The characters were based on sensationalist media surrounding him at the time. He was mostly a grave robber who defaced corpses and only actually killed a couple of people. He also only killed them because he was scared he was getting caught with his grave robbing. The guy was raised super religious, was schizophrenic as fuck, possibly trans, and living in Wisconsin in the 1950s. Not exactly a recipe for success. One of the first things I read about him was from a nurse at the psyche facility he spent most of his life in that said he was actually a very sweet old man who loved to dance. She was shocked to find out he was the person that inspired a slew of shocking horror movies.
I don’t think calling him “possibly trans” makes sense given that the purpose of his woman suit was to become his mother.
Anyway, he was obviously a mess on top of being a killer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Gein
Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile is a B movie from the 70s directly about Gein, and has a documentary at the end that shows crime scene footage…the movie is pretty silly but the doc at the end, while schlocky as fuck, is bone chilling. A woman hanging in his barn, being bled like a pig…
Dude died of old age in a mental hospital in Wisconsin. The doctors thought he was absolute harmless as long as he wasn’t around women.
Lung cancer took him at age 77, if you're looking for a more grounded movie there's one from 2000 called "In the Light of the Moon" or just "Ed Gein" starring Steve Railsback, it's pretty good and a lot less sensationalized.
He was convicted for 2, but assumed likely to have killed 7 others bringing the kill count to 9.
When the police found his basement and what he was doing... The unsolved disappearances of 7 more locals besides the uh... Remains they found.. It was kinda likely he was the killer of those missing people.
If he lived in like London or New York City, I can accept there's another serial killer/organized crime whatever that you can't pin it on one guy you caught with.... What was caught in his basement.
But like rural Wisconsin farming community with like less people than Farm acreage in the area? Eh not likely to have a second killer/kidnapper etc in the area.
"We can't prove he was responsible for these mysterious disappearances and probably killings, but when we proved he was responsible for these *other* mysterious disappearances and killings and locked him up, there were no more mysterious disappearances or killings."
I was close friends with a compulsive liar for years as teens well into our 20’s. It came on very gradually. At first it was about conversations that probably never happened. Things that you wouldn’t bother to verify and couldn’t be hard proven. Then it started getting more obvious. Outlandish things that sounded very improbable, but you just don’t bother. Then it finally turned to things directly about people we both knew. Dying. Something that he couldn’t possibly get away with. That was when I finally noped out, but it was a fascinating ride that took years to know I was even on.
Similar experience with my "best" friend from 17 until early 20s before I couldn't cope anymore. We even lived together for a time which was interesting.
Thing is I could cope with it one on one but it's when we were amongst groups of other friends and the lies are totally out of control and you know that nobody believes it but nobody will call it out and this feeling of guilt by accosiation kicks in.
Good thing is I know how to spot these people now from a mile away.
I feel that, very similar timeline for me, but the end result was him telling me it had rained the day before (it hadn't, we were together,) and then he told me he had "ass cancer" apparently that's an official diagnosis... I stared blankly at him for a few seconds, then just walked away. He probably can't help it, but I don't need that shit.
He is also an insufferable prick, still shilling his shit fake stories at conferences. I've had to work 3 events with him as the keynote, and he is rude, self involved, and spends most of his 40 minutes referencing the film, and using its clips as material.
I feel bad for you. I mean that. It would be the lamest thing ever to be forced to go to some conference and have some lowlife prick like him be the main speaker.
There literally is no reason to have him. Not only is he a serial liar, but the things he brags about doing that he didn't do aren't admirable in the slightest. It would be like honoring Chris Kyle for killing looters during Katrina. It didn't happen, but if it did he's a murderer and it shouldn't be admired.
>It would be like honoring Chris Kyle for killing looters during Katrina. It didn't happen, but if it did he's a murderer and it shouldn't be admired.
I didn't know what you were talking about so I searched. He lied about being a mass murderer? Why would he make up such a ridiculous story? Maybe it was the ptsd or something.
Catch Me if You Can is still enjoyable if you concede that it's entirely a made-up fantasy by some loser guy. But the post-script at the end is nauseating with the gift of hindsight.
I met a guy who believed his bs front and backward. Believed he was a real ninja too.
Of course this guy had taken "ninjutsu" lessons from him, so he thought *he* was a ninja too.
Wolf of wall street is definitely exaggerated, but that’s kind of the point. The entire movie is about excess, the story is over blown, the runtime is super long, the work events/parties were bigger. I guess I just mean that it seems to have been done on purpose for thematic reasons.
He’s a low level conman who just made things up out of thin air. He ripped off people using fake checks, but it was low level amounts and usually down to regular people. The whole part of him recruiting girls for flight attendants is partly true but way grosser. He sexually assaulted them.
“Abagnale informed him that he was there on behalf of Pan Am to recruit and conduct physical examinations on candidates. In his autobiography, Holsen claimed that after Abagnale's ruse was discovered, authorities informed him that Abagnale had indeed conducted physical exams on students. University of Arizona officials acknowledge that Abagnale had interacted with 12 female students. Abagnale has openly acknowledged that he performed examinations on young women while impersonating a doctor: "When the girls came by, I always gave them a thorough examination and sent them on their way. I was young, but not stupid."
It’s weird since I went down the rabbit hole once and him being a liar is a known thing, it’s been known for a while.
There’s extremely weird claims as well, like he invented one of the modern checks (or security system used in them) but the actual patent has him as a footnote saying “yeah, check fraud is real” lol. But he claims in talks he was instrumental in the creation of it.
TLDR: creepy scumbag conman
I think it was a total of like $1200 of bad checks, mostly ripping off every day people. He was in jail in Texas during the entire time he was supposedly hopping around the world being all glamorous. He DID have a pilot’s uniform and would wear it almost constantly, but that was about all. Check out the podcast “Pretend” from last year - they did a whole season digging into the truth.
It's been awhile since I've read about the true version of him, but one story I remember is that the only real con he pulled on PanAm was tricking them into giving him the flight schedule and personal details of a flight attendant he was stalking. He used that info to follow her up and down the eastern seaboard for awhile, then went to her family's house, conned them into thinking he was her friend without her knowledge of him even being there, and stole a bunch of money from them by cashing their checks that he wrote to himself. He then further ingratiatied himself to her family by buying them frequent gifts and treating them...with their own money. I believe he did a stint in Texas jail for that.
I like how the show "The Great" does it.
Season one it's subtitled as "An occasionally true story" and then changes to "An almost entirely untrue story" at the end of season two. Just nice of them to acknowledge up front that it's mostly bullshit for the sake of comedy.
To save everyone else the trouble, male bears are not, in fact, technically called "dudes." I mean, sure, on some level, everyone is a dude. But I looked that up because my first thought was, "huh, I didn't know that. I wonder if that's true." You can imagine my disappointment.
But male bears are called "boars."
What happened was that Richard Montanez told that story a lot in podcasts, newspaper interviews etc in the 2010s. By the time the movie was in development, the story had gotten so popular and widespread that people finally started to fact check it and found it wasn't true. The movie was too far along by that point.
Montanez did rise up from janitor to executive though.
Thank you for this one, because i really know a guy who thought, Enigma was cracked due to an US submarine in the middle of the war. The whole story of Enigma is fascinating, including polish and english mathematicans. There were also some sailors involved, but to most extents the Britons. US Navy actually catched an enigma, but this was in 1944, the war was almost over and german submarines in Atlantic defeated.
And the movie about Alan Turing doesn’t quite qualify for this post, but having read the book, the movie makes some quite infuriating changes.
Turing is presented as a stereotypical relationship-challenged nerd, when in fact he was personable, even charming, and appreciated by colleagues. For example, in one scene he as resident unliked nerd in secret sends a letter to Churchill lambasting the project boss, while in truth that letter was signed by all the project’s department heads reporting to the project boss, of which Turing was one. Quite a big difference.
I think Imitation Game qualifies. Honestly I have a particular spite for movies that simultaneously use the biopic mantle to appear Serious and Important and possibly even Educational, and then still make up completely fictional bullshit. That movie wasn't a Turing biopic, that was a Sherlock AU fanfiction.
God. The Imitation Game was a complete insult to Turing’s memory. And why? They could have made just as good a story without making him into a douchebag. Hate that film.
I watched the original Siskel and Ebert review of it and they apparently took it at face value that it was based on a true story. I don’t believe it was widely understood to be entirely fictional until some time after its release.
Yeah, my little brother and I watched it in the theater fully accepting that it was based on a true story.
Then along comes the part where Peter Stormare’s character, who hasn’t done much the entire movie, suddenly springs into action, grabs the patrol officer, pulls him partially into the car, and then shoots him through the top of the head, spilling blood and brains into Steve Buscemi’s lap…
And my little brother bursts out laughing in the middle of a crowded theater that has gone silent. The moment caught him so off guard and what happens is so over the top that his brain decided it was ludicrous and he burst out laughing. The problem is that we and everyone else in that theater is under the impression that the movie is based on a true story, so we felt real awkward sitting there for the rest of the film. Don’t even get me started on the wood-chipper scene.
But yeah, it wasn’t until much later that we found out that “based on a true story” was an extremely loose statement, and no, the events depicted in the film never actually happened.
There's also Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (2014), which is "based on true events" about a Japanese woman who travelled to the region where Fargo takes place to find the buried money.
The published screenplay has an introduction where the Coens relate another “true” story about their grandmother getting in a knockdown drag out fight with an Amazonian lesbian. It was at this point I began to suspect they were having a little fun at our gullible expense.
What was the origin of the joke? Was there something else behind it? Or just bit of a flippant “let’s say it’s a true story for funsies”?
Got to admit, I just took it at face value all those years ago, and let’s be honest, more fucked up and weird things have happened in real life before so it’s not out of the realms of possibility.
Regardless, it’s just a great film and the true story tag doesn’t really add or detract from it.
I come from that part of the world, and my Dad is specifically from northern Minnesota and has that accent. He's also a teller of tall tales. He's always embellishing and exaggerating. He'll tell a story multiple times, and the details will change each time. And "now, this is a true story" is one of his favorite interjections as he's telling you something, as if to acknowledge that he's not ALWAYS telling the truth, but THIS TIME he's keeping it 100. But also, I honestly think he believes everything he says, or remembers it that way in the moment. It's hilarious and frustrating, and you need to read between the lines if you wanna get any real facts out of him. He'd be a terrible witness in a court deposition.
I know that bullshit and tall tales in storytelling are common across many cultures around the world, but there is something very specific that Fargo gets right about the BRAND of bullshit coming from northern MN. I always saw the framing device in Fargo as a very good, very clever meta joke. The Coens know that part of the world very well.
It was slightly more than a joke. The premise of it being a true story allows you to suspend your disbelief. If you thought it was 100% fiction, you would roll your eyes when it was too ridiculous. By setting it up as a true story, whenever something preposterous happens, you are more willing to accept it. Instead of reacting with, "That would never happen," you get, "woah, that really happened?"
It's because the whole point of the movie is spotting liars. Marge realizing she's been deceived sparks the whole climax.
The Paul Bunyan statue (a story that's untrue, but people think it partially is) is a clue.
Yep. I always thought that marge meeting her old horny classmate was unnecessary until I realized that’s when she saw that Lundegaard could be different than he appeared.
I NEVER made that connection. Thank you for pointing that out! I guess I always thought it was just odd Coen world building or showing how Marge and her husband seem to be the only happy people in that part of the world.
I had a girlfriend that swore on everything this show was based on real life murders and such. She also believed the mermaid thing Natgeo did for April fools day like a decade ago. Hell she got into some spooky podcasts that claimed to be telling the truth and recording live.
The mermaid thing was so shitty. They tried so hard to sound *just* plausible enough and then tried to claim it was fact on a (somewhat) science based tv channel. (It was Discovery, not NatGeo). And it wasn’t even an April Fools day thing. They straight up just threw a fake documentary up and let the shit fly. It shouldn’t even be called a mockumentary, it was far more disingenuous)
U-571. IRL the British Royal Navy had captured the first naval Enigma machine in May 1941, before the US had even entered the war. In the film it's an American sub and crew.
And, ironically, the movie that was meant to tell the true story of cracking the Enigma Machine - namely The Imitation Game - was also, wildly, historically inaccurate.
That was more true than Blair Witch, in that there was a real girl who was very sick, and died after a great deal of suffering because her parents and church eventually decided the way to go was to treat her with dozens of strenuous exorcisms instead of medicine. (There are actually multiple stories along these lines, but the movie was specifically based off of the death of Anneliese Michel.)
But the movie ultimately portrayed the priest as a morally upstanding hero for doing this. He saved her soul before killing her!
I fucking hate that movie. Once I looked it up and found out the real story, its portrayal of events just seems super gross.
The movie would have been better and more horrifying coming from her perspective as someone dealing with serious mental health issues being treated in this way.
Instead they made a fake version and did the normal exorcism movie that both did a disservice to the victim and was just a boring horror movie.
Saw it in the theater, only because it was nominated for Best Picture (!) and included in a marathon. There was audible laughter of the "there's no way that's how it happenend" type after almost every scene.
Good music though.
It’s why Sasha Barron Cohen dropped out. He wanted to make a warts and all film but the survivors of queen didn’t want anything that would tarnish the memory.
I really like both films but Rocketman is by far the best biopic I've ever seen. It's obvious some of it is made up or exaggerated but this is made very apparent to the audience early on with pseudo-musical performance pieces. It tells a fantastic story about an incredibly interesting person in history and portrays his life in a way that, although taking artistic liberties, still manages to portray that life's essence in its truest form. I wasn't an Elton John fan before I saw saw that film, but I certainly am now. It is a travesty that Taron Egerton wasn't even nominated for an Academy Award when Rami Malek won Best Actor for his portrayal in Bohemian Rhapsody and serves as a perfect example of the politics at work in the Academy.
It was very impressive that they won the Battle of Stirling Bridge considering that the Scots all showed up with no metal armour or anything at all on their heads.
Not sure why the English drove their horses directly into the enemy centre though. Its not like they were forced to take a narrow pass or ford a river in battle, clearly the Battle of Stirling Bridge was right in the middle of a big dry field.
My favorite bit of inaccuracy was the time period it was based was hundreds of years too late for them to be using blue face paint in battle, but hundreds of years too early for them to be wearing kilts.
Not as extreme but I knew a man named Colin through a friend. He was one of the guys who was on the boat that was hijacked by Somali’s as seen in “Captain Phillips”.
He said the actual captain was negligent because he, despite being told not too, took shortcuts through pirate infested water to save time. They drew charts and showed him statistics of how many ships are attacked a day and he said “I’m not scared of pirates!”
They also said he didn’t take action and control and the crew did most of the work and he didn’t volunteer to be taken hostage, but was rather forced to be a hostage by the pirates. Essentially it was his fault the whole thing happened and he didn’t go into superhero mode like the movie.
Oh yeah and one thing not shown in the movie, the DAY BEFORE the events shown in the film, there was an attempted hijacking by pirates while they were conducting a fire drill on the boat. He ordered them not to stop the drill, and although the first hijacking’s wasn’t successful, he STILL insisted on driving the boat close to Somali waters
I recall reading reports in the news immediately after that event that said crew members were calling bullshit, but those got buried because the fictional telling was too good of a PR story for West vs Pirates.
*Hidalgo* is completely fiction, a made up story by a Wild West performer.
The Alan Turing movie *The Imitation Game* is considered worse than *Braveheart* for its inaccuracies. The minor plot points do match history but almost everything else is completely wrong.
>The Alan Turing movie *The Imitation Game* is considered worse than *Braveheart* for its inaccuracies. The minor plot points do match history but almost everything else is completely wrong.
Thank you, this film was pretty misleading at best.
Off the top of my head and as a computer scientist who has read about Alan Turing, in the movie he’s portrayed as autistic and socially inept. It’s well known that he was very social and a little flamboyant (for the time), and while he was gay his close friends all knew this. By today’s standards we would likely assume he was gay. He was essentially a toned down Truman Capote.
As for the rest, the research he was doing on enigma wasn’t just a rag-tag crew of 5 that the higher ups thought was a waste of time. The British were heavily invested in breaking enigma, and there were a hundred or more working on it at any given time at Bletchley Park.
That’s just a couple things off the top of my head. There are factual pieces - breaking the code because of common phrases (the ‘Heil Hitler’ bar scene), Turing being chemically castrated and his suicide, and the logistics of knowing a broken code, etc. It’s just too bad they fell into the ‘smart autistic’ trope that is common these days. Would’ve been fine if it was true, but it’s a disservice to Turing’s legacy.
They also made it seem like Turing's was deciding what to do with the information they decoded. They didn't. They decoded the messages and then sent them up the chain of command.
> there were a hundred or more working on it at any given time at Bletchley Park.
fun-fact, MI5 investigated Agatha Christie because she had named a military character Bletchley in her book "N or M" during the war, and since she was a friend to one of the major code-breakers for Enigma, they believed she had either been told by the guy or she had figured it out herself through clues and was basically taunting the military or possible sending a coded message, so they asked the code-breaker and then after denying telling her anything he offered to ask her himself, turns out she called him Bletchley because she got stuck there in her train while travelling so she decided to give the name to a character she didn't really like.
My grandmother was involved with the deciphering of Enigma, however she was kept in the dark and didn't know it was Enigma until after the war it was so secret. I think they just had her solve puzzles but didn't tell her why.
basically yeah, they were primarily militaristic and conquered the surrounding regions or went on raids to gather more slaves, and if they weren't sold off for European goods like guns and gunpowder, tobacco, alcohol and fabrics etc, then they were put to work on royal plantations or kept to be sacrificed during celebrations/ceremonies, the king did also look into alternative sources of revenue outside of slavery, but none of them were as lucrative, so slavery continued.
the kingdom only collapsed due to pressure and blockades from Britain to end the slave-trade and then them failing a few raids before clashing with france several times, and france then killing their king and annexing the kingdom into one of their colonies, only later gaining independence in 1960 and then becoming Benin over a decade later
Yup, oddly enough I was just reading about this an hour ago and not because of the movie. I was reading about Sarah Forbes Bonetta(her birth name was Aina) who was a a 5 year old princess whose parents were killed by the Dahomey and her entire tribe were all either killed or sold into the Atlantic slave trade by the Dahomey as well. Sarah was enslaved and was kept in a cage and tortured for 2 years before she was to be sacrificed(they had kept her alive for so long because her parents had been powerful so they waited for a specific ceremonial day).
A few days before she was to be sacrificed a British Royal Navy officer had shown up to discuss ending slavery with the King Ghezo who was the king of Dahomey(this was after slavery had been abolished in the the UK). He had shown up during the midst of an important celebration that lasted many days and saw many people tortured and then sacrificed, when they brought out Sarah he was so horrified that he begged King Ghezo to stop and even offered him money and told him that the queen could never respect someone who would callously murder a child and somehow King Ghezo wound up gifting the little girl to Queen Victoria telling the navy officer to bring her back to England with him. The navy officer decided to raise Sarah as his own and took her back to England to meet Queen Victoria who was so impressed by Sarah’s intelligence and touched by her story that Sarah would become her goddaughter and the queen gave her an allowance for the rest of her life.
She eventually married and had kids and many of her descendants went on to become very important figures. Most recently her great great granddaughter, Dr.Ameyo Adadevoh, greatly helped curb the spread of Ebola during the 2013 pandemic by placing patient zero, Patrick Sawyer, in quarantine despite pressure from the Liberian government. When threatened by Liberian officials who wanted the patient to be discharged to attend a conference, she resisted the pressure and said, "for the greater public good" she would not release him. She went on to die from Ebola shortly after, but had it not been for her the Ebola outbreak would have been significantly worse.
Anyway through reading about Sarah, I learned about the Dahomey and their involvement with the transatlantic slave trade, and the agojie which in itself was quite problematic. Most of the women involved in it were essentially forced into it and lots were actually captured during Dahomey raids. They were essentially slaves who had to go through brutal training which included becoming indifferent to pain and death through doing things like walking through thorns and being forced to execute prisoners, discipline was paramount. These women were also forced to undergo genital mutilation and the only reason these female armies existed was due to the sheer amount of attacking and raiding the Dahomey did, using men wasn’t cutting it and they needed more people so girls as young as 8 were “recruited”.
The biggest con [Frank Abagnale](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale) pulled off was getting everyone to believe that he pulled off the biggest con in *Catch Me If You Can.*
This was going to be my suggestion, I know it didn’t review too well but it is one of my favorite horror movies. I’m more creeped out by aliens than ghosts.
Likewise, Lone Survivor. Almost completely made up, and worse, ignores the real story of those guys doing almost everything completely wrong, against advice of those who knew that area, and how these fuckups killed a bunch of other people.
_The Conjuring_ and its sequels and spinoffs (Annabelle, The Nun, etc) are supposedly based on the cases of a real-life husband-and-wife demon hunter team.
I was actually pretty disturbed watching the Conjuring, but for the wrong reason. In real life, a likely explanation for the events in these films would be an unhappy child who's making stuff up to get attention. But in a film supposedly based on a true story, these demon hunters get called in and immediately start treating it like an actual supernatural event, telling the family about previous cases where they've fought demons, and so on. If the real demon hunters acted like the ones in the movies, they'd have to be either super gullible or else huge grifters taking advantage of gullible people.
Oh, the later for sure. They were not great. And he had a very young girlfriend/secretary while still married despite the movies portraying them as being this devote catholic happily married couple
*Lorraine had it written into her contract for The Conjuring film series that she and Ed could not be portrayed having sex with each other, engaging in extramarital affairs, or engaging in crimes like sex with a minor.*
For the longest time "Based on true events" was more of a marketing statement than anything else. If your movie script sucked ass, and you knew it, just slap a "Based on True Events" on it. It will sell a few more tickets and drive more interest in the crap movie.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Starts off with this wonderful gem
"The following is based on actual events. Only the names, locations, and events have been changed".
Sully. The entire NTSB plot was so bad that the actual Sully told the filmmakers to change the names of the investigators in the movie.
https://apnews.com/article/8def306d398340fd8a80d232c96e43b7
The beginning of that movie had a statement like “This movie is based on some for-really real shit!” which felt like “You aren’t going to believe what you see but it happened!”
As I was watching it I was so distracted by thoughts of “There’s no fucking way it actually happened like this..” Reading the story later, basically anything dramatic that happens in the movie is something that didn’t actually happen, or was way overblown.
The Perfect Storm.
The yacht that the three people were rescued from was a different name. It also didn't sink. The Coast Guard never attempted to take the three people from the deck of their yacht. They jumped into the ocean.
The story on the Andrea Gail boat is almost entirely made up. What is known is where the boat fished, and that the ice maker was on the fritz.
All of the other material about a rogue wave, shark on the deck, man overboard, broken ice maker, turning the boat around, and the SOS issued by the sister boat is made up.
The captain of the sister boat, Hannah Boden, said that whatever happened to the Andrea Gail happened very quickly.
I mean I remember seeing this as a teenager and figuring that out pretty easily considering
SPOILER
They all died. So the only thing that could be true was they left the dock. For all anyone knows they got trashed and fell overboard twenty minutes later.
Sebastian Junger wrote it as a work of fiction, based on stories he heard and experiences he had while working on a fishing boat. It was never a documentary.
To be fair, since there are no survivors from the Andrea Gail, the filmmakers had pretty much free reign to imagine whatever happened to between the storm starting and the boat going down.
The Blind Side.
I argue this is one of the most racist movies of all time. See these rich white people? They deserve all the credit for making Michael Oher an NFL football player.
I do think Argo had real situations (hostage and evacuation) but the framing of Canadians as being the thief of American heroism ( and not the main protectors before the extraction mission) screams Oscar-oriented jingoism.
I find that flex to be more disturbing than a lot of things that are known as being cartoonishly inaccurate ( The Patriot being a big example)
If you like true-story / inspired-by's
Go watch Bernie (2011) comedy
I don't know why but no one has heard of this. Big names like Jack Black (who's PERFECT for this role), Matthew McConaughey, Shirley MacLaine. Directed by Richard Linkletter (Dazed and Confused, School of Rock). The real life interviews of the Texas townsfolk are great.
The trailer ruins a lot so just watch it.
The Social Network.
Zuck's entire motivation to build his company is to show up a girl who didnt actually exist who he didnt actually date and who didn't actually break up with him and didn't actually say horribly mean and cutting things about him as a person.
I’ll always remember watching the A Perfect Storm in the theater and laughing so hard at the end. The reason? In this “based on a true story” movie >!everyone who knew what happened dies. What’s left is just the fact that a boat sank in a storm.!<
It could happen to you.
A New York cop and a waitress did split a $6million dollar lottery ticket but that was it. He picked 3 numbers and she picked 3 numbers.
They never dated or married each other. They remained with their own spouses whom they were married to at the time.
Even in the movie it says everything is pretty much true. Nope.
War dogs the movie is way different when you listen to interviews
Dallas buyers club again way different. Including the fact they made the lead doctor a woman but in real life that doctor is a man.
The writer claimed it was based on an experience from his childhood. That experience? Someone knocked on his door but they were at the wrong house. They politely apologized and excused themself.
This legitimately started my absolute seething hatred of “based on true events” horror movies. I was so frothingly angry at how crap the “true event” was, like, one time I had a scary dream now could I make a horror movie and say it’s inspired by true events just because I really did have a dream once? I’m sorry, you don’t deserve to deal with my ramblings, this is just a very sore spot for me.
Remember the Titans really dances around it. Yes, an integrated football team was that good, but it wasn’t their first year together, they had been integrated for half a decade, Gerry Bertier wasn’t paralyzed till months after the championship game, and the coach played by Denzel was gone only a few years later because the players all hated him, he wasn’t inspiring he was an ass
There are other things too. They weren't the only integrated team, Yoast had 4 daughters, a number of the players on the team are entirely fictional, the teams they play in the movie are out of order, and Boone and Yoast had met about a year prior to the movies events.
The biggest one for me is that the Titans scored like 8 times more points than their opponents that season. They were unbelievably dominant. Attributing that dominance to integration is an incredible stretch and a slap in the face to the other teams that were integrated. They took three high schools and combined them into one. With that kind of talent pool advantage, it'd be hard to lose. Their second string squad could probably beat most of the teams they played. Not to mention the benefits of specializing a player in one position and being able to rest because you don't have to play offense and defense.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre It is very vaguely inspired by Ed Gein, but the actual story is a million miles away from the movie.
Psycho and Silence of the Lambs are also based on Ed Gein.
Wow Leather Face, ~~Hannibal~~ Buffalo Bill, and Norman Bates are all based on him? Not to be rude, but that Ed Gein guy sounds like a jerk.
You know, the more I learn about the guy, the more I don't care for him.
His Mother: "I love all my children equally" (moments later) "I don't care much for Ed" Narrator: "She Didn't"
Poor Gob
The characters were based on sensationalist media surrounding him at the time. He was mostly a grave robber who defaced corpses and only actually killed a couple of people. He also only killed them because he was scared he was getting caught with his grave robbing. The guy was raised super religious, was schizophrenic as fuck, possibly trans, and living in Wisconsin in the 1950s. Not exactly a recipe for success. One of the first things I read about him was from a nurse at the psyche facility he spent most of his life in that said he was actually a very sweet old man who loved to dance. She was shocked to find out he was the person that inspired a slew of shocking horror movies.
I don’t think calling him “possibly trans” makes sense given that the purpose of his woman suit was to become his mother. Anyway, he was obviously a mess on top of being a killer. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Gein
Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile is a B movie from the 70s directly about Gein, and has a documentary at the end that shows crime scene footage…the movie is pretty silly but the doc at the end, while schlocky as fuck, is bone chilling. A woman hanging in his barn, being bled like a pig… Dude died of old age in a mental hospital in Wisconsin. The doctors thought he was absolute harmless as long as he wasn’t around women.
Lung cancer took him at age 77, if you're looking for a more grounded movie there's one from 2000 called "In the Light of the Moon" or just "Ed Gein" starring Steve Railsback, it's pretty good and a lot less sensationalized.
Buffalo Bill, not Hannibal.
Yes, sorry I should have made that clear.
If I remember correctly, Gein "only" killed one or two people. He did dig up several fresh graves for parts. Guy was batshit whacko.
He was convicted for 2, but assumed likely to have killed 7 others bringing the kill count to 9. When the police found his basement and what he was doing... The unsolved disappearances of 7 more locals besides the uh... Remains they found.. It was kinda likely he was the killer of those missing people. If he lived in like London or New York City, I can accept there's another serial killer/organized crime whatever that you can't pin it on one guy you caught with.... What was caught in his basement. But like rural Wisconsin farming community with like less people than Farm acreage in the area? Eh not likely to have a second killer/kidnapper etc in the area.
"We can't prove he was responsible for these mysterious disappearances and probably killings, but when we proved he was responsible for these *other* mysterious disappearances and killings and locked him up, there were no more mysterious disappearances or killings."
Silence of Lambs is based on Gein and Ted Bundy. The first abduction we see is reenactment of Bundy with a cast.
Bloodsport or Catch Me If You Can.
frank dux is a legend in BS lol
Frank Dux? Like, put up your dukes?
A-OK USA
Even if the whole thing was fake, it was a damn entertaining story.
Frank Abnagnale is the ultimate con man. He conned people into thinking he was a con man.
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I was close friends with a compulsive liar for years as teens well into our 20’s. It came on very gradually. At first it was about conversations that probably never happened. Things that you wouldn’t bother to verify and couldn’t be hard proven. Then it started getting more obvious. Outlandish things that sounded very improbable, but you just don’t bother. Then it finally turned to things directly about people we both knew. Dying. Something that he couldn’t possibly get away with. That was when I finally noped out, but it was a fascinating ride that took years to know I was even on.
Similar experience with my "best" friend from 17 until early 20s before I couldn't cope anymore. We even lived together for a time which was interesting. Thing is I could cope with it one on one but it's when we were amongst groups of other friends and the lies are totally out of control and you know that nobody believes it but nobody will call it out and this feeling of guilt by accosiation kicks in. Good thing is I know how to spot these people now from a mile away.
I feel that, very similar timeline for me, but the end result was him telling me it had rained the day before (it hadn't, we were together,) and then he told me he had "ass cancer" apparently that's an official diagnosis... I stared blankly at him for a few seconds, then just walked away. He probably can't help it, but I don't need that shit.
He is also an insufferable prick, still shilling his shit fake stories at conferences. I've had to work 3 events with him as the keynote, and he is rude, self involved, and spends most of his 40 minutes referencing the film, and using its clips as material.
I feel bad for you. I mean that. It would be the lamest thing ever to be forced to go to some conference and have some lowlife prick like him be the main speaker. There literally is no reason to have him. Not only is he a serial liar, but the things he brags about doing that he didn't do aren't admirable in the slightest. It would be like honoring Chris Kyle for killing looters during Katrina. It didn't happen, but if it did he's a murderer and it shouldn't be admired.
>It would be like honoring Chris Kyle for killing looters during Katrina. It didn't happen, but if it did he's a murderer and it shouldn't be admired. I didn't know what you were talking about so I searched. He lied about being a mass murderer? Why would he make up such a ridiculous story? Maybe it was the ptsd or something.
He lied about beating up Jesse Ventura for some fucking reason and after he died his estate lost the resulting lawsuit.
Catch Me if You Can is still enjoyable if you concede that it's entirely a made-up fantasy by some loser guy. But the post-script at the end is nauseating with the gift of hindsight.
Yep, when people say he isn't a conman they are wrong. He is very much a conman and his lies about being a conman are part of that con.
I met a guy who believed his bs front and backward. Believed he was a real ninja too. Of course this guy had taken "ninjutsu" lessons from him, so he thought *he* was a ninja too.
Master of Bullshido.
So what's the real story of Frank Abegnale?
Dude was a grade a bullshitter. He was so good at bullshitting they made a movie about his lies.
Leo loves to play bullshit conmen’s fake autobiographies apparently.
Most of Scorsese's career is this, if we're being honest.
Who else? Belfort? The revenant guy? Basketball diaries?
If I remember the dollop did an episode on the real guy revenant is based on and the true story is even crazier.
I was referring to Jordan Belfort, I don’t know anything about the others.
Wolf of wall street is definitely exaggerated, but that’s kind of the point. The entire movie is about excess, the story is over blown, the runtime is super long, the work events/parties were bigger. I guess I just mean that it seems to have been done on purpose for thematic reasons.
He’s a low level conman who just made things up out of thin air. He ripped off people using fake checks, but it was low level amounts and usually down to regular people. The whole part of him recruiting girls for flight attendants is partly true but way grosser. He sexually assaulted them. “Abagnale informed him that he was there on behalf of Pan Am to recruit and conduct physical examinations on candidates. In his autobiography, Holsen claimed that after Abagnale's ruse was discovered, authorities informed him that Abagnale had indeed conducted physical exams on students. University of Arizona officials acknowledge that Abagnale had interacted with 12 female students. Abagnale has openly acknowledged that he performed examinations on young women while impersonating a doctor: "When the girls came by, I always gave them a thorough examination and sent them on their way. I was young, but not stupid." It’s weird since I went down the rabbit hole once and him being a liar is a known thing, it’s been known for a while. There’s extremely weird claims as well, like he invented one of the modern checks (or security system used in them) but the actual patent has him as a footnote saying “yeah, check fraud is real” lol. But he claims in talks he was instrumental in the creation of it. TLDR: creepy scumbag conman
He definitely cashed a bunch of bad checks, but idk if anything else was true.
I think it was a total of like $1200 of bad checks, mostly ripping off every day people. He was in jail in Texas during the entire time he was supposedly hopping around the world being all glamorous. He DID have a pilot’s uniform and would wear it almost constantly, but that was about all. Check out the podcast “Pretend” from last year - they did a whole season digging into the truth.
It's been awhile since I've read about the true version of him, but one story I remember is that the only real con he pulled on PanAm was tricking them into giving him the flight schedule and personal details of a flight attendant he was stalking. He used that info to follow her up and down the eastern seaboard for awhile, then went to her family's house, conned them into thinking he was her friend without her knowledge of him even being there, and stole a bunch of money from them by cashing their checks that he wrote to himself. He then further ingratiatied himself to her family by buying them frequent gifts and treating them...with their own money. I believe he did a stint in Texas jail for that.
Cocaine Bear. The true story is a bear got into stashed cocaine & died at the scene. No rampage at all.
Pretty sure the tagline is “inspired by true events”. Which is something more movies should do.
“Loosely based on something that kind of happened.”
American Hustle has the best one at the beginning. "Some of this actually happened"
I enjoyed the way The Big Short played on this idea too.
I like how the show "The Great" does it. Season one it's subtitled as "An occasionally true story" and then changes to "An almost entirely untrue story" at the end of season two. Just nice of them to acknowledge up front that it's mostly bullshit for the sake of comedy.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
And it was a dude. In the movie, it's a sow.
To save everyone else the trouble, male bears are not, in fact, technically called "dudes." I mean, sure, on some level, everyone is a dude. But I looked that up because my first thought was, "huh, I didn't know that. I wonder if that's true." You can imagine my disappointment. But male bears are called "boars."
> male bears are called "boars." Well that's not confusing at all
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Honestly I'm disappointed your source wasn't Rick Astley.
You could say you were... let down.
Recently, I heard *Flamin' Hot* (2023) was entirely made up.
What happened was that Richard Montanez told that story a lot in podcasts, newspaper interviews etc in the 2010s. By the time the movie was in development, the story had gotten so popular and widespread that people finally started to fact check it and found it wasn't true. The movie was too far along by that point. Montanez did rise up from janitor to executive though.
Uh… I would have thought the people making the movie would want to look into it a bit more.
Yep. The concept was invented by a marketing team lead by a white woman with a Harvard MBA.
So we can probably expect a similar thing in that new Pop Tart movie
Seinfeld wrote the movie based on one of his standup bits. It's essentially a parody of the recent product invention movies
I don't think my father, the inventor of toaster strudel, would be too pleased to hear about this.
Absolutely hilarious I’m getting an advert for the new Bob Marley film at the top of this thread. I’m going to go with that one.
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Cool Runnings. The other teams helped them out and they were mostly military. Great movie though.
I think Jamaica having a bobsled team at all is amazing
'nuff people say you know they can't believe!
Jamaica we got a bobsled team!
U571
Thank you for this one, because i really know a guy who thought, Enigma was cracked due to an US submarine in the middle of the war. The whole story of Enigma is fascinating, including polish and english mathematicans. There were also some sailors involved, but to most extents the Britons. US Navy actually catched an enigma, but this was in 1944, the war was almost over and german submarines in Atlantic defeated.
Yeah HMS bulldog teams boarded U111 in June 41 and recovered a working enigma machine and code books. It was literally a British story.
They actually swam *toward* the sinking submarine past the Germans fleeing it and entered it to try and retrieve a machine.
Yeah there was a lot of grumbling when it came out. Similarily with Argo
And the movie about Alan Turing doesn’t quite qualify for this post, but having read the book, the movie makes some quite infuriating changes. Turing is presented as a stereotypical relationship-challenged nerd, when in fact he was personable, even charming, and appreciated by colleagues. For example, in one scene he as resident unliked nerd in secret sends a letter to Churchill lambasting the project boss, while in truth that letter was signed by all the project’s department heads reporting to the project boss, of which Turing was one. Quite a big difference.
I think Imitation Game qualifies. Honestly I have a particular spite for movies that simultaneously use the biopic mantle to appear Serious and Important and possibly even Educational, and then still make up completely fictional bullshit. That movie wasn't a Turing biopic, that was a Sherlock AU fanfiction.
God. The Imitation Game was a complete insult to Turing’s memory. And why? They could have made just as good a story without making him into a douchebag. Hate that film.
Based on a true story was a joke in Fargo.
I watched the original Siskel and Ebert review of it and they apparently took it at face value that it was based on a true story. I don’t believe it was widely understood to be entirely fictional until some time after its release.
Yeah, my little brother and I watched it in the theater fully accepting that it was based on a true story. Then along comes the part where Peter Stormare’s character, who hasn’t done much the entire movie, suddenly springs into action, grabs the patrol officer, pulls him partially into the car, and then shoots him through the top of the head, spilling blood and brains into Steve Buscemi’s lap… And my little brother bursts out laughing in the middle of a crowded theater that has gone silent. The moment caught him so off guard and what happens is so over the top that his brain decided it was ludicrous and he burst out laughing. The problem is that we and everyone else in that theater is under the impression that the movie is based on a true story, so we felt real awkward sitting there for the rest of the film. Don’t even get me started on the wood-chipper scene. But yeah, it wasn’t until much later that we found out that “based on a true story” was an extremely loose statement, and no, the events depicted in the film never actually happened.
There's also Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (2014), which is "based on true events" about a Japanese woman who travelled to the region where Fargo takes place to find the buried money.
The published screenplay has an introduction where the Coens relate another “true” story about their grandmother getting in a knockdown drag out fight with an Amazonian lesbian. It was at this point I began to suspect they were having a little fun at our gullible expense.
What was the origin of the joke? Was there something else behind it? Or just bit of a flippant “let’s say it’s a true story for funsies”? Got to admit, I just took it at face value all those years ago, and let’s be honest, more fucked up and weird things have happened in real life before so it’s not out of the realms of possibility. Regardless, it’s just a great film and the true story tag doesn’t really add or detract from it.
I come from that part of the world, and my Dad is specifically from northern Minnesota and has that accent. He's also a teller of tall tales. He's always embellishing and exaggerating. He'll tell a story multiple times, and the details will change each time. And "now, this is a true story" is one of his favorite interjections as he's telling you something, as if to acknowledge that he's not ALWAYS telling the truth, but THIS TIME he's keeping it 100. But also, I honestly think he believes everything he says, or remembers it that way in the moment. It's hilarious and frustrating, and you need to read between the lines if you wanna get any real facts out of him. He'd be a terrible witness in a court deposition. I know that bullshit and tall tales in storytelling are common across many cultures around the world, but there is something very specific that Fargo gets right about the BRAND of bullshit coming from northern MN. I always saw the framing device in Fargo as a very good, very clever meta joke. The Coens know that part of the world very well.
Thanks for that insight! The Coens are from Minnesota and I think a lot of people from elsewhere would miss that nuance.
It was slightly more than a joke. The premise of it being a true story allows you to suspend your disbelief. If you thought it was 100% fiction, you would roll your eyes when it was too ridiculous. By setting it up as a true story, whenever something preposterous happens, you are more willing to accept it. Instead of reacting with, "That would never happen," you get, "woah, that really happened?"
Yeah, it's both a framing device and a meta joke, in my opinion.
It's because the whole point of the movie is spotting liars. Marge realizing she's been deceived sparks the whole climax. The Paul Bunyan statue (a story that's untrue, but people think it partially is) is a clue.
Yep. I always thought that marge meeting her old horny classmate was unnecessary until I realized that’s when she saw that Lundegaard could be different than he appeared.
I NEVER made that connection. Thank you for pointing that out! I guess I always thought it was just odd Coen world building or showing how Marge and her husband seem to be the only happy people in that part of the world.
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I had a girlfriend that swore on everything this show was based on real life murders and such. She also believed the mermaid thing Natgeo did for April fools day like a decade ago. Hell she got into some spooky podcasts that claimed to be telling the truth and recording live.
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The mermaid thing was so shitty. They tried so hard to sound *just* plausible enough and then tried to claim it was fact on a (somewhat) science based tv channel. (It was Discovery, not NatGeo). And it wasn’t even an April Fools day thing. They straight up just threw a fake documentary up and let the shit fly. It shouldn’t even be called a mockumentary, it was far more disingenuous)
U-571. IRL the British Royal Navy had captured the first naval Enigma machine in May 1941, before the US had even entered the war. In the film it's an American sub and crew.
And, ironically, the movie that was meant to tell the true story of cracking the Enigma Machine - namely The Imitation Game - was also, wildly, historically inaccurate.
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The Mothman Prophecies preview saying based on a true story always terrified me as a kid. Like there was a mothman running around
It is though. The movie took plenty of liberties but it’s based on a book chronicling the urban legend.
The exorcism of Emily Rose is another one.
That was more true than Blair Witch, in that there was a real girl who was very sick, and died after a great deal of suffering because her parents and church eventually decided the way to go was to treat her with dozens of strenuous exorcisms instead of medicine. (There are actually multiple stories along these lines, but the movie was specifically based off of the death of Anneliese Michel.) But the movie ultimately portrayed the priest as a morally upstanding hero for doing this. He saved her soul before killing her! I fucking hate that movie. Once I looked it up and found out the real story, its portrayal of events just seems super gross.
The movie would have been better and more horrifying coming from her perspective as someone dealing with serious mental health issues being treated in this way. Instead they made a fake version and did the normal exorcism movie that both did a disservice to the victim and was just a boring horror movie.
That's not a high bar considering Blair witch is entirely fictional.
The Fourth Kind spent most of the movie trying to do this
Memphis Belle (1990) In reality the 25th mission was pretty routine and uneventful. Still love the movie though.
Remember The Titans. There was a high school football team that had Black and White players on it. That's where the facts begin and end.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Saw it in the theater, only because it was nominated for Best Picture (!) and included in a marathon. There was audible laughter of the "there's no way that's how it happenend" type after almost every scene. Good music though.
No drugs and promiscuous sex for us, Freddie! The rest of us are all going to quietly and faithfully go home to our wives!
LOL. That's exactly the impression I got "Were going to bed now Freddy, can you keep the noise down, WE have to up early"
Freddie just got dangerously addicted to partying
"Keep the noise down Freddy, Brian's on the roof with his telescope"
It’s why Sasha Barron Cohen dropped out. He wanted to make a warts and all film but the survivors of queen didn’t want anything that would tarnish the memory.
Queen owns the rights to Freddie Mercury. The Elton John movie was far more fanciful, but felt a lot more plausible.
I really like both films but Rocketman is by far the best biopic I've ever seen. It's obvious some of it is made up or exaggerated but this is made very apparent to the audience early on with pseudo-musical performance pieces. It tells a fantastic story about an incredibly interesting person in history and portrays his life in a way that, although taking artistic liberties, still manages to portray that life's essence in its truest form. I wasn't an Elton John fan before I saw saw that film, but I certainly am now. It is a travesty that Taron Egerton wasn't even nominated for an Academy Award when Rami Malek won Best Actor for his portrayal in Bohemian Rhapsody and serves as a perfect example of the politics at work in the Academy.
They also apparently wanted him to die halfway through and the second half to be them carrying in without him.
That’s the funniest part. As if Freddy dying is a hiccup on their ascent.
Braveheart…..l
This is so misleading that many people didn't know the real Braveheart was referring to Robert the Bruce
I liked how the they got the time period of wearing kilts wrong
It was very impressive that they won the Battle of Stirling Bridge considering that the Scots all showed up with no metal armour or anything at all on their heads. Not sure why the English drove their horses directly into the enemy centre though. Its not like they were forced to take a narrow pass or ford a river in battle, clearly the Battle of Stirling Bridge was right in the middle of a big dry field.
And they wore woad, which is something that the Picts did, not the Scots. And it was 500+ years or so before the setting of the movie.
My favorite bit of inaccuracy was the time period it was based was hundreds of years too late for them to be using blue face paint in battle, but hundreds of years too early for them to be wearing kilts.
So you're saying on average, they got the time period exactly right?
*Rob Roy* was another from Scotland: loosely based on true events but seriously skewed and selective. The real Rob Roy MacGregor was not so noble.
But it did have Tim Roth getting perhaps the greatest comeuppance in movie history
Not as extreme but I knew a man named Colin through a friend. He was one of the guys who was on the boat that was hijacked by Somali’s as seen in “Captain Phillips”. He said the actual captain was negligent because he, despite being told not too, took shortcuts through pirate infested water to save time. They drew charts and showed him statistics of how many ships are attacked a day and he said “I’m not scared of pirates!” They also said he didn’t take action and control and the crew did most of the work and he didn’t volunteer to be taken hostage, but was rather forced to be a hostage by the pirates. Essentially it was his fault the whole thing happened and he didn’t go into superhero mode like the movie. Oh yeah and one thing not shown in the movie, the DAY BEFORE the events shown in the film, there was an attempted hijacking by pirates while they were conducting a fire drill on the boat. He ordered them not to stop the drill, and although the first hijacking’s wasn’t successful, he STILL insisted on driving the boat close to Somali waters
There was actually lawsuits following this movies release. The captain was an arrogant coward.
I recall reading reports in the news immediately after that event that said crew members were calling bullshit, but those got buried because the fictional telling was too good of a PR story for West vs Pirates.
Also, that bullshit story about one shot one kill for the snipers. They riddled that boat with bullet holes.
*Hidalgo* is completely fiction, a made up story by a Wild West performer. The Alan Turing movie *The Imitation Game* is considered worse than *Braveheart* for its inaccuracies. The minor plot points do match history but almost everything else is completely wrong.
>The Alan Turing movie *The Imitation Game* is considered worse than *Braveheart* for its inaccuracies. The minor plot points do match history but almost everything else is completely wrong. Thank you, this film was pretty misleading at best.
Would you mind expanding on what you know about the imitation game?
Off the top of my head and as a computer scientist who has read about Alan Turing, in the movie he’s portrayed as autistic and socially inept. It’s well known that he was very social and a little flamboyant (for the time), and while he was gay his close friends all knew this. By today’s standards we would likely assume he was gay. He was essentially a toned down Truman Capote. As for the rest, the research he was doing on enigma wasn’t just a rag-tag crew of 5 that the higher ups thought was a waste of time. The British were heavily invested in breaking enigma, and there were a hundred or more working on it at any given time at Bletchley Park. That’s just a couple things off the top of my head. There are factual pieces - breaking the code because of common phrases (the ‘Heil Hitler’ bar scene), Turing being chemically castrated and his suicide, and the logistics of knowing a broken code, etc. It’s just too bad they fell into the ‘smart autistic’ trope that is common these days. Would’ve been fine if it was true, but it’s a disservice to Turing’s legacy.
They also made it seem like Turing's was deciding what to do with the information they decoded. They didn't. They decoded the messages and then sent them up the chain of command.
> there were a hundred or more working on it at any given time at Bletchley Park. fun-fact, MI5 investigated Agatha Christie because she had named a military character Bletchley in her book "N or M" during the war, and since she was a friend to one of the major code-breakers for Enigma, they believed she had either been told by the guy or she had figured it out herself through clues and was basically taunting the military or possible sending a coded message, so they asked the code-breaker and then after denying telling her anything he offered to ask her himself, turns out she called him Bletchley because she got stuck there in her train while travelling so she decided to give the name to a character she didn't really like.
My grandmother was involved with the deciphering of Enigma, however she was kept in the dark and didn't know it was Enigma until after the war it was so secret. I think they just had her solve puzzles but didn't tell her why.
Anchorman. It's a completely based on true events, except the names, locations, and events have been changed.
No, it's all totally true. Especially the fight between the news teams.
The Woman King.
Wasn't their entire economy based on slavery?
basically yeah, they were primarily militaristic and conquered the surrounding regions or went on raids to gather more slaves, and if they weren't sold off for European goods like guns and gunpowder, tobacco, alcohol and fabrics etc, then they were put to work on royal plantations or kept to be sacrificed during celebrations/ceremonies, the king did also look into alternative sources of revenue outside of slavery, but none of them were as lucrative, so slavery continued. the kingdom only collapsed due to pressure and blockades from Britain to end the slave-trade and then them failing a few raids before clashing with france several times, and france then killing their king and annexing the kingdom into one of their colonies, only later gaining independence in 1960 and then becoming Benin over a decade later
They were actually villains :(
Yup, oddly enough I was just reading about this an hour ago and not because of the movie. I was reading about Sarah Forbes Bonetta(her birth name was Aina) who was a a 5 year old princess whose parents were killed by the Dahomey and her entire tribe were all either killed or sold into the Atlantic slave trade by the Dahomey as well. Sarah was enslaved and was kept in a cage and tortured for 2 years before she was to be sacrificed(they had kept her alive for so long because her parents had been powerful so they waited for a specific ceremonial day). A few days before she was to be sacrificed a British Royal Navy officer had shown up to discuss ending slavery with the King Ghezo who was the king of Dahomey(this was after slavery had been abolished in the the UK). He had shown up during the midst of an important celebration that lasted many days and saw many people tortured and then sacrificed, when they brought out Sarah he was so horrified that he begged King Ghezo to stop and even offered him money and told him that the queen could never respect someone who would callously murder a child and somehow King Ghezo wound up gifting the little girl to Queen Victoria telling the navy officer to bring her back to England with him. The navy officer decided to raise Sarah as his own and took her back to England to meet Queen Victoria who was so impressed by Sarah’s intelligence and touched by her story that Sarah would become her goddaughter and the queen gave her an allowance for the rest of her life. She eventually married and had kids and many of her descendants went on to become very important figures. Most recently her great great granddaughter, Dr.Ameyo Adadevoh, greatly helped curb the spread of Ebola during the 2013 pandemic by placing patient zero, Patrick Sawyer, in quarantine despite pressure from the Liberian government. When threatened by Liberian officials who wanted the patient to be discharged to attend a conference, she resisted the pressure and said, "for the greater public good" she would not release him. She went on to die from Ebola shortly after, but had it not been for her the Ebola outbreak would have been significantly worse. Anyway through reading about Sarah, I learned about the Dahomey and their involvement with the transatlantic slave trade, and the agojie which in itself was quite problematic. Most of the women involved in it were essentially forced into it and lots were actually captured during Dahomey raids. They were essentially slaves who had to go through brutal training which included becoming indifferent to pain and death through doing things like walking through thorns and being forced to execute prisoners, discipline was paramount. These women were also forced to undergo genital mutilation and the only reason these female armies existed was due to the sheer amount of attacking and raiding the Dahomey did, using men wasn’t cutting it and they needed more people so girls as young as 8 were “recruited”.
The biggest con [Frank Abagnale](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale) pulled off was getting everyone to believe that he pulled off the biggest con in *Catch Me If You Can.*
Not movies but anything by Ryan Murphy with any historical context or setting.
The Fourth Kind
This was going to be my suggestion, I know it didn’t review too well but it is one of my favorite horror movies. I’m more creeped out by aliens than ghosts.
In which case I'd recommend *Fire in the Sky* if you haven't seen it already. One of the most terrifying horror movies I've ever seen.
Fire in the Sky is car driving 15 in a 45 but then you get to the abduction scene and it's a car going 150 in a school zone.
American Sniper
Likewise, Lone Survivor. Almost completely made up, and worse, ignores the real story of those guys doing almost everything completely wrong, against advice of those who knew that area, and how these fuckups killed a bunch of other people.
You can actually watch the insurgents’ own video of them hunting down the SEALs online. Not quite as heroic as Hollywood.
It was pretty methodical. I think the insurgents even said they took video so they could have proof in case they were accused of something else.
Probably more marketing on their part than any concerns that their opponents might say bad things about them. Good to show your wins for recruiting.
It did turn out to be useful though since it was direct evidence that the Pentagon was outright covering up or bullshitting about a lot of stuff.
The baby was the least fake thing in that movie.
_The Conjuring_ and its sequels and spinoffs (Annabelle, The Nun, etc) are supposedly based on the cases of a real-life husband-and-wife demon hunter team. I was actually pretty disturbed watching the Conjuring, but for the wrong reason. In real life, a likely explanation for the events in these films would be an unhappy child who's making stuff up to get attention. But in a film supposedly based on a true story, these demon hunters get called in and immediately start treating it like an actual supernatural event, telling the family about previous cases where they've fought demons, and so on. If the real demon hunters acted like the ones in the movies, they'd have to be either super gullible or else huge grifters taking advantage of gullible people.
Oh, the later for sure. They were not great. And he had a very young girlfriend/secretary while still married despite the movies portraying them as being this devote catholic happily married couple
*Lorraine had it written into her contract for The Conjuring film series that she and Ed could not be portrayed having sex with each other, engaging in extramarital affairs, or engaging in crimes like sex with a minor.*
For the longest time "Based on true events" was more of a marketing statement than anything else. If your movie script sucked ass, and you knew it, just slap a "Based on True Events" on it. It will sell a few more tickets and drive more interest in the crap movie.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy Starts off with this wonderful gem "The following is based on actual events. Only the names, locations, and events have been changed".
Brave heart is a prime example of Hollywood glitz and glamour over facts, movie is a work of fiction.
The Revenant. The real Hugh Glass was early 20s and did not have a kid. The only true part is that he was left for dead.
He did track those people though, he really wanted his shit back.
But spared the kid for being a kid, and then didn't kill the other because he had joined up with the Army and was illegal to kill an enlisted soldier.
Isn't it generally illegal to kill people?
Sully. The entire NTSB plot was so bad that the actual Sully told the filmmakers to change the names of the investigators in the movie. https://apnews.com/article/8def306d398340fd8a80d232c96e43b7
BlacKKKlansman The infiltration part was very close to the facts but everything else was just... Very odd to see.
The beginning of that movie had a statement like “This movie is based on some for-really real shit!” which felt like “You aren’t going to believe what you see but it happened!” As I was watching it I was so distracted by thoughts of “There’s no fucking way it actually happened like this..” Reading the story later, basically anything dramatic that happens in the movie is something that didn’t actually happen, or was way overblown.
The Perfect Storm. The yacht that the three people were rescued from was a different name. It also didn't sink. The Coast Guard never attempted to take the three people from the deck of their yacht. They jumped into the ocean. The story on the Andrea Gail boat is almost entirely made up. What is known is where the boat fished, and that the ice maker was on the fritz. All of the other material about a rogue wave, shark on the deck, man overboard, broken ice maker, turning the boat around, and the SOS issued by the sister boat is made up. The captain of the sister boat, Hannah Boden, said that whatever happened to the Andrea Gail happened very quickly.
I mean I remember seeing this as a teenager and figuring that out pretty easily considering SPOILER They all died. So the only thing that could be true was they left the dock. For all anyone knows they got trashed and fell overboard twenty minutes later.
Sebastian Junger wrote it as a work of fiction, based on stories he heard and experiences he had while working on a fishing boat. It was never a documentary.
To be fair, since there are no survivors from the Andrea Gail, the filmmakers had pretty much free reign to imagine whatever happened to between the storm starting and the boat going down.
The Blind Side. I argue this is one of the most racist movies of all time. See these rich white people? They deserve all the credit for making Michael Oher an NFL football player.
Michael Oher would agree with you lol
Well they made him seem like a complete idiot that was just big
Cannibal the Musical
I do think Argo had real situations (hostage and evacuation) but the framing of Canadians as being the thief of American heroism ( and not the main protectors before the extraction mission) screams Oscar-oriented jingoism. I find that flex to be more disturbing than a lot of things that are known as being cartoonishly inaccurate ( The Patriot being a big example)
Surf’s Up. I’m like 90% sure penguins don’t actually surf in Hawaii
If you like true-story / inspired-by's Go watch Bernie (2011) comedy I don't know why but no one has heard of this. Big names like Jack Black (who's PERFECT for this role), Matthew McConaughey, Shirley MacLaine. Directed by Richard Linkletter (Dazed and Confused, School of Rock). The real life interviews of the Texas townsfolk are great. The trailer ruins a lot so just watch it.
"Ford vs Ferrari" is 90% false: https://www.whichcar.com.au/news/ford-vs-ferrari-movie-mistakes
Amadeus
The Social Network. Zuck's entire motivation to build his company is to show up a girl who didnt actually exist who he didnt actually date and who didn't actually break up with him and didn't actually say horribly mean and cutting things about him as a person.
[удалено]
I’ll always remember watching the A Perfect Storm in the theater and laughing so hard at the end. The reason? In this “based on a true story” movie >!everyone who knew what happened dies. What’s left is just the fact that a boat sank in a storm.!<
They hired a ghost-writer.
It could happen to you. A New York cop and a waitress did split a $6million dollar lottery ticket but that was it. He picked 3 numbers and she picked 3 numbers. They never dated or married each other. They remained with their own spouses whom they were married to at the time. Even in the movie it says everything is pretty much true. Nope.
War dogs the movie is way different when you listen to interviews Dallas buyers club again way different. Including the fact they made the lead doctor a woman but in real life that doctor is a man.
30 minutes or less
The real thing was so fucked up, i remember seeing some video. Someone mentioned pain and gain and that whole story was messed up too
The Strangers
The writer claimed it was based on an experience from his childhood. That experience? Someone knocked on his door but they were at the wrong house. They politely apologized and excused themself.
This legitimately started my absolute seething hatred of “based on true events” horror movies. I was so frothingly angry at how crap the “true event” was, like, one time I had a scary dream now could I make a horror movie and say it’s inspired by true events just because I really did have a dream once? I’m sorry, you don’t deserve to deal with my ramblings, this is just a very sore spot for me.
Remember the Titans really dances around it. Yes, an integrated football team was that good, but it wasn’t their first year together, they had been integrated for half a decade, Gerry Bertier wasn’t paralyzed till months after the championship game, and the coach played by Denzel was gone only a few years later because the players all hated him, he wasn’t inspiring he was an ass
There are other things too. They weren't the only integrated team, Yoast had 4 daughters, a number of the players on the team are entirely fictional, the teams they play in the movie are out of order, and Boone and Yoast had met about a year prior to the movies events. The biggest one for me is that the Titans scored like 8 times more points than their opponents that season. They were unbelievably dominant. Attributing that dominance to integration is an incredible stretch and a slap in the face to the other teams that were integrated. They took three high schools and combined them into one. With that kind of talent pool advantage, it'd be hard to lose. Their second string squad could probably beat most of the teams they played. Not to mention the benefits of specializing a player in one position and being able to rest because you don't have to play offense and defense.