Is this the source of the item in the Thurber story (“The Dog That Bit People”?) about not feeding the dog on the floor?
In the story, you had to put the dog’s bowl up on a chair because he would try to bite anyone who reached towards the floor. This infuriated one of Thurber’s relatives, who was proud of the fact that he was supposedly the third man up Missionary Ridge in the Civil War. Matters were not helped when Thurber’s brother Roy suggested to the man that if he had fed the dog on the floor right before the battle, he would have been the first man up Missionary Ridge.
Just wondering.
I’d like to see an analysis of Boys Don’t Cry, the Brandon Teena story. Damn fine acting, but I’m interested if the events actually unfolded the way they did in the movie.
I’m not familiar with that one, to be honest. Jackson believed that sitting was one of the worst things a person could do- bad for the back, bad for digestion, etc., and so he rarely sat other than on horseback or for formal photographs or when very tired. He also bathed everyday (eccentric in and of itself for the time) in water that was as cold as possible and slept with his back against the headboard (it was the custom at the time to sleep propped on pillows [which is why many beds were so short] but he took it a step further).
The Natural is a bit of an amalgamation of true stories:[ul][]The shooting of Eddie Waitkus.[]Shoeless Joe’s bat (“Caroliny”), made from a tree that had been struck by lightning.[]Bama Rowell’s flyball that broke the scoreboard clock at Ebbets Field.[]Ted Williams’ desire to be “the greated hitter who ever lived.”[/ul]
There’s a full treatment of it in the book I referenced in the OP.
Suffice it to say, several liberties were taken. And Brandon Teena led a life of crime leading up to her murder; I believe the movie paints a more saintly portrayal of him, IIRC.
Inherit the Wind did take almost all the courtroom stuff from the trial transcripts, but much of the outside stuff was inaccurate. Just for one thing, IIRC that Bryan’s death was not at all like the movie.
Another that isn’t as well known is Moby Dick. This book points out that a ship had been rammed and sunk by a whale a few years before Melville wrote his version. Ahab and his search for vengeance are of course fictional.
Actually, the Essex disaster is well-known and well-remarked in nautical circles. It became a cause celebre when the story came out, not because of the “man bites dog” sensationalism of the whaling ship sunk by its prey, but because the survivors admitted, in public, that they survived by means of cannibalism.
The term “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” refers to an often fatal experience for the whalers when a harpooned whale runs, like a fish on a hook, but a multiton whale has enough of an advantage over the men in the small boats in which they did the actually hunting. A deep diving whale could and often did drag the whaleboat down under with it. Likewise, many a whale would surface under the whaleboat, capsizing it, if not outright destroying it. To go from that to the destruction of the larger whaling vessel is surprising, but not shocking.
Admitting that one of the fatalities of the crew of the Essex was because the rest of the crew had to get some long pork was shocking beyond anything else that happened. This is not to say that the community of whalers, and shippers didn’t know that cannibalism happened to castaways. It was just not commonly admitted.
To be fair, Enigma was a fictionalization of the breaking of the Enigma codes, and while a few of the characters were based on or composites of real life people such as Alan Turing, the mystery thriller subplot was entirely a fabrication which was never suggested to be based on truth. Essentially, it’s fiction set within a real historical setting, not a “based on a true story” claim.
Excellent if slow moving film, BTW, and many (but not all) of the details on the Enigma machine and the cracking of the codes were accurately portrayed; far more so than the excreable U-571; and at least a nodding acknowledgement is made to the efforts of Polish intelligence in acquiring the machine.
The real Robert Stroud was a child molestor who once lost his bird privileges for having child pornography in his cell.
The real Elliot Ness was never known to have fired a gun on duty. One journalist who knew both Ness and Capone and had the hell beaten out of him by Capone’s goons in full view of a Cicero police officer actually said that he still liked Capone better. He felt Ness was little more than a glory-loving hypocrite.
Lion in Winter Did it all come to a head like that over the holidays?
Mutiny on the bounty and it’s various remakes.
(something) years in Tibet. Escaped Nazi meets up with the future Dali Lama as a boy in Nepal.
Great Escape one of the best Movies ever. I read the book years ago and it wasn’t exactly like the movie as I remembered.
Return to Paradise Jocquim Phoenix & Vince Vaughn in a based on a true tale indy film. Very slow off the blocks, but it was very good. I always wondered how close it was to the real thing.
Catch me if you can The book and the movie are not the same thing. The movie is entertaining. The book is utterly fascinating. Con men stories usually are.
Ignore most of my list, I just read the 100 list. :smack:
However, I’d like to add:
Princess Caraboo was supposedly based on a true story.
Proof of Life was based on an article written in Vanity Fair ( (I think) about the kidnapping-for-fundraising by terrorists in south america. ( I like this movie.)
F’rinstance, The Great Escape (good one, Shirley!), is very close to accurate from what I’ve read and seen. There was an incredible escape from Stalag Luft 3, it did use tunnels and the masking methods shown in the movie, the prisoners did, by hand, manufacture all sorts of counterfeit passes and ID. And Hitler did order two thirds of the recaptured airmen killed. They had to increase the role of the inmate played by Steve McQueen, since he had the star power to demand more time, but that’s the biggest single liberty I recall. Considering the way that other movies bend history in the name of a better story (I’m not trying to say that in a negative way. I’m trying to write a novel based on what I think the movie Pearl Harbor should have been. And I know I’m going to have to bend the truth to make it marketable. Fortunately, my viewpoint character is damned near everything I could have asked for.) that’s a minor thing, really.
From what I recall of the movie Midway, it’s also pretty accurate. Where it failed as a movie was in that it didn’t actually have a consistent viewpoint character: It tried to give every view, and so swamped the viewer.
I’ve not read what this book says about Apollo 13, but from what I recall the major changes were that several of the important people on the ground were combined into one character for the purposes of clarity. Again, a very forgivable change, and one that was necessary to make for an approachable story. Similarly both the movie and the book Bat 21 (another one for the list) combined several pilots involved in the extraction into one character.
Of course on your side of the ledger, let’s consider The Sound of Music: When Maria von Trapp saw it she is reported to have said: “It’s a lovely story. But it’s not my story.” I don’t believe that Mrs. von Trapp disapproved of the movie, the way that Christine Crawford does about the movie based on her book, just that it’s not accurate.
While I’m a big fan of the film, I have to point out that there were a lot of discrepancies; while (as the prolog indicates) many of the events and methods in the film did actually occur, the McQueen role was totally written in. Although there had been American pilots in the camp at one time there were none during the escape, and most of the scenes prominantly featuring McQueen never happened, period. Also, in the movie it is indicated that the Commandant was arrested (and presumably executed) for the escape of the prisoners; in real life, his crime was of dealing in the black market and selling supplies (some of which were used in the escapes) to prisoners, a fact only obliquely hinted at in the film.
She was also majorly p.o.d that while the story of her life was the biggest hit on Broadway and later the biggest box office hit in many years (single handedly saving its studio) she received nothing by way of compensation. Reason: many years before she had sold the rights to her life story for a pittance (a few thousand dollars) to a German film studio which made a non-musical, probably more accurate version that was a moderate hit in German speaking Europe but then forgotten; it was this company, not her, that sold the rights to Rodgers & Hammerstein, who then sold the film rights to their play- she was bypassed all around (though the producers of the movie hired her as a “consultant” [less for the need to consult than to be able to throw a little money towards her] and she can be seen in a couple of crowd scenes.) Of course she became in demand as a speaker and she wrote some books that sold well on the Christian market, so she benefitted that way.
The real von Trapps sang a completely different type of music than the upbeat showtunes, but a type of very traditional Alpine religious folk singing. She was married to the Baron for more than a decade, had borne him two daughters and was heavily pregnant with a son when they refugeed. He had once been one of the wealthiest men in the German speaking lands (due ironically to his English first wife, whose family produced half the torpedoes used in WW1 when he was a U-Boat hero) but had been wiped out by the Depression; they actually turned to singing to raise cash. She later spent many years as a missionary for lepers and as a missionary in Borneo.
