of iceberg warnings, which he ignored, and there were technical measures the ship could've taken to avoid the crash, which he didn't order.
Furthermore, he also failed to help save lives after the crash. He never issued the "abandon ship" order (which meant word was delayed in getting around the ship), he didn't have any evacuation plans, he never ran drills or preparation. According to witnesses, Captain Smith disappeared after the iceberg crash. Literally no one remembers seeing him. And that meant that passengers didn't know what was happening, what to do, where to go - and worse, the crew didn't know either. Yes, there weren't enough lifeboats, but the situation was made worse because there was no clear plan set up to deploy them, many boats were only half-filled. And all that was kind of Smith's job. Instead, he vanished somewhere after the crash and the crew had to figure it all out themselves.
4) The villainous J. Bruce Ismay, the rich president of the Titanic company, caused the crash by forcing the Captain to push through unsafe conditions, then saved his own skin.
The decision to push through unsafe conditions was actually all on Captain Smith. Ismay didn't make the decision and didn't have the authority to. In fact, official inquiry and witness testimonies confirmed that Ismay stayed on the ship helping save person after person, and only got into a lifeboat when no one else was left to get on - keep in mind, due to Captain Smith's incompetence, many lifeboats deployed without full capacity, as the passengers didn't know where to go.
Ismay became the villain for two reasons. First, he had a feud with an American newspaper owner, who printed outright lies about Ismay. But more influential was a 1943 film called "Titanic," that painted Ismay as a greedy, hateful, selfish elitist who all but murdered the poor people trapped below, produced by Joseph Goebbels - the Nazi minister of propaganda. See, Ismay was Jewish, and Goebbels wanted to appeal to the Allied publics. So the film portrayed Ismay as a greedy, capitalist Jew who forced the brave Teutonic Captain Smith to speed into unsafe conditions, thereby causing the deaths of thousands of impoverished English passengers. Incidentally, this is partly the source of the "noble Captain Smith" myth too (Actually, a lot of common Titanic film elements originated from this Nazi propaganda material).
Ismay himself was racked with guilt until his death - he felt that even if there wasn't anyone else to go on the boat, he should've stayed behind anyway, saved whomever he could, and gone down with the ship.
5) The third-class steerage passengers locked below, to their deaths -
Partly true, but for the wrong reasons. There were locked gates keeping the third-class restricted to the lower decks - but it wasn't because of elitism and snobbery (well, not primarily). It was actually due to U.S. immigration laws, that mandated the separation of third-class areas (mostly immigrants) from the other decks.
There was no intentional decision to kill off the poor. The 3rd-class areas didn't have any lifeboats - they needed to get to the 1st and 2nd class decks. This meant a) unlocking the gates and b) navigating through unfamiliar corridors to get to the boats. The problem was, again, that there was no clear evacuation plan and no one in charge giving the orders. So the crew members didn't know if they were authorized to unlock the gates, and there was no evacuation route prepared to get the 3rd-class passengers to safety. Because of the delay in getting the evacuation order out, it came late to the lower decks and many passengers were hesitant to believe it. By the time the 3rd-class gates were all opened and the passengers made it to the evac areas, the majority of the lifeboats were already gone, many of them unfilled. Heart-warmingly, the 1st and 2nd class male passengers did step aside to allow 3rd class women and children to get into the remaining boats first.
It is true that the 3rd-class passengers suffered more losses than the others - 75% of them died. However, the crew suffered even more deaths, and theoretically, they should've had a better chance to get out. But without coordination and planning, they didn't really stand a chance and went down with the ship trying their best to improve a hopeless situation.
So again, the problem was a complete lack of preparation and planning, and a terrible response due to a lack of command.
Seriously, f**k that Captain Smith.
tl:dr
Just kidding, I read it and enjoyed it. It was most enlightening. Thank you.
'he had plenty of iceberg warnings, which he ignored' Nope, he didnt receive all the warnings and the ones he did receive he took on board and changed the ships direction due further south. Travelling at full speed was standard practice.
' Literally no one remembers seeing him. ' Nope, there are several accounts as to what Smith was doing some conflicting but still observations of him being around and giving orders. Most agree, however ineffectual, that he stayed at his post and went down with the ship.
'all that was kind of Smith's job' Nope, that, like the lack of life boats and poorly stocked provisions was largely down to White Star Line who didnt provide the staff to do significant drills. (There were no real safety regulations for the Titanic.)
Its still a myth that he was a captain doing his best in an impossible situation. He apparently panicked somewhat (Possibly something to do with the fact that even if the evacuation ran perfectly hed still be responsible for around a thousand deaths.) and at the very least his senior staff should have all been informed of the situation but he was nowhere near the villain many including you have painted him to be.
Sorry Mr. RCB, but I'm more inclined to believe the guy that actually looks credible writing this stuff (read: Skim had better spelling and grammar than you).
"Black Hawk Down" suffers from this too. It's only one character and not the entire movie, but the writers changed history to keep the US military happy.
ReplyEwan McGregor's character Grimes is complete fiction, a replacement for the actual person of John Stebbins. Why did they do it?
Because after Stebbins returned to the US, his raped his own daughter. The US military refused to cooperate unless one of its criminals was edited out.
THIS one, I can understand. I'll give Hollywood a full pass on this.
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To the people complaining that "based on a true story" does not mean "documentary".
ReplyTrue, it doesn't, but when you say that a movie is "based on the novel by ---------" it's generally expected to have the same basic plot as the book, hence if it is "based on a true story" it should at least resemble the real event. These movies are more "inspired by" than "based on".
These days, "inspired by" typically means "I heard something about this one time, so I wrote a script. Maybe someday I'll find out what they were talking about."
That's the sad thing. Complete fictions are passed off as true stories to sell tickets. And it works.
There's a distinct lack of JFK, Erin Brockovich and Che/The Motorcycle Diaries on this list.
Replymy teacher told me that The Last King of Scotland was real
Replynow i hate teachers D:
Nixon is like a trickster incarnation. He was so cool.
ReplyI don't give a s**t if the entire movie was a big fat f*****g lie, A Beautiful Mind was still a damn good motion picture. Anyone who discredits it because it wasn't "real" can get bent.
ReplyNo, it wasn't real, but that's the draw of "based on a true story." It's supposed to be about something that really happened, to sucker in people looking for a break from totally fictional movies. Even if it's connection to real events is often as tenuous as "there was this guy who had this name, who lived in this place during this time, and at one point he had this job."
"5 + 5 = Damn Jew Math!" - gritty remake of a beautiful mind.
ReplyThese aren't documentaries, they are based on true stories. Meaning inspired by true events, but not a factual based film.
Reply"Based on a true story" doesn't really mean "this is exactly how it happened!" It's more of a "this is good, but we'll make it better." Oftentimes, it turns out to be total crap anyway, but yeah.
Reply#6.A Beautiful Mind is full of SH*T, that it can hardly be called a story based on true events and real people. Besides John Nash never having visual hallucinations, and stopped taking his medications decades before he received a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994.
ReplyJohn Nash actually did secretly work for the RAND Corporation in the 50's, and wasn't just "imagining" it all using visual hallucinations that he never had. The Rand Corporation is a very powerful secret government think tank that has engaged in such practices as secretly drugging its low-level employees using LSD to study the effects in the 50's. Funny how John Nash's auditory hallucinations began to appear while he secretly worked for the Rand Corporation during their secret LSD drugging program. Not to mention some, way over the top, BatSH*T crazy behavior John Nash began to exhibit just before he was let go by the Rand Corp. HMMM, think there might be a connection there?
oops #5 and #4 lol
ReplyREAD #4 WAS LIKE YES! some vidication for the south, then read #3...n-never mind
ReplyI had to watch Mississippi Burning for school, (American History), and I only remember two things about it. The first was me joking to my mate that these racists were going to be in a Saw trap soon, Tobin Bell was in the film and he played as Jigsaw in the Saw series, and that all the guys in the room simultaneously crossed their legs when Gene Hackman crushed that guy's balls in the Klan bar.
Reply