6 Movies Based on a True Story (That Are Also Full of Shit)

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.

"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.

It follows Nicholas Garrigan, an adventurous Scottish medical school graduate who decides that, being adventurous and all, going to work in Uganda in a missionary clinic might be a good time. He is mistaken.

"No one told me we had to wear ties! This sucks."

Garrigan soon meets Amin, played by Forrest Whitaker and his terrifying eyes, and soon after Amin takes power in Uganda he takes a shining to the young doctor.

After becoming one of Amin's most trusted advisors, Garrigan commits the tiny little faux pas of impregnating one of his wives. One thing leads to another, Garrigan's lover is murdered by Amin's forces, and soon Garrigan is trying to stop the madman Amin by plotting his assassination. It doesn't happen, but Garrigan escapes torture and imprisonment and is able to flee the country and alert the world to Amin's insanity.

In Reality...

For starters, there was never anyone named Nicholas Garrigan. So there's that.

Instead, the character was based on a man named "Major" Bob Astles. He wasn't a doctor. He wasn't from Scotland. And while we've never actually met Astles, we do know he earned the nickname of "The White Rat" from the people of Uganda, and was considered the second most hated man in the country. So there's that, too.

He had worked as an advisor under the regime overthrown by Amin, and soon after Amin took power he was imprisoned and tortured for 17 weeks. And then Amin decided to give him a job, which makes the imprisonment pretty much the most brutal application process this side of The Apprentice.

Unlike the movie's representation of the Garrigan character seeing the light and trying to take Amin down from the inside, Astles remained by Amin's side until the regime was finally overthrown in 1979, when the Brit fled the country before being brought back to Uganda to face criminal charges and become someone's bitch in prison.

Oh, and he never became romantically involved with one of Amin's wives, either. That part of the movie is based in a little bit of fact, it's just that the doctor in question was an African man named Mbalu Mukasa. And Amin's wife died during a botched abortion by Mukasa, who then killed himself.

How can you cut this stuff, Hollywood? This is gold here!

Not pictured: A rag tag group of underdogs coached by a Bobby Knight clone.

In the film, the point is made and re-made that there are barely enough young men in the school to make up the team. In reality, Coach Wood wasn't exactly hurting for depth. It turns out 58 kids tried out for varsity that year, and the roster consisted of 10 players all season long. Compare this to the movie where Coach Hackman sends only four players out onto the court, due to a short roster and also to teach a rebellious player a valuable life lesson. And also to prove that he had the biggest dick in the room.

Wood was also married with two kids, so the entire awkward romantic subplot between Hackman and Barbara Hershey was fictional, which means that by showing us a truly brutal kiss between the two actors, the filmmakers were really just trying to make us queasy for no good reason. Mission accomplished, fellas.

"You can't handle how not-a-crook I am!"

In Reality...

While David Frost was an admirable fop who tried his damndest to get Nixon to admit to his culpability in the whole "stealing information from the Democratic Party" thing, the movie glosses over the fact that it wasn't so much Frost's triumph as it was a Nixonian PR move that led to his finally admitting the role he played and offering a half-hearted apology to the American people.

In the film's version of the final interview, Frost uses his tricky journalistic tactics to ambush Nixon into an admission of guilt. Nixon is trapped, and Frost has won. Huzzah! Pip pip, cheerio and such!

In reality, it turns out that the "apology" was carefully scripted by Nixon and his people well ahead of time. They realized that if he went through the entire interview series without changing his stance, he'd have gained nothing and would be viewed as the "same old Nixon," out to do the classic politician image rehabilitation.

So Nixon delayed the final interview for two months, allowing him to carefully script exactly what he'd say, and how he'd say it. In other words, the whole thing was just another Nixon ploy. When Frost/Nixoncame out earlier this year, many critics were surprised that the disgraced ex-President was the most sympathetic character in the film, and commended for it's daring decision to humanize a monster. Kind of seems less daring when you realize the script was based on a story that unfolded exactly the way Nixon scripted it.

"Nailed it!"

Find more of Jeff's stuff at TheLastGaffe.com.

For more bullshit that people actually believed, check out 11 Movies Saved by Historical Inaccuracy and 7 Clearly Fake News Stories That Fooled The Mainstream Media.

And visit Cracked.com's Top Picks to see the completely true story of how we became the kings of the Internet that is totally not bullshit. Did we mention this story is loaded with boobs?