Yes but this ruins my favorite running joke with my mother, who is named Joan. When I call her “Mommie dearest” she always replies “Smile when you say that” and I always respond “Yes, Mommie dearest.” This has been going on for over 20 years and we both enjoy it.
Before Night Falls, starring Javier Bardem, is a biopic about Cuban dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas who was gay, did time in a Cuban prison, eventually made it to the USA, and died of AIDS. The same actor more recently starred in another biopic, The Sea Inside, about the plight of the Spaniard Ramon Sampedro, who campaigned for euthanasia after becoming a quadriplegic.
Enemy At the Gates, based on real-life Soviet ace sniper Vassily Zaitsev (Jude Law) and the “cult of the sniper,” as it was created by and capitalized on by Soviet propaganda. I’ve read that the real-life Zaitsev did indeed rack up dozens of kills during Stalingrad, but that he was also running a sniping school of sorts that presumably would have diverted some of his time and energy from his own sniping, and that some of his proteges ran up many kills in their own right. I don’t know any of the particulars of the sniping “school” he ran, how formally organized it was, and whether it was something he ran out of his own initiative or if it was created or ordered by Moscow, but it would have been nice if the movie had elaborated a bit more on that aspect, beyond the one scene of him in the field with the two proteges (culminating in the department store set-up).
There was indeed a German sniper instructor (the “Major Konig” character) sent to kill Zaitsev, but I don’t know how much is known about that historical incident, beyond the bare facts that he was Germany’s best sniper, that he was sent to kill Zaitsev, and that he failed and was himself killed. I’m not even sure if it’s been sufficiently well-established that it was Zaitsev who killed Konig! The scene in which General Paulus takes Konig’s identification (so that his death couldn’t be used for propaganda purposes by the Soviets) suggests that the facts surrounding his death or disappearance were only vaguely established in the historical record. I highly doubt the extensive dramatization of the Konig character was based on established facts – i.e., the gold-tipped cigarettes, the repeated confrontations in the field, and most egregiously, the Major’s relationship with the boy.
Also, the filmmakers took a few liberties with the girlfriend subplot. (There was a lover, and she was seriously wounded, but I’m not sure if any of the other details were accurate.)
OTTH, the ruthless carnage of the main battle sequence early in the film was probably very accurate, including the inadequate arming of the ordinary Red Army soldier, and the willingness of officers and commissars to shoot any soldier in retreat or trying to flee. I read recently (I can’t remember where) that some 15,000 Soviet soldiers are known to have been killed by their own side; dunno how much of that occurred at Stalingrad.
re. Miracle: Overall, it probably deserves high marks for accuracy, although it’s hard for me to judge, since I don’t know much about hockey and I don’t have a copy of the US-USSR match to consult. The filmmakers painstakenly choreographed 133 plays from the actual Games for their actors to recreate for the film. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that at least a few liberties were taken (and mistakes made):
1) Casting/appearance inaccuracies. Granted, it was necesary to cast for hockey ability rather than appearance, especially given that this was a team sport and the movie took that tack, with its emphasis on Coach Brooks and minimal individuation of the players (other than a few stars). Having said that, it’s unfortunate that while some of the actors bore a strong resemblance to the actual players, others didn’t. Ken Morrow, for ex., was tall, lean, and heavily bearded, but the actor playing him had a different body type and was clean-shaven throughout the movie. Mike Ramsey was tall, lean, long-faced, and blond, but the actor playing him was stockier and dark-haired. (And there were other mismatches.) Couldn’t the movie producers have done a better job altering their actors’ hair, at least?
2) Deliberate liberties taken for reasons of drama, pacing, etc. The movie shows Johnson’s last-second goal at the end of the first period as ending it, with Soviet Goalie Tretiak being benched at the beginning of the second. What I’ve read is that there was one second left on the clock, that the Soviets were leaving the ice but the ref called them back for a final faceoff to burn off the last second, and that the Soviet Coach Tikhonov actually made the goalie substitution at that point. The minor changes were presumably made for clarity and pacing, and so that the goalie change would get the due emphasis it deserved at the opening of the second period.
Also, the combined hard hit on Goalie Jim Craig and easy score later in the second period were actually separate incidents, which the director opted to combine for better pacing. That may be, but it also had the effect of making that score look unearned, that Craig couldn’t have stopped it.
3) Minor goofs. But I’ve read that the filmmakers didn’t use the right kind of goalposts. (The 1980-era goalposts had a double-arch shape.) Also, the arena they used to shoot the Lake Placid Games didn’t look much like the actual one, and the ice didn’t have those big blue patches seen during the Games. There are probably a zillion of these that hockey afficionados could spot. OTOH, I thought the overall period feel of the film and the look of the crowd scenes and extras were pretty good.
To be fair, though, neither of these claimed to be “based on a true story” and, to add to thw whammy, the movies are, of course, adaptations of other works, which places them one step farther.
As noted above, the case of the Essex was well known, and Meliville didn’t claim to be giving the true story. He pretty clearly suffused the story with symbolism and rounded it out with his own experience as a whaler.
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee never said their play Inherit the Wind was about the Scopes trial, and a pretty clear indication that they intended to re-arrange things to make their own case about intellectual honesty vs. religious orthodoxy is that they changed all the names and places – “Cates” for “Scopes”, “E.K. Hornbeck” for “H.L. Mencken”, “Drummond” for “Darrow”, “Brady” for “Bryan”, etc.
I loved the movie The Great Escape, too, and shortly after I saw i I stumbled across a copy of Brickhill’s book, which I rad to rags. My biggest complaint about the film is that they made the Americans major participants in the actual breakout. Americans ertainly did contribute, but the Germans moved them all out of the compound prior to the break – the English and Americans go along too well. The Germans were apparently hoping they’d disrupt eacjh other.
lso annoying is the claim that Stalag Luft III was the “basket into which they put all the bad eggs”. It wasn’t – that was Kolditz Strafelager. Read Pat Reid’s books about Kolditz, an see the movie The Colditz Story. I think it’s reasonably true to the book. Don’t, however, wach the TV movie The Birdmen, which is about the glider they built at Kolditz to try and fly away (and which came extremely close to working – they were liberated first, though). That film has one of the lowest truth-to-fantasy ratios of any “based on a true story” films I know of.
Incidentally, there seemds to be a backlash even against Brickhill’s book on The Great Escape. A couple of more recent books on the camp don’t even mention his book. Brickhill, by the way (an inmate at talag Luft III himself) also wrote The Dam Busters, which was also filmed, an seems reasonably ccurate. It was also one of the inspirations for the closing sequence in the original film Star Wars.
I hadn’t heard it was an inspiration for Star Wars, but back in the good old days of AMC I caught a showing of The Dam Busters. It seems like it could make a very enjoyable remake even today. Granted it suffers the flaw of being (except for the detail of being historical events) mostly hard SF - where the idea is the protagonist.
You need to read my essay in Teemings about it – “Use the Force, Luke”. I think it’s in the third issue which, unfortunately, isn’t up yet.
Lucas has admitted the borrowing. Heck, he took some of the pilots’ dialogue berbatim from the older film!
What I find significant is that in the original story, finding a way to make sure where to drop the bomb – in both horizontal distance away from the dam and in vertical height above the water – was crucial, and a lot of drama revolves around building a – well, call it an analogue “targeting computer”.
and what does Luke switch off?
And Stonewall tells his slave that they may free the slaves if they fight for the CSA. I know they put that line in to make the character look sympathetic to a 21st-century audience. But General Cleburne brought that up in 1864, after Stonewall had died.
One of my favorite based on true history films is The Long Riders. Not that’s it’s exceptionally good, it’s the gimmick of using real life siblings to play real life siblings. And due to the casting, it’s probably the only time in his life Randy Quaid felt more important than Dennis.
Actually there seemed to be very few westerns in the book, so how about Tombstone, Young Guns, and somebody else already mentioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Also wasn’t Rob Roy based on a real guy?
But we got to see Rachel Weisz’ butt! 
How about A Cry in the Dark ? Based on the incident where a dingo took a woman’s baby and she was convicted of murdering it.
Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken , about the blind woman that rode the diving horses in Atlantic City. I have her autobigraphy , and it is vastly different from the Disney filck.
Apparently films about Mary, Queen of Scots are required to have a scene in which Mary and Elizabeth I meet face to face. They never did meet, and by all accounts Elizabeth was determined they never would. Mary of Scotland, a low point of Katharine Hepburn’s career, goes further by completely misrepresenting her love life and showing every Scottish lord, including Lowlanders and Borderers, parading around in kilts. In one scene Bothwell goes to a kitchen fire and lifts his kilt to warm his backside, then turns and warms his front as well.
**The Charge of the Light Brigade ** with Errol Flynn has squat to do with the actual Charge of the Light Brigade. An early battle is actually a pretty accurate recreation of the siege of Cawnpore during the Indian Mutiny, except it’s transferred to Afghanistan (where it could not have occurred, because Afghanistan has no navigable rivers), made to occur before the Crimean War instead of after, and given a connection to the Charge, where there wasn’t any.
*The Hollywood History of the World * by George MacDonald Fraser (yes, the one who wrote the Flashman novels) discusses these and other historical films, good and bad.
As a P.S. to my own post, I watched a documentary on Leavenworth the other day (where Stroud kept his birds and did his experiments [he wasn’t allowed to have birds at Alcatraz]) and Stroud was even worse than I realized. A complete sociopath, he killed a guard (at least his third victim) and openly joked about it in a letter to his father; this was one reason he was kept in solitary at Alcatraz later.
At the time of the movie the wardens of both Leavenworth and Alcatraz along with many other guards and inmates, former and then current, were livid at the whitewashing of the man. Stroud himself of course was ecstatic (even though he never got to see the film). Thousands of letters from fans of the movie came in asking for his immediate release; one of the biographers interviewed on the documentary read a letter from a 9 year old boy, then read just the beginnings of a “short story” written by Stroud about the same time in which the main character is a 9 year old boy who gets raped by the story’s “hero”. Chilling.
Stroud predicted his death would make front page news. It possibly would have had he not died the day after JFK; he did make the news but only in the back pages.