Based on a Great Big Lie

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"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"

If books and movies could wear pants, these would be on fire.

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 half-truths to justify himself.

Compare Very Loosely Based on a True Story. Contrast Roman à Clef. Not to be confused with a Big Lie.

Examples of works based on a great big lie include:

Film

  • The original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was supposedly based on a true story, but no such "massacre" ever took place. Leatherface is allegedly loosely based on the killer[1] 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, From a Certain Point of View 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?" On the special features on the 'Fargo' DVD, the Coens claim they were afraid nobody would have believed the crazy plot they came up with any other way.
  • The horror movie "The Strangers", about a masked trio of psychopaths who stalk, terrorize, and eventually murder(?) a newlywed couple in their new home, is supposedly based on a true story, but it was primarily inspired by an incident from the director's childhood in which a pair of "strangers" came to the door, and were later found to be breaking into houses if no one was home when they knocked. It also took cues from an actual set of murders, but they were absolutely nothing like the plot of the movie - while staying in a cabin in a resort town, a woman in her thirties, two of her children, and a friend of one of the children were mysteriously bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Those murders were never solved, but they also never involved newlyweds in their first marital home or masked psychopaths.
  • 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, which never existed to begin with) 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 have been at least somewhat exaggerated. Debate still rages as to which parts of the book really happened.
  • The Haunting In Connecticut purports to be based on a true story. However, 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."
    • Ed and Lorraine Warren themselves are (were in Ed's case) self professed demonologists. Opinions may differ in terms of their reliability when it comes to cases, shows, and other investigators such as Jason Hawes that they have been involved with.
  • As a result of Executive Meddling, Alien Abduction Incident in Lake County was billed as being based on actual events, against the wishes of the director.
  • 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.
  • In a very similar vein to King Arthur, the makers of movies such as Troy and 300 make a big deal about the historical content, which, in reality, is minimal at best. The glaring violence toward epic mythology and written history would be sufferable if people like Zack Snyder didn't insist on their accuracy, and yet in the case of 300 there's the Unreliable Narrator thing. So which are we supposed to believe? In both cases, however, with even the most rudimentary knowledge of classical history and literature one can recognize that the movies are mostly In Name Only adaptations (at best) of whatever the original work is.
    • The 300 example is pretty tricky to pin down, especially since Snyder himself has been both inconsistent and somewhat cavalier in claims of accuracy. Between him, Miller, and various other involved personnel, the idea seems to be that the events as depicted are knowingly exaggerated, subjective and the result of an Unreliable Narrator, but the broad history and the thematic content are intended to be accurate- which is generous, but still- and that the film is intended to give an impression of the events, rather than an accurate depiction. It's about the myth of Thermopylae, in short, rather than the battle per se.
    • It's also worth noting that, for all it's inaccuracy and exaggeration, some scholars have commented that it is at least roughly consistent with the contemporary traditions of heroic fiction; for example, while the Greeks historically fought in an unbroken phalanx, they often depicted themselves fighting in a more heroic melee, as in the film. Even if it's nonsense, it's the sort of nonsense which the Spartans themselves would probably have appreciated, so that's something.
  • 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. In fact, this is common with the Found Footage Films genre.
  • In a similar vein for the older Cannibal Holocaust, the advertising of it as real footage caused so much outrage that its director was arrested and dragged to court - on charges of murder - and once there he had not only to admit it was all a great big lie but show the actors to the judge to prove that they were all alive and well. This was further complicated because, as part of their contractual agreements, the actors were legally obligated to keep away from the public eye for a full year, in order to help hype the movie. A second deal nullifying the first had to be struck with the studio before the actors were allowed to testify.
  • 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.
  • The mockumentary I'm Still Here presents Joaquin Phoenix's breakdown as fact; in reality, it was just the filming of the movie. Phoenix and director Casey Affleck simply didn't tell anyone.
  • 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 Mozart died during a long period of illness, but confoundedly, 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, but whoever finished it, Mozart or someone else, it certainly wasn't Salieri).
    • 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.
  • 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.
    • Well, if you consider them to be the actual events happening in the heads of two loser stoners, it makes more sense.
  • 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 plausible enough that people would want to believe it.[2]
  • 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 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." This is a B-movie about aliens who fly around in hubcap-spaceships creating zombies.
    • And the even more convincing disclaimer "Can you prove it didn't happen?" Take THAT, skeptics!
  • The original The Last House on the Left.
  • The sci-fi/horror movie The Fourth Kind has, as its tag line, the claim that the movie is "based on actual case studies," and even claims to include actual footage of alien abductions. Guess what?
  • The Men Who Stare at Goats begins with an assurance, perhaps just as a weak joke, that "more of the film is true than we would believe." Which part? Sure, there was a remote viewing project in the U.S. military around the late '70s/early '80s, but it didn't work.
    • Actually, Project Stargate (yes that was its name) worked surprisingly well—the remote viewings were almost 1/9 more accurate than wild guessing. It was cancelled because conventional spying is a hell of a lot more accurate than that, and nobody was sure if they could ever get the remote-viewing more accurate than "11% better than a wild guess". The Soviets had a similar project at around the same time, with similar results, leading many to conclude that ESP may well exist, but even if it does, it's not particularly useful.
    • The movie is a fictionalization of a fairly well documented journalistic book.
    • That assurance was followed immediately by a scene of a very strait-laced military man calmly and deliberately stepping away from his desk and running head-on into a wall for no apparent reason. We find out why later on, but right at the moment it's just a jarring juxtaposition with the reassurance, since it's exactly the kind of thing that's so hard to imagine.
  • Paranormal Activity uses, along with several other formulas from films like The Blair Witch Project, the claim to be a real event.
    • They both get the slight excuse that large portions of the movies were unscripted (usually stage directions along the lines of "You're stressed out after two days of weirdness; GO!") and quite often the actors had no idea what things were about to happen (or IF they were about to happen) to get more accurate reactions out of them. The events DID happen, just not quite the way you might think...
  • The Boat That Rocked
  • Battleship Potemkin is a purportedly historical film that depicts a massacre that, in truth, never happened: the records are scarce and conflicting, and eyewitnesses were unreliable and confused. It is, however, known, that spirits in the city were running high at that moment, and there were several demonstrations that, by some accounts, including a British consul and The Times reporter, were put down using armed troops, but no massacre. Of course, Eisenstein wasn't making a documentary, he was making a propaganda flick, so he took really great liberties with the facts—including the massacre. It's just that doing so, he had several ideas how to edit the footage for most emotional impact, and they worked so good that he basically became a father of all modern film editing, and the Odessa Steps Massacre became firmly entrenched as a fact.
    • It is said that after seeing the movie, the person who was shooting at that area came to the police (he lived in USA then) and confessed about a murder.
  • Sunset: "It's all true, give or take a lie or two."
  • In-movie example: in the classic John Ford western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Jimmy Stewart told the story in Flash Back to a biographer, and revealed that it was John Wayne, not him, who killed the outlaw Liberty Valance. The biographer tore up his notes at that point. His words to Stewart are this trope distilled to its essence.

"This is the west. When the legend becomes fact, you print the legend."

  • Blood Sport is supposedly based on an actual secret, underground fighting competition, told from the perspective of American martial artist Frank Dux. (It even shows the supposed records he set at the end.) The fact that NOBODY has ever stepped forward and claimed to have even heard of this tournament should tell you something. It's likely that Dux came up with the "to the death" angle to get around this little detail: "Of course nobody's said anything, they're all dead but me!"
    • It's actually much funnier than that. Disregarding all the other massive problems with the 'martial artist' Dux, he made two very interesting claims about the Kumite (the 'tournament' he 'fought' in): the fights were to the death and that he fought 52 opponents to claim the title. Think about it first: fights to the death would imply a elimination-type tournament, where the number of fights grows exponentially to the number of stages; i.e., for him to have fought 52 opponents in a 'to the death' style tournament, the total number of fighters involved would have been 2^52 or 4,503,599,627,370,496. Note that this is roughly 50,000 times the current population of the entire planet Earth.
      • Well, it said he retired "undefeated as champion" from the Kumite. So it wasn't like he had to fight his way through the tournament each time, more that he merely faced and defeated the number-one contender each time. A better debate to his claim would be that he, supposedly, was given a trophy for his win in the Kumite, which was later proven to have been made at a factory in California. Now, what kind of underground "to the death" tournament would give out trophies!? They probably wouldn't... which would necessitate Dux having one made.
  • There's an obscure film that not only has a "this is all true" message at the beginning but also makes the claim in its title. The film is called China Cry: A True Story and even IMDb reports it as "based on a true story", despite it having unlikely divine intervention incidents, being based on the autobiography of the woman who's the main character, and apparently not being well supported by evidence.
  • The epilogue of The Toolbox Murders states the film was based on a true story, though near the end of the credits the usual "this was fiction, all resemblance to anything real is just coincidental" disclaimer is shown.
  • After all the hijinks of Silent Movie, the end of the film displays the title card: "This is a true story."
  • An interesting example is Enemy at the Gates. Jude Law's sniper character was a real person, and, surprisingly, so was the Love Interest played by Rachel Weisz—but the same can't be said of the German sniper and the main plot. Soviet officials insisted the story was true, but recent reappraisals of the available evidence have led historians to strongly suspect that the whole thing was just a load of made-up wartime propaganda. The villain of the piece is a Bavarian aristocrat sniper named Erwin Konig; in reality, no conclusive evidence has been found that Konig ever even existed, let alone that he fought a sniper duel in Stalingrad.
  • The Seven Percent Solution states that it is the "true story" of what happened during Sherlock Holmes's legendary "Great Hiatus" from 1891-94. Then the title card goes on to state, "Only the facts are made up."
  • The film adaptation of The Hunt for Red October inverts this by providing a disclaimer at the beginning of the film to the effect that "According to repeated statements by both Soviet and American governments, nothing of what you are about to see ever happened." The audience is quite pointedly left to draw their own conclusions.
  • Done in-universe in The Debt, which drives the plot.
  • The majority of the film JFK is entirely made up, with the only real events being the assassination and the Clay Shaw trial (which was an affront to justice). Perhaps the worst was that of the crucial 'smoke from the Grassy Knoll', none of the rifles used would emit any visible smoke.
  • An example of a film's producers trying to enact the No Such Thing as Bad Publicity Trope on purpose was the 1976 low-budget exploitation film, [Snuff]. The director - one Allan Shackleton - edited a South American slasher movie, giving it an even gorier ending, and then billed it as "The film that could only be made in South America... where life is CHEAP", implying that this was an actual Snuff Film. Which was false advertising. He went so far as to put out false newspaper clippings that reported a citizens group's crusading against the film and hired people to act as protesters to picket screenings. This didn't have the desired result, because even compared to other grindhouse movies, the film was... bad, and the special effects were so poor that it was easy for most viewers to discern that the killings in the movie were not real. Shackleton eventually admitted to the hoax, even providing dated pictures of the actress to prove she was alive and well.

Literature

  • Little Tree[context?]
  • 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.
  • 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 and 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 leaked 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—basically, the plot of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. 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.
  • 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.
  • Cracked.com has a whole article devoted to this.
  • The "autobiographical" works of Anna Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court and Romance of the Harem, on which the novel Anna and the King of Siam, the musical and film The King and I, and the film Anna and the King were all based on. Although in the West they were thought to be non-fiction, they were in fact outright lies. About the only verifiable details in them are that Anna Leonowens did in fact work as a teacher (and later as a language secretary) for King Mongkut of Siam, and that some of his children did remember her fondly (although they were distressed by the stories she had written about their family).
    • She was not the only, or even the primary, governess/teacher in the palace.
    • The king certainly did not have a romantic relationship of any sort with her. In fact, he regarded her as a "difficult woman and more difficult than generality".
    • The story of Tuptim, which Anna admits was "based on palace gossip", never happened. Unfaithful concubines in the time of Mongkut were simply dismissed.
    • Anna herself was not all that she appeared to be. She took great pains to conceal from the world that she was half Indian, changing her name repeatedly (from her birth name of "Anna Harriet Emma Edwards" to "Anna Leon-Owens" and "Anna Leon Owens") and repudiating family members who could out her.

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.
  • See Literature above for the dubious source of the supposedly-true story behind The King and I.

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.

Web Original

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.
  • 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 and 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".
  • The Woody Woodpecker short "Under the Counter Spy" (a parody of Dragnet) starts with the disclaimer, "The story you are about to see is a big fat lie! No names have been changed to protect anybody!"
  1. ↑ According to the FBI a person needs to kill three people with a "cooldown" period in between the murders to qualify as a serial killer; Gein killed only two.
  2. ↑ There is a moment that gives it away to sufficiently aware viewers: the point where the Macguffin was finally found "under the sign of Taurus" (the Bull).
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