If I were writing a movie about a cool historical event or person, my primary goal would be telling a compelling story. Sure, I’d try to get the facts straight, but if there was a battle between the facts and the story, the story would win every time.
People like Dopers, who get enraged by historical inaccuracies, represent about 0.5% (I made that stat up for the sake of a more compelling post) of the movie-going audience. Story is king.
Red bit: Made-up figure or no, this claim characterizes those who object to changes in “historical” stories as trivial nitpickers who fret about the color of the buttons (and similarly irrelevant details) .
Some who post objections to a work’s inaccuracies are of that ilk. But to claim that all who object are silly fussbudgets is…inaccurate.
Blue bit: But what if changing the facts changes the story?
This is the non-trivial case in examples such as Selma (in which the actual conflicts are ignored in favor of a fantasized conflict with LBJ) and several movies made by Mel Gibson, in which, variously, English Protestants and Jews are accused of having done things they are unlikely to have done (movies ready for use by hate-crime enthusiasts as rationales for violence).
Changing the facts is not always a good way of telling a story from human history.
Yes, of course you have to shorten, edit and or spice up the story, fine. But it;s stupid to change facts when it does none of those.
Purple bit: Don’t take the “story is king” bit too far. In 1932, MGM made a movie, Rasputin and the Empress, which clearly implied that a Russian princes, Irina, still living when the movie was made, had been ravished by the mad monk Grigor Novikh, aka Rasputin. In fact she never even met Rasputin. She sued MGM for £25,000 (over $100,000) and won.
Another one just came to mind. Simple, plain facts were changed in the made-for-TV movie about disgraced former Canadian Colonel and killer Russell Williams.
I can’t recall all the details but simple things were changed for no apparent reason. For example, when he went to the Ottawa police station to be interviewed by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) the movie showed him removing his boots before entering the interview room. “Ah ha!” That gave an enterprising young officer the opportunity to remove the boots and have a copy of the treads made, ultimately defeating William’s any chance of defense. The thing is though that he was asked during the interview if he was willing to provide shoe prints, and he agreed to it. I can’t imagine why they would not have just stuck to the real story, because this is the turning point of the whole case AND he fucking agreed to it. Why fictionalize that portion at all? Besides, wouldn’t the evidence gathered without his permission be inadmissible in court? I believe it would.
Also, his face was covered when he killed his first victim, yet they showed him with his face completely uncovered. WTF?
So, like, that really wasn’t Paul’s grandfather?
Tell them Argo fuck yourself. 
And your name will be MUD all over Canada.
I just finished the book-a good read, but i am sure that is has been fictionalized. Some of the characters seem to be fantastic-like the Voodoo “witch” who Williams hires to placate the ghost of the murdered lover. I am sure that the novel would be less entertaining if the author had just stuck to the story as printed. Of course, part of the fascination was with the whole aspect of “crime and punishment”-after 4 trials, Williams gets off. In the end, the story is more about the weird world of Savannah-how the people who run it act and behave.
No, but he was very clean.
Sorry, but Asylum Films doesn’t accept outside ideas. I asked.
FTR, I enjoyed their War of the Worlds more than the Tom Cruise one, American Warships was more fun than Battleship, but I can’t bring myself to see Sharknado 1 or 2.
Sharknado was a great movie, in a horrible movie kind of way.
Or is it the other way around? 
Except the movie didn’t give you a general idea of who he was. It portrayed Turing as an aspergery dork who didn’t understand hu-mons emotions, who had to fight wrongheaded idiots to win the war.
But in real life, he got on great with people, despite having some quirky quirks. In real life he was part of a team that was given enormous support, he was liked are respected and supported by his superiors. In real life Bletchley Park wasn’t five guys in a shed, it was thousands of people whose work was considered vital to the war. In real life his work wasn’t burned at the end of the war, because in real life it turns out the British government was still interested in cryptography after the war. In real life Turing was never blackmailed by a Russian spy, which if it were true would make the prohibition on homosexuals getting security clearances sensible, since all you’d have to do is threaten to expose their homosexuality and they’d cravenly betray their country.
The problem I have with the movie isn’t that it gets certain details wrong. The problem is that it gets Turing completely wrong. It doesn’t give you a picture of a real person, it creates a fictional character nothing like the real Turing.
When the Turing character mentioned that he’d “had affairs with men”, I almost laughed out loud in the theater. The real Turing was gay and did have a sex life, but the real Turing also had much better social skills. The movie character might have wanted to have affairs with men, but it seemed totally implausible that a guy who couldn’t understand when he was being invited to join his coworkers for lunch could even manage to correctly identify another gay man.
It told you that he was a visionary genius whose work not only contributed to, very arguably, the most important technological development of the 20th century, but that he saved millions of lives. You might say, “Well, duh, who doesn’t know that?” My parents didn’t know it. And, as southern Baptist who are finally starting to accept the idea that homosexuality might not be a ticket to hellfire, like they once thought, it was nice to hear recommend a movie with a gay hero to me, without using words like, “queer” or “pansy”. As a bisexual woman, who has never come out to them, it was nice to hear them talk respectfully about what Turing did.
Movies usually have something to say, and if it’s any good, what it has to say is generally more than just, “this is a thing that happened.”
Then perhaps they should just make a movie based on pure fiction with something to say, rather than pretending to make a movie about something or someone that it isn’t?
And why is it that reality, ie “a thing that happened” can’t be any good?
I suspect that the whole “based on a true story” meme, if we can call it that, is added to the marketing campaign based on audience research. I can only imagine there is a market sigment that wants “real” stories and not pure fiction, and that throwing in the hint of reality is done to lure these people.
Though really, what other descriptive options are there? “Oh, you’ll recognize the main character’s name, but he didn’t actually do any of the stuff that we have him do” – well, I’ve never heard that in a marketing campaign.
Exactly.
There are plenty of movies “based on a true story” that manage to tell a good story and not shit on history.
Take two examples, one of which elicits quite the reaction from dopers. Apollo 13, and Titanic. *Apollo 13 *manages to make an exciting movie out of an event everyone knows the outcome of, and doesn’t make any egregious historical errors. They do simplify, and excitify certain events, but they’d have had to make Chris Craft’s character complain about the wasted money in this “moon business” to even come close to The Imitation Game’s level of disconnection to reality.
And Titanic - despite what you think of the love story, Cameron managed to fit it within the historical events of the sinking, and got the big picture more or less correct. The closest similarity to TIG was the way Titanic presented Murdock.
How about The Longest Day? The Battle of Britain? The Dam Busters? They seem to be more or less accurate.
On the other hand, The Battle of the Bulge has so many errors it might win in a face off with TIG for most disconnect from the real event.
Biopics like to have an unflawed hero. Night And Day had to hide Cole Porter’s homosexuality in decorous clouds of fiction and Carbine Williams portrayed a much more likeable character than the real David Marshall Williams, who probably was a murderer.