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From Watergate to delinquent strippers, here are the true stories never told in the movies
In Hollywood, it’s more productive to use certain promotional tactics with suspicion, perhaps no more than any movie that claims to be “based on a true story. “In many cases, this usually means that a filmmaker has taken a small spoonful of facts. And I stretched it to the max. That’s fine: they’re narrative films, not documentaries, and it takes a bit of artistic freedom to put a story on screen.
Every once in a while, however, a film comes along that approaches its subject with a journalistic eye, and those are the ones we’ve selected to highlight here. Among them are Academy Award-winning dramas covering important moments in history, lewd crime stories plucked from magazine articles, bizarre character studies, and other outlandish stories that no one would know about if they didn’t actually happen. Sometimes, facts are really stranger than fiction, and in those express situations, they create a great picture.
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Wait, are you telling us that Watergate is a genuine event that happened and that in 1974 two bloodhounds actually overthrew a sitting American president?Who knew? Jokes aside, even with its finish intact, Alan Pakula’s journalistic procedure remains captivating, and perhaps even more vital today, with some other recent leaders of the free world attempting to label the press as the “enemy of the people. “Shot and acted with a naturalism typical of the ’70s, the film rejects any impulse to flesh out the family life of Woodward and Bernstein (played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), or to believe what was happening inside the White House. or deviate from it or embellish it. Central research. Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman believe that watching professionals do their jobs with the greatest risks imaginable is exciting enough. They were right.
Before the true-crime podcasts and NBC Dateline marathons, there was Truman Capote, whose account of the 1959 massacre of a circle of relatives in rural Kansas stunned a country that was not yet insensitive to random acts of unspeakable violence. As groundbreaking as the book In Cold Blood for long-form narrative journalism, director Richard Brooks reproduced it on screen, detailing the murders and their aftermath with an austere realism unusual in Hollywood at the time. Conrad Hall’s black-and-white cinematography removes any hint of cinematic artifice, and Robert Blake and Scott Wilson deliver intense and extraordinarily plausible performances.
A rare depiction of a recession that is neither a harrowing drama about farmers squandering their homes, nor a political discourse opposed to the greedy 1%, Hustlers is rather a hyperkinetic story of economic survival, set in a global world hit hard by the 2008 Currency Crisis: The York Strip Clubs. Writer-director Lorene Scafaria founded the script on a New York magazine article about an organization of dancers who set out to drug their frugal Wall Street clientele and hog their credit cards. She approaches the film with a visual power halfway between Scorsese and a ’90s rap video. Most of the praise, however, went to Jennifer Lopez as the team’s leader, who is as charismatic at the bar as she is cautious.
It’s one of those stories too far-fetched for even the most creative screenwriter to make up. At the start of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a CIA film buff hatched a plot to smuggle six diplomats out of the country by posing as a Canadian. film crew filming a fake Star Wars-style sci-fi movie there. Somehow, it took Hollywood more than three decades to turn the story into a full-fledged film; what’s even more curious, it was Ben Affleck who, despite everything, did it. In the past, Affleck had poked fun at his directorial prowess with Gone Bathrough Gone and The Town, but Argo still surprised a lot of people. With the tension of the heist movie and the grit of the ’70s, the film proved to be one of the smartest and most perfectly executed thrillers of the decade. It deservedly won the Oscar for Best Picture, even though Affleck was embarrassingly snubbed in the directing category.
It’s almost old-fashioned to think back to a time when the most debatable thing about Facebook was that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea. However, David Fincher’s dark and sublime tech drama remains a must-see precisely because of its unsettling nuances, given Trent’s extra-strong shadows. The revealing music of Reznor’s Oscar-winning music seems to foreshadow the terrifying influence that social media would exert on global history in the years to come.
A movie about a gay man who robs a bank to fund his partner’s sexual replacement surgery would likely end up being banned in at least three states today, so believe how it was perceived by audiences in the ’70s. But the incident actually happened: In August 1972, two green criminals walked into a Chase Manhattan branch in Brooklyn, gun in hand; Several hours and rookie mistakes later, one of them would be dead and the other in police custody. Sidney Lumet interpreted the episode as a countercultural tragicomedy and, with loose, fiery functionality through Al Pacino at the center, made it one of the iconic films of the time.
No one who has lived through the ’90s wants the Tonya Harding scandal to happen: An Olympic figure skater who conspires with her foolish husband to eliminate his closest rival is the kind of tabloid story you don’t see once the news cycle has passed. It was meant to be made into a movie, but director Craig Gillespie didn’t just produce a Lifetime soap opera or a live rerun of Wikipedia. Instead, he made a truly electric film, with an aesthetic maximally described as “Scorsese trash. “A glamorous Margot Robbie discovers humanity and humor in Harding’s complicated upbringing, but it was Alison Janney, as his cold and abusive mother, who drew the most attention, winning an Oscar in the process.
McConaissance reached his climax with this decidedly unsentimental biopic of Ron Woodruff, a homophobic jerk who nonetheless helped many early AIDS patients by exploiting loopholes in federal law and selling black HIV drugs that the FDA was in no hurry to approve. Matthew McConaughey pointed out the atrophy of the beach frame to include Woodruff, who died of the disease, but it wasn’t a reward: the dissonance between Woodruff’s weakened figure and his intense narcissism helps to understand the kind of man he was. Still, it earned McConaughey an Oscar, and he deserved it.
Only an actress as lovable as Melissa McCarthy can play someone as bitter as editor Lee Israel; Otherwise, the prospect of spending two hours with her might be too unpleasant to bear. By the early ’90s, the famed biographer had burned bridges enough to struggle to get anything published and resorted to literary forgery to pay her bills. Somehow, McCarthy makes Israel not only sympathetic, but to the utmost lovable, without appeasing his must-have irritability. Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty’s screenplay is equally sympathetic, arguing that the success, however short-lived, of the Israel scam was only imaginable because, deep down, the world appreciates clever liars. This is evidenced by the fact that his memoir, on which the film is based, ended up being his most successful book.
In 1992, Christopher McCandless, a wealthy student from Virginia, abandoned his inherited wealth and long safe journey to travel to the Alaskan wilderness in a vague quest for “enlightenment. “He was later discovered dead in a deserted bus. But Jon Krakauer, the writer who used McCandless’s diary to piece together the nonfiction crop of Into the Wild, didn’t exactly consider his story a tragedy, nor did Sean Penn. In adapting Krakauer’s book, Penn is overly uncritical of McCandless’s motivations, but that doesn’t mean the film looks any less enjoyable or detracts from Emile Hirsch’s poignant and captivating lead performance.
There was a time when Big Tobacco bewilderment was almost a film genre in its own right. (See: Thanks for Smoking, Doubt Merchants. ) Michael Mann’s prestige drama about the guy who first exposed what the tobacco corporations knew about the danger of their products is the most productive of all. It features a star-studded cast including Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, and Christopher Plummer and a tense, tight script based on Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair article, “The Man Who Knew Too Much. “”A true masterpiece of life.
Despite how his career is portrayed on screen, videos rarely do smart journalism, and when they do, the cinematic experience is often boring. Perhaps it’s time for attention only for All the President’s Men to present high-profile journalistic reporting in a way that is both fair and compelling to watch. Starring a remarkable cast led by Mark Ruffalo, Tom McCarthy’s Oscar-winning film depicts the Boston Globe’s team of investigators as they take on an establishment even more evil than the Nixon White House: the Catholic Church.
In 1996, Bernie Tiede, the original funeral director and the kindest guy in the town of Carthage, Texas, killed 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent, a wealthy widow almost universally the baddest woman in town. In a Texas Monthly article on the crime, Richard Linklater interpreted the case as a black comedy and had the genius to cast Jack Black in the lead role. Although it goes against the grain, it’s arguably Black’s biggest feature and earned him a Golden Globe Nomination. Another brilliant move by Linklater: incorporating interviews with genuine residents of Carthage, creating what amounts to a riveting docudrama about the quirks of small-town America.
It was only a matter of time before a viral Twitter thread became the basis of a movie. To be honest, anyone who read superstar Aziah King’s entire storm of tweets in 2015 about his ill-fated trip to Florida will probably have to have left knowing one day it would be a movie. (Though technically, Zola is based on the Rolling Stone article that investigated his story. )After James Franco thankfully dropped out of the project, newcomer Janicza Bravo stepped in, weaving a dark and comical thread of sex, drugs. , pimps, and weapons that store DNA. With Spring Breakers, The Bling Ring, and other bleak stories about amoral young men.
Director Steve McQueen broke down with this poignant depiction of a six-week hunger strike that was ultimately fatal perpetrated by IRA member Bobvia Sands at Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. Haunted by memories of his formative years on the Sands reports, McQueen immersed himself in the literature on the “anti-money laundering protest” of five years in prison, and the end result is a remarkably detailed look at life in an almost literal hell. Michael Fassbfinisher went emaciated to play Sands, an obligatory physical transformation that transcends a cascade of approaches and creates The Already Alive functionality is even harder to shake.
Baseball videos were already a hard sell in 2011, let alone baseball videos that are less about the players in the box and more about the hustle and bustle of the front office they were given there. But through the dramatization of the unconventional thinking that got the hapless Oakland A’s to the playoffs in the early 2000s, Moneyball, founded on Michael Lewis’s book, also of The Big Short, becomes something of a meta-commentary on stubborn conservatism. This has made the American pastime anachronistic. Also, watching Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman interact in the heady discussion of Aaron Sorkin who is quite athletic.
Ironically, given his modus operandi, the hunt for the Zodiac Killer over the years is nothing more than a riddle to solve for internet-obsessed amateur sleuths. But that did little to dilute David Fincher’s ability to disrupt David Fincher’s masterpiece: the sunlight murder of a couple. Picnicking remains perhaps the scariest cinematic horror moment of the past two decades.
Kathryn Bigelow made this uncompromising portrayal of the search for (and in the aftermath of the assassination) of Osama bin Laden, the skills she honed in In Hostile Land to create a white-core war mystery that usually sticks to the facts. In “Most of the Time”: Jessica Chastain’s character is a fictional combination of several CIA officials involved in the persecution, and some critics have accused the film of protecting torture techniques used by the military to extract information. Gripping ancient drama that never turns into waving a patriotic flag.
The filmmakers had been looking to adapt Roman gonzo in the key of Hunter S. Thompson for decades before Terry Gilliam finally brought it to the screen, and the end result shows why directors like Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone eventually gave up on their attempts: a movie without a plot. The drug that reflects on the death of the ’60s plays much more role on the page. Still, it’s a wacky adventure, with Thompson’s clever friend Johnny Depp betting on the writer (or rather, his slightly romantic avatar, Raoul Duke) as a mescaline-infused Wile E. It might take an entire chemistry lab to perceive it in the literal sense of the word, but Gilliam’s surreal odyssey still manages to grasp Thompson’s main point: that America is decadent, depraved, and utterly doomed.
It’s hard to believe that the incident that prompted this unsettling independent mystery actually happened. Who could fall into the trap of a caller pretending to be a police officer and ordering a random citizen to strip naked to look for one of his colleagues?But that’s precisely what happened at a fast-food restaurant in Kentucky in 2004, and the humiliation didn’t happen there. It’s mind-boggling, but writer-director Craig Zobel takes the opportunity to read about American loyalty to authority. And through that lens, it’s really not hard to understand.
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