Based On A Great Big Lie - Television Tropes & Idioms

"[P]lease ignore any tiresome scolds who complain that the movie is not really based on fact. Duh."

—Roger Ebert, from a review of Hidalgo

"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. 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 Roman A Clef.

Examples:

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Comics

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. 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?".
- What was really funny is that critics loooooooved this movie despite (or maybe even because of) the fact that it was an exceptionally violent film for a "realistic" drama. In their reviews they would rally around that fake Based On A True Story blurb and sanctimoniously declare that anyone who objected to the violence in the movie was simply objecting to the violence of Real Life. Ironically it was the violence that first exposed the story to be false. The film is set in 1987, the first murder victim is a Minnesota state trooper...and no Minnesota state troopers were killed in 1987 (states do tend to keep records on such things).
- Their various explanations about Fargo's factuality/lack thereof can basically be pieced together to mean, "Our movie about people murdering each other is a totally accurate account of how people sometimes murder each other."
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. 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).
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.
- And it doesn't help that most of the Arthurian legend known today is hashwork of oral myth and legend "borrowed" from France by the Normans of all people.
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.
- This troper was highly amused at the number of people who, finding out that I had seen it, said "You know it's not a true story, right?" By the time I saw it, that was old news, and I enjoyed it as fiction.
- They ripped off The Last Broadcast in the process.
  - And they both ripped off Cannibal Holocaust.
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.
Amadeus was based on an apocryphal tale Salieri, a contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus 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 respectful 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).
- 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. You can see 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 along 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).
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.
- This troper and his entire film music class was shown this by his teacher who did not let anyone in on the joke. At the point where the Macguffin was finally found "under the sign of Taurus" was when I twigged and couldn't help laughing too hard to explain to the rest of the class that the whole movie was literally bull.
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. 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."
Plan 9 From Outer Space — "Every incident is based on sworn testimony." I cannot emphasise enough that this is a B-movie about aliens who fly around in hubcap-spaceships creating zombies.
The original Last House On The Left.
Hostel, which according to teaser, is based in true events; later Eli Roth says that he found a Thai website that advertised itself as a "murder vacation," offering users the chance to torture and kill someone for the price of $10,000. Roth later showed the site to Quentin Tarantino and the two developed the idea for the film. Tarantino and Roth said later on an Icelandic talk show that they have no idea if the website was real or not.
The sci-fi/horror movie The Fourth Kind has, as its tagline, the claim that the movie is "based on actual case studies," and even claims to include actual footage of alien abductions. Guess what?

Close Film

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.
- Dan Brown owns this trope.
- Years earlier there was a computer game Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, which was inspired by the same book, and paid open homage to it by allowing the main character to realize the similarity between the words San Greal and Sang Real by noticing the book in the window of a bookstore.
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.
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. 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 Kensuke's 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) was pissed.
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.
There are those 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. If it says "A Novel" on the cover, it's fiction. Yes, always.
- In Memoirs of a Geisha the author mentions an actual geisha named Mineko Iwasaki in the acknowledgments and claimed in interviews that a lot of the elements of the story were based on stories she told him about her own life. She quite famously sued him for breach of contract, saying he promised never to tell anyone that she had spilled so many trade secrets to him (she even got death threats over it).
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. In this case, it's all about the historical context. At the time it was written, this trope was so hugely popular with novels that none of its readers would've taken the prologue seriously. 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.)
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.
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 Mac Donald 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 witchunt 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 aparently 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.
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. (Which didn't stop this then-young and impressionable Troper from believing it for a while.)

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