The Exorcist was supposedly based on true events. I think they may have taken a few liberties along the way.
Madison, set in & named after my hometown, about the early 1970s victory in its annual hydroplane race- great story about how a small town banded together to save its race & its city-owned hydroplane, and then how the boat went on to win the race. EXCEPT that the movie has the mechanics, faced with
a blown engine, STEALING the engine out of a WWII plane from a nearby city’s memorial. No resemblance to reality at all, and downplaying the real accomplishment of the town, the boat crew & the driver.
Ed Wood - totally downplayed his drinking problems, general self-destructive behavior, manufactured a major Hollywood premiere for PLAN 9,
and gave Bela Lugosi a potty-mouth which really offended those who knew him
best.
The Birdman of Alcatraz portrays Robert Stroud as a mannerly, soft-spoken man who, implicitly for justifiable reasons, is in prison for murdering two men. He devotes his life to the study of birds and their illnesses.
The real Robert Stroud really did contribute a lot, especially for an amateur, to the field of avian physiology, but he was also a cold blooded remorseless killer. In addition to the murder he was sent to prison for (a john who did not pay the whore Stroud was pimping) he was suspected of other crimes, known to have been a constant thief and pimp, and upon his imprisonment murdered a guard in a room full of witnesses because the guard’s reporting of him had cost him privileges. (He was sentenced to death for killing the guard but the sentence was commuted to life without parole.) While a prisoner he was a rapist, he was involved in many fights, kept completely non bird related contraband in his cells (including child pornography and homemade whiskey) and was considered violent and dangerous by other inmates and the guards. Prison guards and administrators expressed outrage at the movie and pleasure when Stroud died.
The Crucible is sometimes said to be based on a true story, but “inspired by” is far closer. There was no affair between John Proctor and Abigail and in fact there was about a 50 year age difference- he was 60 and she was somewhere between 9 and 13 depending on the source. Danforth was not the bastard in real life he was in the movie and in fact was one of the first to denounce the proceedings. Tituba was not a black slave but a Caribbean Indian. Most of the other characterizations are likewise off, Giles Corey (the cantankerous old man who was pressed to death) probably being the most near to what’s known of the historical figure. Likewise Amadeus, Royal Hunt of the Sun and most of Shakespeare’s histories are far more literary than they are historical and vilify characters who really weren’t that vicious (i.e. Salieri was neither mediocre nor obsessed with Mozart and there’s no reason to believe he killed him, the roles of de Soto and Pizarro are reversed in Royal Hunt {it was de Soto who wanted the Inca saved, not Pizarro as in the movie} and the Inca Atahuallpa was a bloody tyrant who had made his deposed brother eat dog feces in the streets of Cuzco shortly before the Spanish arrival, Richard III was probably nowhere near the monster he is in Shakespeare and Henry VII had far more motive to kill the imprisoned princes, etc.). I recognize that these plays do not purport to be histories and objective, but it is a shame that people don’t realize they’re not to be confused with the real story.
Good pick. Wood’s posthumous biography is a true nightmare of alcoholism and hopelessness. As is typical in the art world, he’d only achieved his renaissance after he was dead. His final years would make for very intriguing cinema.
The movie Casino is based on this guy and apparently the movie does contain quite a lot of events that actually happened.
The Perfect Storm I’m fairly certain they took liberties in the movie on what happened right before they sunk.
Having followed the Baby M surrogacy trial like an obsession, I can honestly say the movie about it was about 50-50.
And yet, Ed Wood is a fantastic movie. It’s a beautiful story about a man who really, really loved movies, but wasn’t any damn good at making them. I’ve read that biography of Wood too – was it called Look Back in Angora? I lent it to a friend several years ago and never got it back. I’m glad the movie is what it is.
Living in Houston, I’ve met a number of people who could vouch for the accuracy of Apollo 13. When I mentioned that they probably used composite characters, I mostly meant in minor roles. I don’t know that the personal family drama was exactly as it happened, but the facts of the case as shown in the movie certainly were very close to the real deal.
More on Apollo 13: IMDB’s goofs page for the movie states at the top of the page " … the film is prey to a large number of factual errors due to the large volume of documentary footage/evidence from the actual event."
In general, the words “based on a true story” are a bad sign - particularly if you know anything about the real story. I was, and still am, pleasantly surprised that hollywood made a movie about the great drama that was Apollo 13, and didn’t screw it up. No aliens, no song and dance numbers, no stripper/brain surgeon girlfriend on the command module, just the story. Nicely done, Opie!
Tucker: The Man and His Dream is reasonably accurate. You can read a detailed breakdown of what’s true and what’s not, here.
That was the name of the documentary about him. The book was Nightmare of Ecstasy.
Wood’s widow died recently. In her final years she was very conflicted about Ed’s legacy: on the one hand he’s something of a laughing stock, remembered as a talentless hack. OTOH, unlike many far more gifted directors he is remembered and even has some apologists, and interviews and movie projects and all made her final years the most financially comfortable of her life (I don’t think she got rich but she made enough from the movie and other projects to have some security and comfort whereas she and Ed lived in unqualified poverty for the last decade of their marriage).
The movie took a lot of liberties. Tor Johnson, for example, had been making movies for many years before Wood “discovered” him, they omitted the odd story of Bela’s fifth/final marriage and his odd relationship with the fourth wife (only ex-wife I’ve ever heard of who went to court demanding that her ex-husband’s child support payments be reduced- she cared about him immensely but just couldn’t live with him), and Bunny Breckinridge wasn’t a longtime friend of Wood’s- he just did a cameo in Plan 9 as a lark. (Bunny was also loaded- a multimillionaire through inheritance, and in his younger days he married a French aristocrat and managed to produce a daughter who was a titled European aristocrat- major chicken hawk as well and went to jail for “contributing to the delinquency” a good bit; his same-name grandfather, John Cabell Breckinridge I, negotiated the final surrender of the Confederate army as CSA Secretary of War.)
You’re right, of course. Thanks!
Speaking of the Civil War, the movie GLORY, though one of my favorite movies, did have some major embellishments. The most significant perhaps are these:
*— a powerful scene is the whipping of Denzel Washington’s character for desertion- when he’s stripped his back is revealed to be already scarred from the lash of slavery. In fact, whipping was banned as a punishment for desertion and Shaw would have gotten into major trouble for doing this. The character (who is fictional/composite) would more likely would have been tied to a wheel, clapped in irons, or one of other acceptable punishments.
*—there were all-black regiments comprised mostly if not all of freed slaves, but the 54th Massachusetts was not one of them. There were a few freedmen in the ranks, but the majority were free blacks living in Massachusetts at the time of the war and not runaway or in most cases even former slaves.
*—the assault on Battery Wagner was a bloody horror for the 54th, but not quite as bad as the movie implied. I was surprised that none of the main characters survivewhen in fact most of the 54th (albeit by a slim margin) did survive the attack.
*—Frederick Douglass as portrayed in the movie was too old and had the wrong hairstyle. He’s shown gray haired with the famous proto Afro but was actually considerably younger and looked a bit more like James Brown in the early 1860s (which isn’t coincidental- Brown drew inspiration for his look from Douglass [and from several other sources].
GONE WITH THE WIND is not supposed to be a work of non-fiction, but even so it makes some whopping errors that contributed greatly to the romanticism of that era. Among them:
*— there were nowhere near that many wounded soldiers in Atlanta (and one of the veterans of Atlanta is said to have remarked “if we’d had that many we’d have won the dang battle”
*—there were not mansions like Twelve Oaks anywhere in Georgia at the time, not even in Savannah- major overkill
*—Tara was a big ugly sprawling whitewashed farmhouse in the book but a mansion in the movie
Perhaps the most common error about GWTW isn’t actually the movie’s fault but interpretation. Rhett and Scarlett flee the burning of Atlanta and most people assume the fires were set by Sherman, but in fact they were set (and Rhett even specifically says they were set) by the Confederacy who were torching the provisions and blowing up the ammunition they couldn’t take as they retreated to keep them from falling into Union hands. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta was nowhere near as total as commonly cited- between him and the Confederacy approximately 30% of the city was destroyed, but what he burned were mostly legitimate military/economically strategic targets. By far the greater damage came from the shelling and the buildings that burned from flames carried by the burning of the real targets. (Enough of the city was left that it became the state capitol shortly after the war even though Milledgeville was almost entirely undamaged.)
Without going into the reasons (Because that would be me beating a very dead horse. Again.) I want to remind everyone here, that the 2000 “Pearl Harbor” was another abhomination. It got the fact that there was an attack right. Mostly. And that’s about it.
But we were supposed to be rooting for the Japanese in that movie, right?
Well, they were the plucky underdogs in that conflict. 
An long but true anecdote about that movie:
One of my neighbors and tangential friends (i.e. we don’t call each other up but we always talk when we run into each other) in Montgomery is a lady named Anna who is still alive, in her mid 90s, and was an unmarried nurse at Pearl Harbor. The producers of that movie sent people to interview her at her home (as they did with other Pearl Harbor survivors, particularly nurses). I’ve seen the tapes of her interview (so has Ogre if he’s here so this is one he can back me up on).
Anna, who not only doesn’t mind talking about those days but generally won’t shut up about them and has written a book about her experiences (privately published), is on the tape TRYING to tell them some truly fascinating stories. This is not verbatim but just based on memory- the interview goes something like this (and Anna’s stories are all true [and the coffee cup would have made a great scene for the movie if they’d have listened]):
This woman who was a senior nurse there and who is in remarkably good mind and memory for a woman her age was trying to tell him truly fascinating atmospheric stories. She even sensed that he wanted to hear about the sex, but while a 90 year old social matriarch from Alabama or almost anywhere else (Anna married a high ranking officer and is quite well off and was a major hostess for many years) is JUST SIMPLY NOT GOING TO DISCUSS HER SEX LIFE OF 60 YEARS BEFORE EVEN IF SHE HAD ONE she was willing to tell him a very interesting story about the prostitutes that also has some awesome imagery (the officer’s wives and nurses and doctors rubbing shoulders with scantily clad prostitutes covered in scrubs and blood). She tries to tell him about a Zero that flew so close it wrecked her car almost three days after the attach- he’d been stranded. She tried to tell about the hate crimes that occurred that day, and how they found out one of the sweet elderly male Japanese orderlies really WAS a Japanese spy who’d been taking photographs of military facilities, and lots of other interesting stories, and basically what the guy wants to hear was
“Oh yeah, oral sex was so de rigeur that we made knee pads out of coconuts! The Arizona wasn’t the only thing full of lubricants and seamen in that harbor lemme tell you what! Oh, this one time I remember I was in a four way with this double jointed anesthesia nurse, Admiral Nimitz and this 18 year old twink Airman who had a better ass than any of us and Nimitz took his fingers and just…”
And of course when the movie comes out you see the nurses going on unchaperoned dates with enlisted men and none of the interesting stuff. "Oh, here’s Cuba Gooding for no particular reason as a real life hero cameo, that’s enough history. Y’know what’d be something? If FDR got out of his wheelchair cause you know that’d stun his cabinet as getting out of his wheelchair is something he only did every goddamned time he gave a press conference or there were cameras present. "
Anna was disgusted by the experience and so was everybody she showed those tapes by.
Sorry for the long hijack, but the point is don’t judge a whore until you’ve operated on an airman with her, and if your coffee cup is rattling put on your seatbelt.
Thank you, Sampiro.
Any chance you can tell me where I can get a copy of her account? Feel free to email me, if you get the chance.
I’ll pm you her surname. I last saw her a few months ago and though she’s in her 90s she’s doing well and, as I said, more than willing to talk about her life (except the sex part).