Every so often, I pitch an idea to Cracked.com, and every so often, they politely decline it or ignore me totally. In the spirit of this quaint tradition, here's one I didn't even bother trying to pitch, but still wanted to write.
Anyone capable of even a little bit of critical thinking knows that "based on a true story" at the start of a movie doesn't mean the same thing as "This is all completely true, we swear."
Sometimes, however, the events in popular films are so completely contrary to what actually happened that film-makers would be better off with a title card that said "Here's some shit we decided might have happened."
Such as...
5. American Gangster.
The Movie: Denzel Washington stars as real life drug dealer Frank Lucas. Having worked his way up from a mere limo driver in the underworld hierarchy, Lucas uses a combination of brutality and strategic thinking to dominate the heroin trade in 1970s New York.
An intelligent, business savvy black man, Lucas is able to out-plan the competition and obtain his heroin direct from South East Asia, smuggling it in the coffins of dead G.I.s, whilst using his calm, philosophical exterior and the dismissive racism of the time to remain under the police radar.
Stupid Reality: Whilst all movies employ a "pinch of salt" mentality when claiming to be based on the truth, people who knew Lucas - or, indeed, any of the principle characters involved in the story - have put the movie's accuracy rating at a healthy "one percent." That's an estimate from people intimately involved with the real events the movie is based on. It also means "American Gangster" is probably less accurate than "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."
Starting his life in the criminal hierarchy as a humble "guy-who-robbed-bars-at-gunpoint," Lucas was described by associates as a brutal, impulsive and functionally illiterate flunky.
Rather than the suave, contemplative and sympathetic figure epitomised by Denzel, the real Lucas succeeded in crime because he was the nastiest rat in the shit-house. Not only is there no evidence of his ever using coffins to smuggle drugs, but most contemporaries agree he simply wasn't smart enough to come up with the business model he is credited with. The only source for these facts about Lucas' life? An interview with Frank Lucas from a few years ago.
Turns out violent heroin dealers from the slums can't entirely be trusted. Who knew?
4. Braveheart.
The Movie: Mel "he wasn't crazy yet" Gibson plays Scottish folk-hero William Wallace, a simple man who wants only the quiet life until, typically, he is PUSHED TOO FAR. Atypically, he then instigates a national uprising and begins a war that eventually sees Scotland gain independence. (Apparently, there are some occasional wars that aren't caused by Jews.)
Wallace is martyred in an emotional scene before he sees this come to pass, maintaining his stoical dignity and everyman demeanour even in the face of torture.
Stupid Reality: Also, he was a pumped-up giant who committed a slew of war crimes.
Seriously.
Whilst Mel Gibson stands a normal 5' 10", most scholars agree that in reality, Wallace was a giant, estimated to stand at an absolute minimum of six-feet-six. When the script for the movie mentions that Wallace is rumoured to be seven feet tall, it's not actually kidding.
Also, he was far less a noble savage forced to take arms, and more a savage savage who liked taking arms off of other people. At the shoulder. With a big fucking sword.
After the battle of Stirling Bridge, Wallace - whose forces had routed the English - personally skinned the corpse of the Scottish treasurer and had a long strip of his hide made into a strap for his sword.
Following this victory, Wallace invaded England and was reported to commit acts of ethnic cleansing, his men raping and murdering anyone they came across with glee. He was also said to burn down schools with children inside, and have monks drowned for his entertainment.
One can only assume those scenes were extras on the DVD.
Wallace has spawned a thousand Scottish tattoos, remembering him for patriotic slogans like "How can I be guilty of treason when England is foreign to me?"
His other famous line, "Because Fuck Monks And Children!" has yet to catch on.
3. Erin Brockovich.
The Movie: Julia Roberts plays Erin Brockovich, a spunky female lawyer, because for a few years in the early 2000s, approximately 30% of our entertainment involved spunky female lawyers.
After getting a job as a legal secretary, plucky single mother Erin notices a file on a small town where there are a disproportionately high number of cancer cases, and, through her amazing talents of hard-headedness and large-boobedness, manages to sleuth out the cause: A local conglomerate poisoning the water table and, by extension, the people of the town.
She then champions the cause of these poor downtrodden folks and eventually brings the evil corporation to justice.
Stupid Reality: Alright, fair enough, Erin Brockovich wasn't an illiterate heroin dealer who burned children alive like the other entrants on this list.* But the happy ending of the movie is far from accurate.
In the film, Brockovich's street-smarts lead to the case of the townspeople being considered in private arbitration, which means that it is reviewed by a judge or judges without the need for a trial-by-jury.
This is fine in theory, but legal scholars have begun to fret that the rise of private arbitration runs the risk of creating a two-tier legal system and rampant cronyism.
In the case of the Brockovich trial, the judges who arbitrated were wined, dined and taken on cruises by the lawyers for the conglomerate that poisoned the town, which does tend to put paid to the idea of impartiality.
A lot of the residents of Hinkley, California were aghast at the story portrayed in the movie. Far from a happy ending, many of them had to wait months for their settlements - without ever receiving the interest that had accrued - and felt that their compensation was nowhere near high enough. And some claim to have never received their money at all.
Residents have even attempted to sue their own lawyers for, in layman's terms, "doing a shitty job."
Still, at least the company that was poisoning the water has been forced to mend it's evil ways, right? Not according to a 2010 article it hasn't, no...
2. Bonnie and Clyde.
The Movie: "They're Young, They're In Love, And They Kill People," proclaimed the tag-line to the sexy, devil-may-care crime movie with the tragic ending.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (played with ridiculous attractiveness by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) embark on a Robin Hood crime spree, never harming the innocent or robbing the working man. They're playful, good looking and really don't mean any harm, only killing in self defense and at one point taking playful pictures with a kidnapped lawman. Sort of like "The Beverly Hillbillies," but with more larceny.
Eventually, hubris and the harsh nature of the world catches up with the young lovers, and their former lawman hostage, enraged at the ignominy of his treatment, tracks them down. Betrayed by one of their own, the unarmed lovers are cornered and share a final, passionate glance before being torn apart in a hellish, unending maelstrom of gunfire.
Stupid Reality: To say that the real-life experiences of depression-era outlaws were grittier than the movies make out is like saying that the Holocaust was less fun than Julie Andrews made it seem.
Clyde Barrow, whose first arrest came from not returning a rental car on time, was a killer long before he met Bonnie Parker, having beaten a man to death in prison after the man repeatedly raped him. Embittered (for some strange reason) upon his release, Barrow began a one man war with the forces of law and order in Texas, seeing every crime he committed as an act of personal revenge on authority.
And the whole Robin Hood aspect? The Barrow gang were responsible for the shootings of nine lawmen, as well as a smattering of shopkeepers, who were killed for items such as "twenty-eight dollars and some groceries."
As for the glamour of outlaw life, the gang's notoriety left them afraid to approach public areas, meaning they invariably bathed in cold, outdoor streams and ate around campfires, if at all.
Having narrowly escaped capture by the awesomely named Sheriff Smoot Schmid (sheriff Smoot Schmid sold sea shells by the sea shore on his days off, fact fans) the two murderous hobos were finally brought to ground by Frank Hamer, who was far from the bumbling victim the movie portrayed.
A big, powerfully built man who was semi-retired at this point, Hamer was a legend in Texas for doing things his own way, cracking heads and getting results. He was known for his disdain for authority and an obsession with his own personal ideas of justice. Before Barrow and Parker, he had personally shot fifty-three suspects, and been injured in the line of duty seventeen times.
That's right. Bonnie and Clyde, who were the bad guys, were taken down by Dirty-fucking-Harry.
Hamer had never met the couple before his posse killed them, but far from being the un-armed sweethearts hollywood gave us, Bonnie and Clyde were found to be in possession of machine guns, shotguns, rifles and pistols, and a few thousand rounds of ammunition. Of course, by the time these weapons were discovered in the back seat of their car, the couple had been shot so many times that the coroner couldn't find a way to keep the embalming fluid in the corpses.
1. The Hurricane.
The Movie: Much like the song Bob Dylan wrote about the same subject, The Hurricane is a story of racially motivated injustice in 1960s America. Denzel Washington (again?!) plays Rubin "The Hurricane" Carter, a young black boxer on the fast-track to the middleweight title.
Having already been wrongfully jailed for attempting to defend his friends from a pedophile, Carter is all set to put his past behind him when the spectre of racial discrimination rises again, seeing him first denied his rightful place as the world champion, and then arrested for brutal murders that he had nothing to do with.
Imprisoned but unbowed, Carter spends years fighting the corrupt white system, becoming an icon of racial injustice, before mounting a last-ditch appeal that sees him exonerated of his crimes, finally allowed to walk free after nearly twenty years of wrongful imprisonment.
Stupid Reality: First off, Carter wasn't on a fast track to anywhere, much. Although a ranked middleweight contender, Carter was already past his prime and slipping down the rankings by the time of his fight with middleweight champ Joey Giardello. Giardello won the fight not by deignt of racist judges, but with the classic boxing trick of "handing Rubin Carter his ass for fifteen straight rounds." Giardello sued the movie producers, who were forced to admit it was bullshit and pay him off.
As for Carter himself, he was far from the embattled saint depicted on screen. He had spent time in juvenile detention, but not for protecting his friends from pederasts. He was instead convicted of "protecting" a man from his own wallet and wristwatch in a mugging - mugging being one of Carter's hobbies. He assaulted and robbed numerous people, black and white, with impunity.
Whilst spending time in detention centres, he was frequently noted for his habit of blaming everyone else for his own wrongdoing. Even when caught red-handed in a misdeed, he would always strenuously protest his own innocence and claim he was the victim of various conspiracies against him.
In June of 1966, two black men - one short and stocky, one tall and thin - entered the Lafayette bar and grill in New Jersey and shot three people dead. Witnesses say the shooters left in a white car. Rubin Carter was subsequently pulled over whilst driving his white Cadillac, and, when police recognised him, he was immediately LET GO.
Far from being discriminated against for his race, Carter was let off the hook because of his celebrity.
As reports became more detailed and specified that the shooters had left in a white Cadillac with butterfly tail lights, Carter was stopped again (still driving his white Cadillac - which had butterfly tail lights) and arrested.
In the car were Carter (a muscular 5' 7") and his friend John Artis (who was taller and thinner.) Also in the car were a shotgun shell and a .32 caliber pistol round. Both a shotgun and a .32 were used in the Lafayette shootings.
Convicted and sentenced, Carter began a long campaign of protesting his innocence, eventually leading to a re-trial a decade later. This time - with two black jurors in attendance - Carter was found guilty again.
During the period of his re-trial, incidentally, Carter was released on bail just long enough to savagely assault a female supporter in a quibble over a hotel bill.
Carter was eventually released, as in the movie, due to the efforts of a Canadian religious sect that, in reality, Carter has since severed all ties with. His convictions were never oveturned; it was merely decided that a third trial, twenty years after the fact, was not in the public interest, and that Carter should be released on the basis of time served.
If all of this weren't damning enough, during his re-trial, Carter was offered a deal: Take a polygraph test. If he passed the test and it agreed that he was innocent, the result would be included in his defense. If he failed the test and it made him look guilty, it would be ignored.
Carter still refused to take the test.
Also, Denzel Washington REALLY needs to start screening his parts a little better.
*That we know of.
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