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Basing a book on a true story is a handy way to get some publicity for a project. But hey! Why not save time and effort by cutting out the middleman? Just come up with your own, entirely fictional story and tell everyone that it actually happened. Who's going to find out?

Everyone who visits IMDb, for a start.

The best case scenario is that you get a wry chuckle from your fans and a nod in a couple of papers. The worst case scenario is that a gaggle of chuckleheads band together and sue you for selling the story to them under false pretences. Best solution? Just say that it's fiction all along.

Compare Very Loosely Based On A True Story. Contrast But It Really Happened.

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Examples:

Film

• The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was supposedly based on a true story, but no such "massacre" ever took place. Leatherface is allegedly loosely based on the serial killer Ed Gein, but that's like saying Dirty Harry is based on a real police detective.
  • The director mentioned in the DVD commentary that if you check the dates during which the fictional events supposedly occur, they correspond with the dates that they were filming the movie. So, kinda sorta technically, for a given value of technical, the events really did happen. In a way.
• Fargo is supposedly based on a true story. It isn't.
  • The Coen Brothers (eventually) tried to weasel their way out of this by saying that everything in the movie was meant to be interpreted as fiction, including the blurb at the beginning that claimed it was based on a true story.
  • Another lie they fed the media was that there was a news report in 1987 about a businessman who planned on having his wife fake-kidnapped for ransom money, but the police caught him before he could make his plan come to fruition, and the Coens asked themselves "what if he had succeeded?".
• Hidalgo is based on the actual stories of Frank Hopkins — but Hopkins is known to history as a con-man and quite possibly a pathological liar, so it's anybody's guess how much of it actually happened.
  • None of it actually happened. Hopkins was not part Native American, did not ever work in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, never visited the Middle East (and certainly was never in a gigantic race in the Middle East) etc. etc. etc. On some level, however you've got to admire the guy for inventing a story that Hollywood decided to make into a movie (given all the writers who have stories they are trying unsuccessfully to sell to Hollywood).
    • This does not, of course, stop it from being a truly awesome movie.
• The Amityville Horror is supposedly based on a true story. However, the book containing said "true story" was admitted by its writer to be fabrication.
  • In a similar fashion, The Haunting in Connecticut purports to be based on a true story. However, like Amityville, Ray Garton, the author of the book that the film (and a Discovery Channel documentary) was based on, has admitted that the "true story" was a fabrication. He has said that none of the family members could get their story straight, and that they were dealing with alcoholism and drug addiction at the time, which may have affected their judgment. When he pointed this out to Ed and Lorraine Warren, the case investigators (who, not coincidentally, also investigated the Amityville case), they reportedly told him, "Make it up and make it scary."
• King Arthur is billed as the true historical story of King Arthur, but instead is little more than a "remix" of the popular Arthur mythos. Whether there was a historical Arthur at all remains a matter of fierce historical debate, and there are several potential candidates for the basis of the character, none of which bear more than a surface similarity to the movie's Arthur.
  • It's not exactly a success as a "true historical story" either - the entire movie is one long historical inaccuracy. Heck, the title character himself lived about 300 years before the movie is supposed to take place.
• Back in the 70s, the very first "snuff" film (imaginatively entitled Snuff) purported to depict the actual on-camera murder of an actress. Despite all the controversy that was stirred up — which actually was the entire point — the murder was later revealed to be a hoax, albeit a not-quite convincing one. In fact, the distributors of the movie had actually just bought some random South American B-Movie and grafted on their own, completely different short bit of footage (the "snuff"), replacing the actual movie's ending.
  • That, coupled by the fact that the snuff footage looked unbelievably fake. See for yourself.
• The Blair Witch Project does this deliberately and plays it to the hilt.
  • ...ripping off The Last Broadcast in the process.
• The Last Samurai is based on an odd amalgamation of the historical Satsuma rebellion and the part played in the earlier Boshin war by French officer Jules Brunet. The Anvilicious "guns vs swords" plot is particularly ironic, considering that even the real "last samurai" of the Satsuma rebellion openly embraced modern weaponry for the tactical advantages it offered. The decline of the samurai class in real life came about in a much slower and less dramatic fashion and there were certainly no embittered American Civil War heroes involved.
  • Not to mention the Real Life Japanese threw all their French advisors out in 1871 for Prussian/German advisors. They didn't take advice from losers, no way in the world they'd take advice from a Confederate officer.
    • He was a Union cavalryman, but the American military of the time was not considered to be that great, so the point still stands.
• Amadeus was based on an apocryphal tale Salieri, a contemporary of Mozart, went mad late in his life and confessed to killing Mozart. It is a matter of historical record that he died during a long period of illness, but confoundingly, the film accepts both of these stories as true, and sets about to tell a story about how a man can murder someone else with a disease. After that premise, all the other errors on Mozart's life seem insignificant, but are still quite numerous: His mother-in-law is depicted as a harsh shrew when in fact they got along famously; Salieri being depicted as his arch rival when in fact the two were at least friendly competitors, if not actual friends; the Requiem Mass being commissioned by Salieri (Mozart never did find out who the anonymous patron was, but we know now); and Salieri helping to compose the Requiem (it is unknown how much of the piece Mozart finished, and there is some small debate over who wrote the rest of it, but Salieri's name is never, EVER brought up at these debates).
  • Curiously enough, this is unlikely to be an example of Did not Do the Research, as the movie depicts a number of aspects of Mozart as accurate, particularly whenever he stumbles across to a piano or an orchestra. He actually could do all of the things that the movie shows him doing, and so much more.
    • As could Salieri: His own talents as a musician were seldom explicitly mentioned in the film, but they are evident for anyone with a keen eye. For example, the scene where he is reading the score of one of Mozart's pieces, and hears the full piece in his head. He was actually one of the few musicians of his time that was capable of that.
  • It is very possible that Salieri wanted to kill Mozart, however. Mozart was incredibly difficult to get a long with: Haydn once observed Mozart at a social gathering, and stated that at the end of the night, he had made one-hundred enemies. Another thing that the movie gets right (to some extent, at least).
    • The historical inaccuracies are intentional - quite simply, Shaffer and Forman did not want to write a faithful biography of Mozart, but they used it just as a premise.
• Similar to Fargo, Dude, Where's My Car? begins with the statement "The following is based on actual events" and proceeds to tell a completely made up story. In this case, however, it's a story that no one could ever believe was true, making the opening just another joke instead of an attempt to trick people.
• Peter Jackson's Forgotten Silver is a truly stunning example of the trope. Jackson claimed to have discovered his neighbor was the widow of Colin MacKenzie, an early 20th century filmmaker who invented many revolutionary processes but was also extraordinarily unlucky and ended up completely obscured by history. His goal with the film was explicitly to make people think it was real, and to this end he got such notable figures as Harvey Weinstein and Leonard Maltin to participate, as well as coming up with a story, including explanations of how MacKenzie could have done so much and remain unknown, that's just barely plausible enough that people would want to believe it.
  • If it's the one where he dies on camera during the Spanish Civil War then from this Tropers view point it failed. There's more to looking like authentic '30s film footage than changing the hue to brown.
• Picnic At Hanging Rock is an adaptation of a novel that tried its very best to pretend it was true.
• Scary Movie 4 used the words "Based On True Events" at the end of its trailer as a parody of all of the horror movies that use this trope.
• The Exorcism of Emily Rose was loosely based on the Anneliese Michel case. Emphasis on "loosely": the film depicts the jury letting the priests and parents off with probation, while in real life, they were thrown in jail for manslaughter resulting from negligence. Not to mention, it changes the setting from 1976 Germany to modern America.
• FairyTale: A True Story. Just...yeah.
  • More a case of Stranger Than Fiction - there was a Cottingley Fairy Hoax, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did investigate it, and Harry Houdini was a friend of his at the time! But the movie fails to mention that the children eventually admitted to faking the photos, making it literally based on a Great Big Lie.
• The first Return of the Living Dead opens with "Everything in this story really happened. None of the names or locations or events have been altered."
• Anchorman The Legend Of Ron Burgundy mocks this tendency with its introductory text: "The following is based on actual events. Only the names, locations, and events have been changed."

Literature

• In the 1970s, the book The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail (retitled Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the United States) claimed to reveal the truth about a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene that was hidden in various Renaissance paintings. It was later revealed to be completely fictional, but not before hundreds of thousands of people had been conned.
  • That book heavily inspired (i.e., was ripped off by) The Da Vinci Code, which caused an identical resurgence in public interest.
    • Amusingly, the authors of the first book sued Brown for plagiarism, but it was pointed out that either they claim that the book is true, thus destroying their own case, as you cannot copyright history and facts; or that it was false, thus destroying whatever credibility they had and losing anyway as you can't copyright ideas. Needless to say, they lost. The Da Vinci Code actually gives HBHG a mention, but "inspired by" isn't the same as plagiarism.
    • They got exactly what they wanted, though: tons of free publicity.
    • ...and a huge legal bill that outweighs any advantage from the extra publcity.
• This is part of the plot in Mike Nelson's Death Rat!, where the main character, an author who "doesn't look the part" of an adventure novelist, hires a handsome lunkhead to pose as the author of his eponymous book. Trouble is, said lunkhead didn't read the book first and sold it as a true story: a true story featuring a 6-foot-long rat.
• All of the angsty teen-lit novels written anonymously by Beatrice Sparks were written as cautionary tales to children about whatever the author didn't like. Go Ask Alice is probably the most famous of these. The most ridiculous one was Jay's Journal, which has Jay being forced to commit suicide by fallen angels after he gets involved with drugs and Goths — ironically making the book and character a cult favorite for teenage Satanists. The family who showed Sparks the journal on which she loosely based the story wrote a play about their son's life and suicide, with Sparks as the main villain.
• Lucian's True Story is a very old example of this. The clue to it not being what it says it is, is the fact that it is the earliest known story about a trip to the moon.
• This troper actually believed that Kensuke's Kingdom really was based on Michael Morpurgo's childhood.
• James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. Oprah (who had plugged the book for Oprah's Book Club) was pissed.
  • Which makes one wonder why he agreed to go back on the program after it was all revealed. I mean, what's the best he thought could happen?
    • Maybe he was hoping that any publicity is good publicity, and that the book's notoriety as a lie would work as well as, or better than, its hype as a true story.
• German author Karl May (1842-1912) is best known for his stories about 'his' travels through the American West and the Middle East long before he actually visited the US and the Orient in person. (Today that's no longer a major issue, but some of his contemporaries took it less well at the time.)
• House Of Leaves plays with this, with the framing manuscript claiming to be a critical analysis of a documentary that the editor of the manuscript assures us doesn't really exist, about a photojournalist who documents footage of his very strange house...
• The Letters of Pontius Pilate (1928) is a book of letters that Pontius Pilate wrote home to his friend Seneca the Younger and was supposedly "edited" by the author W. P. Crozier. Of course, it's a work of historical fiction and the author never claimed it was anything else. That hasn't stopped others from holding up the book as historical "proof" of one thing or another.
• This troper has run across people who thought that Memoirs of a Geisha and Life of Pi were both autobiographies, possibly because both have the Frame Story of a writer documenting the stories of the respective protagonists. The troper had to gently explain that if it says "A Novel" on the cover, it's fiction. Yes, always.
• There's a story that still pops up every once in a while, based on a pamphlet written by a woman in the 19th century, detailing the horrific abuse she supposedly endured at the hands of the Mormons in Salt Lake City. Apparently she was held prisoner inside the temple and used as a sex slave, until one day she managed to escape by jumping out of an upper window into the Great Salt Lake and swimming to safety. For those unfamiliar with local geography, the temple is at the center of the city, and the lake is more than 30 km away.
  • The book The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk does the same thing for the Catholic church, suffering from extreme Did Not Do The Research that clearly indicated it was fiction.
• Les Liaisons dangereuses has two prefaces, both written by the author. The author's preface is called the 'Editor's', and claims all the letters in the book are true, he's just edited out boring bits. The publisher's preface warns it's all false.
• The Scarlet Letter begins with the author himself finding the titular letter in a forgotten box in a customs house, along with several sheets of foolscap that he says outlined the tale he fictionalizes. He insists that he'll be happy to show the letter to anyone who doubts the story—one wonders whether he figured nobody would bother to ask, or didn't care about the risk of being caught in the lie.
  • It's all about the historical context. At the time it was written, this trope was so hugely popular with gothic novels that none of its readers would've taken the prologue seriously.
    • All forms of the novel, actually. It was simply a game played between writers and readers, which makes it a Values Dissonance problem, not a lie.
• Bram Stoker's Dracula presents itself as an archival collection of letters and newpaper articles for dramatic effect. The idea that it actually is an archive, and that modern readers have just misinterpreted it as fiction, lives on in countless modern stories featuring Dracula, from Marvel Comics to Castlevania.
• The Arthur Conan Doyle story The Horror of the Heights begins with an introduction claiming that the story, written as a doomed aviator's diary, was recently recovered from a wrecked airplane, and cites the library where the original manuscript's on display for anyone who wants to learn more. It's a good thing for both the aviation industry and human sanity in general that there's really no such manuscript.
• Then there's the Holocaust memoir "Angel at the Fence". The author really is a Holocaust survivor, but the parts about his future wife secretly meeting him and sneaking him food were pure fiction. Oprah was fooled by this one, too.
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl.
• The Day My Butt/Bum Went Psycho. Uh... yeah.
• Similar to the James Frey controversy, JT Leroy was actually the pen name of a middle-aged woman, Laura Albert, whose fictional persona was of a young transgender prostitute. Albert even hired her sister-in-law to make public appearances dressed up in drag in order to portray a post sex change Leroy. (Try not to think about that one too hard.) Her first novels about underage gender dysphoric sex workers from the Deep South were presented as being at least vaguely autobiographical. Of course, it should be noted that even though it's Based On A Great Big Lie, this doesn't stop The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things from being really, really good.
• Anthony Godby Johnson's A Rock and a Hard Place is the memoir of a young boy whose parents molested him and sold him to their friends for sexual purposes, until he contracted AIDS. Eventually, he ran away and was adopted by Vicki Johnson. However, none of it actually happened; authorities and reporters became suspicious when they realized that Vicki Johnson was the only person who had ever seen the boy. A New Jersey traffic engineer realized that the supposed author photo was one of him as a boy. Armistead Maupin, one of the many authors taken in by the hoax, wrote The Night Listener about the experience. However, it's a roman a clef, and the first-person narrator, a Maupin stand-in, says several times that he's been known to embellish the truth. Very good book about this trope. (''A Rock and a Hard Place", on the other hand, isn't very well-written, particularly once you realize that its author is NOT an 11 year old.)
• Go Ask Alice purports to be the diary of an anonymous teenage girl. However, evidence suggests that it was written by Beatrice Sparks, its alleged "editor."
• The book The Princess Bride actually claims to be an abridged "good parts" version of a book by S. Morgenstern about a story from the fictional land of Florin. Supposedly Morgenstern's claims that the story takes place "after America, but before Europe" and other such comments reveal his belief that the original story is a big fat lie. The book is also peppered with asides form William Goldman, about his relationship with the book and his father (who is from the fictional land.) The true story is that the whole thing was written by William Goldman, but somehow, the story continues to fool and confuse people, who think the framing device around the story is true.
• The book "The Third Eye" by 'Lobsang Rampa' allegedly tells the experiences of a tibetan lama. It was eventually revealed to be written by a Devon plumber called Cyril Hoskin who had never been to Tibet in his life.

Music

• To promote Platinum Weird, Dave Stewart (from the Eurythmics) and Kara Dio Guardi claimed that the songs were originally by a lost-to-history 1970s band of the same name, sung by (the fictional) Erin Grace. VH 1 even did a mockumentary on the fake band.

Video Games

• The Japanese Tengai Makyou comedy Role Playing Game series is purportedly based on a Western author's writings about Japan. Said author and his writings never existed, although they are genuinely inspired by the largely- to entirely-fictitious accounts of life in Japan that used to be popular in the West.
• Similarly, the US/Europe release of Fatal Frame/Project Zero is advertised as being based on a true story. Charitably, it could be said to actually be based on something that might, at one time, have been an urban legend in Japan.
• "Players will participate in actual battles from Japanese history...so here this Giant Enemy Crab and I'm going to Attack Its Weak Point for massive damage!"

Western Animation

• This is actually parodied in the episode, Arrgh!, of Spongebob Squarepants. Spongebob and Patrick quickly come to believe their pirate quest is a scam (and that Mr. Krabs has gone Cloudcuckoolander) finding out the treasure map is just a game board they used earlier in the episode. Chance kicks in as they do find the treasure according to the map (the game board) with the remarks of Spongebob saying "It really IS based on a true treasure map!" The Flying Dutchman comes in to take his treasure back, willing to share with Spongebob and Patrick. But much to the dismay of Mr. Krabs, he only gains a piece from the game board, and gets replied "But it's based on a REAL treasure chest!".
  • It's notable that this is rather Karmic, as it was a fight over the treasure (Patrick and Spongebob wanted their shares, Krabs wanted it all) that woke up TFD in the first place.

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