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"Hello. I'm Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer is...no." — Leonard Nimoy, The Simpsons, "The Springfield Files"
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. A worse case scenario is that some folks get together and sue you for selling the story to them under false pretenses. The worst case scenario is when your supposedly true story is actually very close to someone else's actual true story, and you end up losing every penny of your profits in a humiliating lawsuit because nobody believes your sudden recantation. Best solution? Just say that it's fiction all along.
You could argue that the very premise of this trope exists because Viewers Are Morons. It's generally taken for granted that just about everyone over the age of six realizes that fictional media is not real, and that any attempt to replicate an actual event within a fictionalized framework - no matter how painstaking the effort - is inevitably going to fall short. But in a heavily suburbanized era where so many people in post-industrialized countries are sheltered from so much of reality, it's probably inevitable that they'll think of docudramas as being as real as it can get.
Based on a Great Big Lie is a specific type of Dan Browned. The author may make heavy use of From a Certain Point of View to justify himself.
Compare Very Loosely Based on a True Story. Contrast Roman à Clef.
Note: No real life examples, particularly against specific persons.
Examples:
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Film
Literature
- Little Tree
- 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 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. Holy Blood, Holy Grail got a name drop in The Da Vinci Code, as one of Teabing's resources on the Grail yet many people seem to squall about the book being "ripped off" without ever noticing its acknowledgment within the book that apparently ripped it off so entirely. The ideas posited in Holy Blood, Holy Grail were essentially used as a MacGuffin in the story, as various Holy Grails so often are. The mistake Dan Brown made was the same mistake the authors of Holy Blood made, which was claiming it was all based on fact instead of what could amount to Epileptic Trees.
- This is part of the plot in Mike Nelson's Death Rat! (by Mike Nelson), 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.
- 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. It ends with a promise that the protagonist's further adventures will be described in a sequel, which is also a lie.
- It's also a wonderful piece of satire. Lucian was apparently annoyed by contemporary historians who reported just about everything they heard or read as facts, in response he wrote a "true" story that was as ludicrous as he could imagine.
- There are some that actually believed that Kensukes Kingdom really was based on Michael Morpurgo's childhood. Made all the worst by the epilogue, where he writes about "himself" going to meet Kensuke's grandson after writing the book. Really, Michael?
- James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. Oprah (who had plugged the book for Oprah's Book Club) first denied the idea that the book was false. Then she tried to claim that essential truth was more important than factual truth, which honked off the general public until she finally rescinded her recommendation and verbally castigated the author on her show.
- 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...
- 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.
- 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, but in a deliberately ridiculous way — the "publisher" claims the story obviously can't be true because nobody in this country, in this oh-so-enlightened era, would ever behave as these characters do. (So the real message is that yes, the story itself is fiction, but it's a satire on how people really do act.)
- In-universe example: Jim Butcher's series of Harry Dresden novels claim that Dracula was indeed Based on a Great Big Lie, but a lie circulated deliberately: it's a masterpiece of anti-Black Court spin by the rival White Court vampires, that spilled the beans to humans about how to wipe out the Black Court vampiric strain.
- 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.
- Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird was a fiction book that was supposedly based on the author's Real Life war experiences in German-occupied Poland. Which turned out to be false; i.e., the couple who took care of him as a boy alongside other Jewish children that they protected, were depicted as abusers and rapists. (They were pissed when they found out, logically.)
- The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl claims to be a true story, only with a few names changed. Given that the title character exercises clairvoyant powers, it's reasonable to assume that he did not exist by any name.
- 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 transgendered 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 Abusive Parents molested him and sold him to their friends for sexual purposes, until he contracted AIDS. Eventually, he ran away and was adopted by a social worker named Vicki Johnson. However, none of it actually happened; authorities and reporters (including Keith Olbermann, who was one of the "kid"'s biggest supporters at first) became suspicious when they realized that Vicki Johnson was the only person who had ever seen the boy, and that Johnson had pretended to be him while talking to them on the phone. A New Jersey traffic engineer realized that the supposed author photo was one of him as a boy, and the person who took said photo was his former school teacher... Vicki Johnson.
- 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.)
- The case was so polemic that it inspired a rather popular episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In it, a literary agent is killed for discovering that the ill and secluded female teenage author he sponsored didn't exist, but was the invention of two con artists that made themselves pass as her "foster parents". The "girl", just like Tony Godby Johnson, had written a best seller based on her horribly abusive bio parents.
- 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.
- Hoskin subsequently insisted that "Rampa" was a walk-in spirit that had taken over his body. As shown by the "Talk" page on his Wikipedia article, some people still believe this.
- Subverted in that it appears Hoskin himself genuinely and sincerely believed what he was saying.
- The Flashman books are all supposedly based on rediscovered memoirs written by the title character. This device (coupled with the impressive amount of research George MacDonald Fraser put into every volume) led more than one critic to believe they were the real deal.
- The book Michelle Remembers, perhaps the most (in)famous alleged written account of Satanic Ritual Abuse, though helping to stir up the SRA witch hunt of the 80s/90s, has now been widely discredited. Mostly by many healthy doses of Fridge Logic - for example, a supposedly nonreligious 5-year-old having the presence of mind to rebuke Satanists with a cross, an 81-day ritual that summons the Devil himself during which none of the Satanists apparently need to eat, use the bathroom, or show up at work, and a fatal car wreck that strangely didn't turn up in a newspaper that reported on wrecks of even less serious nature at the time. One of the worst parts is that the titular Michelle (who later divorced her husband to marry the psychologist she was relating all of this to) blames her involvement in the abuse on her mother, who died of cancer when Michelle was 14. This article gives a detailed analysis of the book.
- Michelle Remembers was hardly the only book that factored into the "Satanic Panic" of The Eighties. Two other books that led the scare were Laurel Rose Willson's Satan's Underground (under the name Lauren Stratford) and Mike Warnke's The Satan Seller. The former spoke of being brought up as a "baby breeder" by a Satanic cult, giving birth to babies to be used in sacrifices or snuff films, while the latter was about serving as a "Satanic high priest" before coming to Christianity. Both books were exposed as frauds by the evangelical magazine Cornerstone, which pointed out that the dates and events given by the authors didn't line up with school and hospital records, among other inconsistencies. Willson later reappeared as "Laura Grabowski", claiming to be a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and a victim of Dr. Josef Mengele; this, too, was exposed as a fraud when a Jewish group investigated her claims.
- The prologue to the original novel of The Phantom of the Opera has the author going into great detail about the "research" he did about the Opera Ghost, including digging through archives and interviewing some of the characters, claiming the story to be true. Two bits are verifiable: there was indeed an underground lake under the Paris Opera House and there was allegedly an accident in 1896 involving a falling chandelier that killed one person. Oh, and of course the real opera house provides the setting. But the rest is fabrication.
- What fell in real life was the counterweight of the chandelier, not the chandelier itself. Still, many of the book's characters are No Celebrities Were Harmed versions of real people who lived in Paris at the time. Some scholarly fans have claimed that everything in the book save for the Phantom himself was based in real experiences, though that most likely is still a gross exaggeration.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has an in universe example with Professor Lockhart's books. He was a complete fraud who simply stole the accomplishments of less "charismatic" people after making them forget about ever doing them via memory charms (that is, the accomplishments were more or less true, the great big lie, so to speak, was that Gilderoy Lockhart was the protagonist).
- The book The Men Who Stare at Goats is claimed to be true by the author, but the Army denies it and nobody's been able to confirm any of the incidents described.
- Horace Walpole originally passed off The Castle of Otranto as an antique manuscript penned by an Italian clergyman. At the time he wrote it, supernatural tales were regarded as embarrassing products of ignorance, not entertainment, and Walpole probably feared for his credibility if his name were attached to literature's first Gothic novel.
- Several books purporting themselves to be the Necronomicon have been published over the years, cashing in on the infamy of H.P. Lovecraft's spurious text on things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
- Many Cthulhu Mythos stories are told in the form of diaries, discovered manuscripts, and obscure ancient texts. Faux scholarship is part of the fun.
- A children's book called The Pushcart War claimed it was based on a true story. While certain events are implausible (like attacking trucks with pea-shooters), it's theoretically possible...until you realize that the copyright date is before the time that the events in the book supposedly take place.
- Averted by Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles; notable in that, although they are written as a relatively realistic take on the Arthurian mythos, Cornwell cheerfully acknowledges that they are entirely fictitious. He suggests that the broad sweeps of the story provide a viable mock-up of what could have happened, but based purely on his own speculation, and are heavily tempered by narrative demands and whatever he thought would make a good story. Ironically, despite all of this, it is still altogether more realistic and historically accurate than the above film which actively touted itself as such.
- Lorenzo Carcaterra's Sleepers purported to be a nonfiction account of how he and three of his friends were sent to reform school for a year, where they were viciously abused by the guards. A decade later, two of the friends killed one of the guards but were acquitted of murder because they were prosecuted by the third friend, who intentionally lost the case with the help of a false alibi provided by a priest. However, none of the details provided by Carcaterra corresponded to any real-life murder case that has been identified, and Carcaterra's records from the Catholic school he attended in his youth have no indication of him ever having been sent to reform school, or even being absent for as many as four consecutive weeks.
- No real murder case on Manhattan has been found to correspond with the one featured in the book but Carcaterra states in the opening that it didn't take place on Manhattan in real life. The book also claims the school records for Shakes and his friends were altered before the trial to make it seem like they hadn't been gone for any long period of time. This doesn't mean the story is true though.
- Go Ask Alice, a rather infamous anti-drug book, offers the compelling tale of a young suburban girl who is sucked into the world of drugs and eventually ends up dead. Ostensibly the real diary of a teenage girl, it was, in fact, entirely fabricated by "editor" and youth counselor Beatrice Sparks. Sparks has also released a series of other "true diaries" in the same vein as Go Ask Alice, but dealing with different subjects, such as AIDS (It Happened to Nancy), and teen pregnancy (Annie's Baby, among others). It was also debunked on Snopes.
- Also infamous was Jay's Journal, which was about Satanism. It was such a lie that Sparks got sued by the real Jay's family (actually, a boy named Alvin Barret). They also wrote a book about how horrible and false Jay's Journal was and sponsored a rock opera based on their testimony.
- Happens in-universe in Albert Sanchez Pinol's Pandora In The Congo. The protagonist writes down a murder suspect's story of what really happened when he went to Congo with two noblemen. No, he didn't murder them. They were killed in a war with an underground race called "tektons." The suspect then blocked off the passage connecting the tektons' underground world to ours, Saving the World, and returned to civilization alone. The story is published and everyone believes it, leading to the suspect going free. Except not a word of it is true and he really did murder the noblemen.
- Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust was written by Misha Defonseca. She said when she was 4, her Jewish parents were sent in a concentration camp during World War II, she crossed whole Europe to go back home, and she was alone with wolves during the travel. A movie was done in 2007, based on the novel, and "Misha" confessed after that her name was Monique de Wael, she wasn't born a Jew, her parents were arrested because they were members of the Belgian Resistance, and she was simply sent to her grandfather. Monique invented the story because of her passion for wolves.
- You can argue that the surprising part is that the lie was exposed only after the movie was released. There was a small conference by a Polish Holocaust survivor, years before the movie was done. He exposed the book as a lie, just because Jews in Poland didn't have to wear yellow stars on chest, but blue ones on the arm.
- The Princess Bride claims to be an old satire by S. Morgenstern, which was abridged by William Goldman, who adds little biographical details, stories about legal battles over the sequel, etc. S. Morgenstern, of course, never existed, and William Goldman wrote the whole story himself. Unfortunately, this leads people who have only seen the movie to try to find the "unabridged" version, which doesn't exist.
- Goldman adds to this mythology as the novel is reissued in new editions. Basically, publishing the unabridged version (or Goldman's own sequel) has been stymied by a vengeful pack of Florinese lawyers fighting over the unspeakably complicated Morgenstern estate.
- Amusingly, at least one library lists the novel under the "S. Morganstern" pen name, and gives its length as five hundred pages.
- John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise. From the preface:
The main advantage this book has over libraries, and indeed all of its almanackian predecessors, is that all of the historical oddities and amazing true facts contained herein are lies, made up by me. And it is this astonishing innovation that allows each entry to contain many more truths than if it were merely factual.
- Bravo Two Zero, the memoirs of former SAS trooper and Gulf War veteran "Andy McNab", ended up becoming a severe embarrassment to the British Army thanks to this trope. First, another member of the squad — Chris Ryan, now a minor TV personality in the vein of Ray Mears — chimed in with his own memoir, painting McNab as a very Unreliable Narrator and blaming him for the mission's disastrous end. Another SAS veteran flew out to Iraq in 1993, retraced as much of the squad's route and interviewed as many witnesses as he could find, and discovered that both of them were equally guilty of inflating their stories. If they were exaggerating for the sake of a good story this would be bad enough, but they were apparently less than truthful during their debriefing sessions as well. Unfortunately, by the time this became generally known there were half a dozen other "true accounts" of the SAS in the Gulf War that showed equal regard for fact-checking. Peter Radcliffe, then-Regimental Sergeant Major of the SAS and the only Gulf War veteran of the Regiment to publish his memoirs without a pseudonym, devotes an entire chapter to the whole wretched business.
- Greg Mortenson's Three Cups Of Tea. He really did go to Pakistan and Afghanistan and try to build schools, but embellished his narrative to H. Rider Haggard (or Red Rascal) proportions, insulting his hosts in the process and blaming it all on the Balti people's vague notions about time.
- Kathryn Stockett's The Help, about a white woman's relationships with two black maids in the 1960s is an inversion of this. The book is fictional, but black maid Ablene Cooper is suing the author because she claims one of the maids, Aibileen Clark is meant to be her. She was once the nanny for Stockett's brother. Cooper claims that the character has an uncanny resemblance to her, right down to a gold tooth.
- Liza Marklund co-authored a whole series of books together with a woman calling herself Mia, detailing the abuse and persecution Mia and those close to her suffered from her Muslim ex-boyfriend. The events in the books were claimed to be completely true with only names and places changed to protect those involved, and Marklund spent years using the books as proof in political debates. In 2008, Monica Antonsson wrote a book proving that the books about Mia are almost completely fictional. After trying to claim that Antonsson was lying, Marklund changed her tune and claimed the books were never meant to be taken as fact and were clearly fiction all along.
- Jordanian author Norma Khouri wrote Forbidden Love, a memoir detailing her life in Jordan and her friendship with a Muslim woman who was murdered by her family in an honour killing for meeting a Christian man in secret. When an Australian literary critic did some digging and discovered that Khouri had not been in Jordan at all during the book's timeframe (and even got certain locations in Jordan wrong and misrepresented their legal system), the publisher hastily recalled the book. Khouri admitted to taking some liberties with original story, but maintains that the book is still Based on a True Story, despite all signs pointing to the contrary.
- Both a real example AND an in-universe example: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with the narrator (Huck) informing the reader that you won't know who he is unless you've read "a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Huck tells us the book was written by Mark Twain, "and he told the truth, mainly. there was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth." He then goes on to make the same claim about the story the reader is about to be told.
- Done for satirical effect by The Report from Iron Mountain, a '60s counterculture book written by Leonard Lewin as a Stealth Parody of Vietnam-era military think tanks. Posing as a document written by a "secret government panel", it claimed that war was a necessary part of the economy and served to divert collective aggression, and that society would collapse without it. Therefore, in the event of peace, they recommended that new bodies be created to emulate the economic activities of war, including Blood Sports, the creation of new enemies to scare the people (including alien invaders and environmental destruction), and the reinstatement of slavery. Before the hoax was revealed in 1972, even President Lyndon B Johnson was fooled by it (and reportedly "hit the roof" when he read it), and there remain conspiracy theorists who believe that it actually is the real deal, claimed to be a hoax as a means of damage control.
- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic tract claiming to be the records of a meeting by a Jewish cabal plotting to Take Over the World. In reality, it was written by the Okhrana, the Secret Police of Tsarist Russia, as a tool for starting pogroms with, and was later carried into western Europe and the US by White Russians in the wake of Red October. It was exposed as a forgery by The Times of London in 1921, which revealed that large sections of the book were cribbed wholesale from a 19th century anti-Napoleonic tract. Even so, it was made part of the school curriculum in Nazi Germany, and anti-Semites to this day cite it as "evidence" of a Jewish conspiracy.
Live Action TV
- Kids' show Wacaday had something very similar to this with its fictionalized historical fact segments, as they'd always remind you at the end that "We know it's true because we made it up ourselves!"
- Lie to Me inverts this with a disclaimer at the beginning of each episode, stating that the events and characters of the series are entirely false. While nothing like any of the episodes has ever happened in real life, Lightman is based off of a real-life person, Dr. Paul Ekman.
Music
- To promote Platinum Weird, Dave Stewart (from the Eurythmics) and Kara DioGuardi 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.
Theatre
- Ruggero Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci is probably one of these: Leoncavallo said it was based on a court case that his father, who was a judge, presided over, and further claimed that he had the document to prove it. However, no such document, or indeed any corroborating evidence, has ever been found. It is now generally believed that Leoncavallo played the "true story" card to evade the charge of plagiarism.
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. This one is very tongue-in-cheek and not at all intended to be taken seriously, though.
- 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.
- At the start, Armed And Dangerous says that it was based on a true story. Considering that this game includes a tea drinking robot, miniature black holes, and a land shark gun, among many other things, this was probably not supposed to be taken seriously.
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 Cloud Cuckoo Lander) 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.
- Tex Avery was fond of this trope. Drag-Along Droopy began with the disclaimer; "This is an absolutely authentic account of the grazing land battles of the sheep and cattle wars of the early west. We know this story to be true. It was told to us by—A TEXAN!"
- The story of Pocahontas used by Disney and others is pretty much entirely bunk despite it being billed in its original form (the writings of John Smith) as true. Researchers reviewing Smith's other works quickly realized he had a penchant for making up absolutely insane stories about himself and passing them off as fact (if taken as true, Smith was a demi-god of manliness and combat skill who found success, riches and sex wherever he went). Conveniently, the story wasn't published until after Pocahontas had died, leaving Smith's claims and exaggerations uncontested.
- The Ren & Stimpy Show episode "Son of Stimpy" (A.K.A, "Stimpy's First Fart") began with a voiceover declaring that "this is a true story that we made up".
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