Watched “The Imitation Game” recently. I was aware it didn’t stick entirely to the facts, but these days I make a habit of looking up just how fictionalized these “true story” movies are after I watch them. And TIG sure does make up a lot of crap.
Now, I understand some degree of embellishment and exaggeration in order to make an interesting movie. For instance, the huge resistance Turing had to overcome to get his “computing” machine built to beat the Enigma cypher was very exaggerated. I can understand that to a point. Drama! And I understand things like combining several characters into one composite character to streamline a story. But as for stuff like the member of the Bletchley Park team who was giving secrets to the Russians:
one, he wasn’t giving them Enigma secrets, they were lesser secrets. Two, Turing didn’t discover it, it wasn’t discovered until after the war was over; and three, it wasn’t part of an Mi6-approved double-agent scheme.
Why add all those arbitrary fictionalizations?
I read somewhere that one of the filmmakers responded to criticism of TIG’s extreme fictionalizations by saying something to the effect of “a drama isn’t a dry recitation of fact A, fact B, fact C… the fictionalization serves to tell a greater truth”. Or some such B.S. But it seems like if you feel the need to overly fictionalize something as dramatic as the life story of Alan Turing, THAT is a failure of good storytelling.
And while I’m on the topic of biopics of great scientists/mathematicians, how about “A Beautiful Mind”, where it’s revealed that
John Nash’s buddy/confidante, who he’s been talking to throughout the entire film, turns out to be a figment of his imagination. Nash didn’t have an imaginary friend in real life.
I don’t know, maybe I should stick to either movies that are entirely fiction, or documentaries.
Watch out on that one since documentaries can be as fictional as fiction movies.
As for your question, you really said it already: Drama! There is also the case of changing the ending of the “real life” story to make a bad ending a happy one (I’m looking at you Hurricane.
You also got it right with the “overlooking facts to make a greater point”. This is mostly with the heartwarming true stories I’d think (Lookin at you Remember the Titans)
Because “Based on a true story” is a marketing line. Believe it or not, people actually think that makes a movie better(!) And the word “based” only means that something from the original story made it into a movie.*
As for why they change things – it’s to make the movie more dramatic. Given the choice between dull facts and a dramatic fictional change to the story, any moviemaker worth anything is going to go with the latter.** Any movie “based on a true story” is a work of fiction.
*And, in Fargo, it wasn’t even that – the line was pure marketing.
**Ron Shelton wrote and directed Cobb, a very accurate biography of the relationship between Ty Cobb and Al Stump. In the movie, and in real life, Stump took secret notes that Cobb never saw. In the movie, Cobb finds the notes. As Shelton said (paraphrasing a bit): “You can’t not have Cobb find the notes.” That’s why Shelton is a successful director and screenwriter – he knew that.
I agree that the fictionalization is often because of wanting to tell a story about the greater truth, or for sake of drama.
But also, scripts go through multiple drafts. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if a screenwriter wrote a script about Teddy Roosevelt or someone that was 90% true to life in the first draft. Then he revises it on his own, and changes around some stuff for a smoother story and to make it less exposition heavy, and it’s down to 85 or 80% true. Then when he sells it, there might be another screenwriter who goes over it, bringing it down to 70% true. Then when there are directors and actors attached, and they want to do certain things and not do other certain things, it brings it down to 50% true. Not that that’s what happens every time, but I think it does happen some.
Sometimes the plots stays very true to reality, but as playwright (and screenwriter) Peter Stone says a fellow author once said, “God Writes Lousy Theater”. As anyone who’s spent time on this Board knows, even the most accurate films still take considerable liberties with reality. And in an awful lot of cases, the relationship between film and reality is negligible.
There was a 1971 TV movie I liked – The Birdmen – about an escape from Kolditz Strafelager during WWI (Many films and TV shows have been made about escapes from this supposedly “unescapable” lockdown, often based on Pat Reid’s works). This story was about POWs who built an actual working glider to fly away.
The story about building the glider is true, but it was never used. The camp was liberated first. (And, although a picture of it was taken, the glider disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Years later, a NOVA TV special reconstructed it from the plans. It flew). I could understand the guys who made the film changing that bity of history – How could you make a film about building a plane and NOT show it taking off?
What bothered me was the rest of the additions. It wasn’t enough that the prisoner they were getting out was a POW – he had to be essential to the war effort. A contributor to the Manhattan Project, no less. It was also essential that they ALMOST get caught, and that one of the heros gets his leg broken in the takeoff effort.
Still a good film (with Chuck Connors, Richard Basehart, Doug McClure, and a post-Beverly Hillbillies Max Baer Jr.), but the incredible liberties they took sort of poisoned it for me.
Maybe it’s that we’re primed for certain things in story, and feel disappointed when those things aren’t in a story, even if it’s based on something from real life. There are certain times in a movie when the protagonist is supposed to face a real hurdle, and have to figure out some way to overcome it, so The Birdmen had the characters almost get caught. If there wasn’t an issue like that, the audience might think it went too easily and not like it.
Also, characters in movies are almost always special in some way. So a character can’t just be a POW, he has to be essential to the war effort.
And we’re always watching for Chekhov’s gun in movies, but in real life there are tons of Chekhov’s guns that never go off. So the screenwriter can include things that are true to life, and the audience might ask “why did that character have that thing/do this thing and it never paid off?”, or the screenwriter can just eliminate that distraction.
I’m not saying it’s right necessarily, but I can see why it’s done.
As I was watching the Canal+ series Borgia, I went back and forth to various histories and biographies, originally to try to understand what was going on, but very quickly, it was to figure out what was real and what was added for “drama.” On its own, I enjoyed the series, and I had the bonus of learning things I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, so it was a win-win for me.
Same with the series The Tudors - while trying to separate truth and fiction, I discovered all sorts of things I didn’t know. It sparked an interest in history that I had lacked for many years.
Mostly what irritates me about the embellishment of these “based on a true story” movies is that people accept them as fact and refuse to believe that, for example, Rose and Jack weren’t lovers on the Titanic. Not that the movies are to blame for the lazy viewers, but it bugs me nonetheless.
I get drama, I get storytelling, but sometimes Hollywood just seems to deliberately change inconsequential facts for no reason, like Connecticut’s vote on the 13th Amendment in Lincoln. It didn’t affect the story, it took extra effort, so why change it? It’s like Hollywood is giving a big FU to their audience. “We change things because we are gods! Kneel before us!”
That’s kind of an annoying attitude. If it is a story based on reality, I want that the story doesn’t completely make up facts. If Hollywood wants to tell a different story, change the names. If it’s a good story, I’ll still watch it.
Where do you draw the line? Movies based on actual real people should strive to be as close to reality as possible (while telling a good story).
But if I make a bio pic on the life of Bob Dylan, but cast Samuel Jackson as Dylan and make him a Chinese Communist peasant who is a NASCAR driver by day and flies fighter jets in the American Revolutionary war (on the Russian side) by night, I guess that’s OK? But hey, you want the real story, watch a documentary, I guess.
At least, no one tried to pass *Inglourious Basterds *off as a factual telling of the end of WWII.
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E, Lee’s play (and later movie) Inherit the Wind told the story of the Scopes “Monkey Trial”, but changed all the names – Scopes became Bert Cates, Clarence Darrow became Henry Drummond, William Jennings Bryan became Matthew Harrison Brady, and so on. I don’t think it really changed anything – I mentally shifted the names to the “rightr” ones. It signaled that this wasn’t history, but drama. Yet people still ended up thinking it was historically accurate.
As I’ve mentioned before, Peter Schaeffer’s plays are nmominally based on history, but he didn’t feel compelled to stick strictly to the facts, and savvy theatergoers realized this. So don’t get your history from the Royal Hunt of the Sun or Amadeus, or even Equus – they’re not about History – they’re about God and Man.
Maybe plays and movies should come with warning stickers for first-time attendees, but a lot of people know already.
But so many of the changes didn’t make any sense on any level. Like, shutting down trying to break the code if you didn’t break it by midnight? Yes, it means you can’t read today’s secret messages until tomorrow. It also means you can’t read today’s secret messages in real time, and act on that intelligence in real time. So? Breaking the secret messages tomorrow or next week is still pretty fucking helpful.
And then the annoying tropes like the wrongheaded commanding officer. Seriously we’ve got to throw in the wrongheaded commanding officer who wants you off the force? And then the war is over, so take all your computers and codebreaking skills and notebooks and set them on fire, we won’t need to break codes anymore now that the war is over!
Go for it. If Abe Lincoln can fight vampires, and Elvis can team up with a black JFK to fight a mummy, I see no reason a black Bob Dylan shouldn’t race in NASCAR and fly fighter jets. It sounds awesome!
Yeah, but I’d say that there’s a difference between “historic fiction” and “based on a true story” stories. I’m perfectly happy for people to change history and introduce amazing elements, just to see what would have happened or to really spice things up. It’s when the marketing guys get involved and try to spin this as being “a re-enactment of true events” that it becomes annoying.
Funnily enough, you’ve mentioned two plays that I’ve actually done in community theater, Inherit the Wind and Equus (I did not appear nude–I left that to the younger, fitter people).
While Equus is nominally based on a true story–Shaffer heard about a stable where a young man had blinded several horses–I wouldn’t think that people would be looking for historical fact in it in any case. Unlike his other plays, it’s not as obviously about a historical event. In fact, until I appeared in it, and read Shaffer’s notes about the writing of it, I had assumed he made it all up.
Yeah, I agree. Saving Private Ryan is a good example. It was indeed based on real events, in that there were actually a group of 4 brothers (the Niland Brothers) where 3 were thought killed, and the Normandy paratrooper survivor was sent home as a result, and that there were the 5 Sullivan brothers, all killed on the USS Juneau earlier in the war.
But there’s no attempt to actually portray the story of Ryan as the story of Fritz Niland; it’s clearly a similar, but fictional story taking place at the same time and place as real events, with no real (or very few) real people portrayed.
On the other hand, there’s “Braveheart”, which takes place within the context of the early stages of the First Scottish War of Independence. Almost everybody who wasn’t a Scottish peasant was a real historical personage, and a LOT of what happened in the movie is untrue, and misleading.
