Customer Reviews

Based on a True Story: Fact and Fantasy in 100 Favorite Movies

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"Based on a True Story" is an immensly enjoyable mini-survey of the "real" story behind many of the fact-based films of our time with particular emphasis placed on how much "fact" there is at each films base. The breezily written accounts of these films are always fun to read and, if they don't "expose" many new factual mis-steps (How many film fans are there who don't already know how "fictional" the purportedly fact-based "A Beautiful Mind" is?)they do offer intelligent, brief, discussions of films that (wonder of wonders!) actually merit them. One major quibble though: For a book that is dedicated to exposing falsehoods in films of all sorts, it perpetuates one of the greatest. This is not the first book that attributes the line from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" ("When the legend becomes fact, print the legend") to John Ford. Ford DIRECTED the movie. The screenplay was by James Warner Bellah & Willis Goldbeck, from a story by Dorothy M. Johnson. While it is notoriously hard to tell who did what in a film, one would think that the Screenwriters should at least be credited with the DIALOGUE!

As an historian who is also a film buff, I try to be lenient when faced with a movie that bends the facts more than necessary. Anyone who has ever tried to write a screenplay, even one based on a novel much less on a real person's life or a real historical incident (and I have), knows you do indeed have to adapt a story (or real life) to the medium of film -- but there's a limit, and some flicks are just too much to take. The authors, talented entertainment-journalists, know this, for the most part. They obviously loved *Shakespeare in Love* and admit that it stuck close to the exceedingly few facts that are known about Shakespeare; likewise *Girl with a Pearl Earring* (a gorgeous film), since almost nothing is known about Vermeer. And they'll accept the rather minor biographical changes made in *Erin Brockovich* and *Norma Rae* as being simply unavoidable. But they really rake Mel Gibson over the coals (deservedly, I think), both for the perversion of English history committed in *Braveheart* (the Christ-like martyrdom of Wallace, they suggest, was practice for *The Passion*) and for the equally perverted treatment of the American Revolution in *The Patriot* (which pissed off a lot of people on the other side of the Atlantic with its suggestion of Nazi-style behavior on the part of the British). They come down hard on *The Hurricane* for claiming that Carter won fights that he actually lost, merely to reenforce the theme of racism, nor have they anything good to say about *Elizabeth*, the 1998 version, in which Cate Blanchett portrays a young queen so insipidly naive and trusting, "she wouldn't have lasted longer than a fortnight (or whichever ye olde calendar notation ye prefer)" -- in which they'll entirely correct. (I hated that movie.) They don't have much use for Spike Lee's egotism, either, especially in *Malcolm X*. They reserve real venom for the fact that *Amistad* not only jerks history around, the production company, Spielberg's Dreamworks, actually had the nerve to send out study guides to schools promoting wholly made-up characters as actual historical models to be emulated. In other cases, the authors simply wonder why liberties with real people were taken unnecessarily, as in *Seabiscuit* or *The Elephant Man*. Some of the biopics the pair analyze, such as *American Splendor*, probably don't belong here (Harvey Pekar is hardly "historical"), and some, like *Communion* and *The Mothman Prophecies*, don't belong anywhere, but they presumably had to come up with an even hundred. However, the film that led to this book being written is Oliver Stone's *JFK*, the most vilified film ever made -- before it was even released. As the subsequently published "documented screenplay" demonstrates, every voiced opinion in Stone's film came out of forty years of assassination research. "To its critics, *JFK* was a film that offended their deeply held view of the world. Stone questioned their religion." This is a good book to keep at hand while browsing through your DVD collection.

This book is a non-stop joy to read. Funny, irreverant, intellectual and endlessly fascinating. It's divided into quick to read chapters so it's perfect for carting off to the doctor's office, your son's baseball game, the line at the DMV, or sneaking in chapters between work assignments at the office, although I pretty much read it to cover to cover in a couple of days. I absolutely loved it.

For any movie fan, Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen's "Based On a True Story* (*But With More Car Crashes)" is as fun as a tub of buttered popcorn. These 100 brief articles on how movies based on true stories diverged from the actual facts make compulsive, page-turning reading. Some of the cinematic whoppers related here were already well-known ("A Beautiful Mind," "Titanic"), others less so ("Boys Don't Cry"). And really, did any sane person think "The Amityville Horror" or "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" were documentaries? But they sure are fun to read about, especially with the sprightly, sardonic approach Vankin and Whalen take to writing about them.

That said, the book contains more proofreading errors than any book I've read recently--a real problem for a book that sets itself the task of correcting factual misconceptions. Words such as "a" and "the" go missing with regularity in the text, making it read at times like a bad Charlie Chan screenplay. There also are frequent and deplorable misspellings ("Comtesse," not "Comptess," is the correct version of "Countess" in French). Nevertheless, the sheer fun of the book makes up somewhat, if not completely, for the frequent errors. To read or not to be? I leave that question to you.

Great book because it gives the other side of the "based on a true story" movie. Makes you look at movies in a different light.

The authors do meticulous research and supply ample source footnotes in their reviews of one hundred movies dating from the seventies to many quite recent releases. Their analysis is so straightforward despite the liberal interjection of sarcasm that it is impossible to conclude that the great majority of Hollywood filmmakers couldn't honor truth if you paid them to, even though in many cases they apparently enjoy pretending to while being paid.

If you are a movie fan and look at cinema as a strong forcefor "truth and beauty" in the world this book will cause you to thing again. Is it possible that all the failed would be blockbusters are an indication that the audience has enough continuous access to viewing video products that even the most uncaring are better able to instinctively sniff out obscured incredibility and turn their noses up?

The fascination with mere flickering images may be over. We will see what happens as the means of production goes all digital and the price of entry into movie making goes down by orders of magnitude. It may be that everyone can get a shot at being a star. We also may be on the receiving end of many opinion pieces masquerading as documentaries. Yes I know, at least Michael Moore cares and believes passionately about his subject matter.

If you really want to hear about an instance of dishonest and ludicrous audience manipulation do an internet search on "lemmings to the sea" and find out about Disney's cruelty and venality in the 1958 production "White Wilderness". Suffice to say that lemmings never hurled themselves off cliffs committing suicide.

As the title of this book suggests, the authors examine the accuracy of 100 fictional movies that claim to be based on fact. The book is divided into sections based on theme to help the reader understand the various subcategories of "true story" movies such as: true crime, docu-trauma, and out of the past. Each three or four page chapter discusses the main events of the movie in comparison with books and primary sources about the same event or person. The authors include a works cited entry at the end of each chapter; I found this to be a nice touch in case you want to do further research. Overall, the book is easy to read and the selected movies are accessible and mainstream. The only downfall to this particular book is that the authors do not provide a very thorough summary of the movie, which may limit the reader's understanding of the chapter if they have not yet viewed the movie.

I can see several potential uses for this book in the English classroom. Primarily, this book could be used in a unit about levels of truth across all forms of texts. Teachers may use this book as a resource for discussing the legitimacy of different sources of information: comparing primary vs. secondary sources. This book could also be used to discuss the ethical implications of saying something is "based on a true story." How does the viewer react when something is supposedly true? Students could also use the book to examine how and why authors, directors, and artists distort reality. Students may be surprised to learn that films which appear to portray true events are often times highly sensationalized in order to draw bigger crowds to the box office.

Too many chapters are superficial. The author's spend many pages on each movie going over the plot and other well known details and then give only 2-3 comparison/contrasting points between the movie and the 'true story' Woulda been better covering 50 movies and providing more historical scholarly work.

Based on a True Story tells the "real facts" behind dozens of movies that are supposedly based on real people and stories - from blockbusters like Erin Brockovich to more obscure films. The stories are often fascinating and revealing. But the authors' analysis often left me frustrated - they obviously give certain films more leeway than others when it comes to bending the truth. One film might ignore inconvenient facts, and it's dismissed as "blatant pandering", but another movie might do something almost identical and it's called "fulfilling the director's vision". It's quite obvious which types of movies the authors like and which ones they don't. I enjoyed the backstories behind the films, but after a while I started skipping over the authors' harangues.