This Film is Based on a True Story

You’ve just watched a film, likely one from Hollywood. You may have caught the quick text flying across the

screen—just after or before the opening credits—declaring that this film was “based on” or “inspired by” a true story, or, even more vaguely: “true events.”

                Inspired by true events. How’s that for safe? What story isn’t inspired by true events at some level? And “based on”? “Based” means the directors and producers—I carefully avoid using the term “artists” in this sense—are declaring their right to take as much licence with the truth as they feel is necessary to sell tickets. Every film, if you stretch your thinking far enough, every piece of art at all, is based on true events, or inspired by them. I mean, where else do ideas come from?

                They add and alter to create drama. The question becomes, why can we not simply tell a true story? Why must we inject lies into truth to make it supposedly more interesting? Sin? Sex sells?

                So you watch the film, which follows a pretty basic Hollywood formula. Despite this, because of the little disclaimer at the beginning, you keep telling yourself: true story, true story, true story.

                Then, if you’re like me, once you’ve seen the film, you go look it up. You’re surprised that what you watched was nothing like what really happened. You’re a little hurt. Maybe you even feel cheated. Very little of what you saw was true, yet they used the names of real people, they used actual dates and locations in quick flashes across the screen, so that you would note “this moment was important,” and, depending, draw parallels to other events in history or your own life that were happening at the same time. (Was I the only one thrilled by the Star Wars toys at the end of Argo? Doubt it.)

                So you’re disappointed, feeling conned into believing this great story of sacrifice /success /ingenuity /perseverance /insanity /sex was actual, when really it’s just another fiction.

                When you follow up those inaccuracies, you learn that the director or producer or screenwriter made the changes for the sake of drama. That is, for the sake of fiction. To make the truth more moving, they needed to turn it into a lie.

                This always bothers me. Not because I don’t like fiction—I love it—but when they use real names and events and then dress them up, they try to fool the audience to gain its sympathies. It’s like they don’t trust themselves enough to tell a good made-up story, so they give steroids to a true story, but then hide what they’ve doctored.

                Braveheart, Pearl Harbor, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Titanic, Munich, Bonnie and Clyde, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Patton—just a cursory glance at the Academy Award nominees list for any given year will reveal that lying about the truth sells very well as art. But when you do a little research, you ask yourself why they didn’t tell the truth in the first place, why it wasn’t good enough.

                One of my favorite films is Finding Forrester. It’s loosely inspired by the life of J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye. Rather than deal with awkward bits of reality, or whore up the truth to make it exciting, the creators took the themes and a handful of applicable facts regarding Salinger’s seclusion and turned them in to a very fine fiction, without using real names, people, or events. If you know Salinger, you know it, but you don’t need to know Salinger to know it. It’s inspired by a true story, but they don’t need to flash you a lie at the beginning. They trust that their art can stand by itself, and it does.

                When I was young, I saw the violent climax to the film Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde gets out of the car to help a stranded motorist he recognizes. He munches an apple and smiles in the bright sunshine. Suddenly, a Thompson-toting posse springs up from some nearby bushes, the old man dives under his truck, and the ambush is sprung. Clyde gets that one, meaningful look back at Bonnie, who is sitting pleasantly in the car with the door open. Then, for what felt like forever when I was ten, the bank-robbing lovers are hammered with machine gun bullets. I recall still the spasms of Bonnie’s body as they fired and fired.

                Violent, horrifying, intense.

                Untrue.

                In reality, the car never stopped. The posse leapt up and opened fire—no one gave the order—and turned the couple into Swiss cheese while they were still driving. Hundreds of rounds were fired, passing through the car panels, the couple, and then the other side.

                Violent, horrifying, intense.

                True.

                I’ve often wondered what that ending would have been like if the true version would have been filmed. Would I have felt cheated because Beatty and Dunaway wouldn’t have been filmed in close up for that last “I love you” look? I don’t think so, but my dependence on art has begun to influence my truth.

                Cliché time: art imitates life. But when life becomes so informed by art that only art can be depicted, where is the life at all?

                Have we become so dependent on drama that we can’t tell a true story? Has capitalism and salesmanship so permeated our thinking that lying isn’t just easy and natural, but expected?

                Perhaps the next great movement in film will be a true cinema verite; the true story as accurately as you can give it without making a documentary. How’s that for a challenge for actors: to make them act like it’s life, not art. 

Summer of the Geek

            Since about 1999, after a long hiatus following the first of the modern Batman movies, superhero films have been pretty respectable—as summer blockbusters go. X-Men 4, Transformers 3, Thor, Green Lantern, Captain America. . . . This summer is so front-loaded with the nerdtacular that the ten-year-old in me can hardly contain himself. I think I was born twenty years too early. They’re even dipping beyond the mainstream heroes. I mean, Thor and Green Lantern? Who ever thought to see them on the screen?

These movies have been gold for movie producers, and as you can see by the number of sequels going on, they’ve proven to be a cash cow for Hollywood. And if there’s one thing Hollywood knows how to do, it’s squeeze a capital bovine dry.

Batman’s going on seven modern movies, his third of the second set coming next summer. Superman’s going on movie six, reboot two. Spider-Man is being rebooted after two good and one pathetic films. Iron Man’s had two, Hulk two (one a reboot), now we have Thor and Captain  America all leading us in the direction of next summer’s Avengers movie, which can’t possibly live up to this much hype but who the hell cares? Just that they’re making it blows me away, and these flicks are laden with big-name stars and directors having fun and—often—doing something for their kids or—oftener—funding their next artsy project.

But, ah, the shine is starting to wear off. The public’s starting to see the formula, and at the glacial pace it takes the mob, they’re starting to get a touch bored of the same ol’ same ol’. People know that when they sit down, they’re either getting an origin story or a “how the hero’s presence has made things escalate” story. Those are the only two formulae. Usually the hero quits once per movie, his girlfriend gets kidnapped (all three Spider-Man movies!) and at some point in the third act a sequel is set up. Sequels are usually announced before the first film is released. And then there’s this Avengers mess . . . I never leave a theatre during the credits anymore because there’s always some teaser.

Are they cookie cutter? You betcha! Can you predict everything that’s going to happen, every line of dialogue? Yar! Are you going to catch all the nerdy in-jokes if you’re the type what bathes themselves daily? Unlikely! Is Michael Bay a good director? Nuh-uh, but he blows things up good.   

             But the nerds deserve this Geek Renaissance. The reformed comic addict in me (been on the wagon over a decade now) has been waiting hsi life for 1) film technology to catch up to comic books and 2)for Hollywood to understand that the stories in comics are good (not great), and need only be adapted for the screen, not rewritten. X-Men in 2000 and especially Spider-Man in 2002 taught this.

            It’s not nerdom’s fault that when something bears Hollywood fruit they must turn it to fruit leather.

            Is that my second Hollywood squeezing-related metaphor? Maybe.

            Nerds deserve—nay—require this summer. They sat through 1990’s rubber-shielded Captain America, through the last three movies of the Batman franchise pre-Begins, and all those Stan Lee-awful made for TV movies (the Hulk died falling out of a helicopter? Really? The Hulk, you say? Did you even bother to look at the comic? The Hulk eats tanks and farts cruise missiles).

            It’s about time the nerds enjoyed some actually decent movies. Most of them, yes, are over-contrived special effects extravaganzas—Thor and Green Lantern—some are vehicles for good actors’ egos—Iron Man, Hulk, X­-anything—and a few are well-crafted, subtle, thematic and brilliant—The Dark Knight and  . . . uh . . .

            But, c’mon. Survivor’s been on the air a decade and The Bachelor/ette has been railed on for its idiocy before on this page. I mean, who are you to say something’s stoopid? You watch Glee.

            So, please, let the nerds have their day. Let them giggle at inside-jokes, quibble about changes to the canon, and laden theatres with the smells of BO and stale nachos. They have waited for this brief time where their interests are represented on the screen by spandex-clad superbuffs with ‘roid rage and afraid-looking Botox-ettes dressed in dental floss. Let the geek have his day.