Based on a True Story (But with more car crashes): Fact and Fantasy in 100 Favorite Movies) by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen

"Based on a True Story". How many times have we seen that in a movie or on the box of a video or DVD? And yet, how much of the story we actually see on the screen is based on reality?

And as far as most movies are concerned, very little, actually. Some stories are changed to make them more exciting, some to make them seem more realistic (amazingly enough, truth can be *far* stranger than fiction, and what really happens would be rejected by movie audiences as far too unrealistic... even if it actually happened- like the wife of one of the Apollo 13 astronauts losing her wedding ring down the drain in the shower a week before the capsule suffered trouble in outer space), and some to make the movie conventions we have come to accept (the protagonist of the movie starts out a bit of a jerk, but learns a lesson along the way and becomes a better person).

I've always wondered how much of "True Stories" are true, based on my experience with the film "Open Water", about two scuba divers who go for a pleasure jaunt with a group of tourists and are left behind by their boat. The film has them menaced by sharks and eventually the man dies, and the woman commits suicide to join him. According to the movie, their bodies were never found. If their bodies were never found, how did they know what happened to them, as posited in the movie?

They couldn't, of course. That was the conclusion I came to. After they were left behind by the tourist boat, all else was pure speculation. i.e. guessing. I don't consider that much of "Based on a true story", so when I saw the title of this book, I was intrigued and wondered how many other movies based on true stories had fudged the details.

As I said above, the answer is pretty much all of them. Two that stand out for being truer than the rest are Raging Bull and JFK. I know that JFK gets a lot of flak, but everything in it was based on evidence presented at the Warren Comission. The other film, Raging Bull, is more of a shock today, since the main character, Jake LaMotta, starts out as a jerk and remains one throughout. It eschews the trope of the hero learning to be a better person. And truth be told, I think that trope should be abandoned when it isn't the truth. Oskar Schindler started out a not very nice guy who did good deeds. Nothing in his past impelled him to do so, he just did. The same with the Coach who helped the guy nicknamed "Radio". He helped the kid because it was the right thing to do, not because of some incident in his past that he was ashamed of (as the movie would tell us). I resent this bit of movie trope-ism because it denies that some people just do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, not because of some unresolved issue in their past or because they learned better. I think it cheapens humanity to say we only do right because of some incident in our pasts. It may not give the audience the same "feel good" sensation, but it's truer to who we are as humans.

So though I thoroughly enjoyed this book, I also felt rather insulted at the way the filmamkers of many of these films censored things out or put in things only to make us, the audience feel better. While I don't ascribe to the belief that true film should wound people, I do think that when someone makes a movie and tells us that this movie is true and based on real events, that they remain true to reality and what actually happened. If you are making a film solely to entertain, then tell us so and don't try to pass it off as truth. I'm more entertained by real truth than convenient lies and falsehoods passed off as truth. Read this book to enlighten yourself about the nature of "reality" or what passes for such in the movie theatre. Occasionally funny, sometimes infuriating, but always interesting, this book will keep you reading, and thinking, long after you have read it.