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.

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.

"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!

The many faces of Bobby Knight.

In reality, tiny Milan High was coached by 26-year-old Marvin Wood, a former standout player at Butler University who was actually in his second year coaching the tiny high school when they took home the state championship.

More importantly, it also wasn't like Milan surprised anyone with their run in the state tournament. They were a small school, sure, but they'd been on the big stage before. Like, the previous year. In Wood's first season as the head coach, he took the team to the state semifinals, and almost all of the key players from that squad returned the year that they won it all.

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.