Based on a Great Big Lie: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|''"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"}}

 

[[Ripped from the Headlines|Basing a book]] on a [[Real Life|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?

'''Based on a Great Big Lie''' is a specific type of [[Dan Browned]]. The author may make heavy use of [[Metaphorically True|half-truths]] to justify himself.

 

 

{{examples|page=works based on a great big lie}}

* 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<ref>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.</ref> 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.

* Back in the 70s, the very first "snuff" film ([[Sarcasm Mode|imaginatively]] entitled ''[http://www.agonybooth.com/snuff/ 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 [[No Ending|actual movie's ending]].

** That, coupled by the fact that the snuff footage looked ''unbelievably'' fake. [http://www.agonybooth.com/recaps/Snuff_1976.aspx?Page=9 See for yourself].

* 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.

* 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.

 

* 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 [[Morton's Fork|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" [[Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch|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 Browned|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]].

** 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.

** ''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 Film|snuff films]], while the latter was about serving as a "Satanic high priest" before coming to Christianity. Both books [https://web.archive.org/web/20130320055536/http://www.holysmoke.org/sdhok/side.htm were] [https://web.archive.org/web/20131029141200/http://www.holysmoke.org/sdhok/warnke.htm 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 [[Mad Doctor|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.

* 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.

* 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 ''[[wikipedia:The Report from Iron Mountain|The Report from Iron Mountain]]'', a [[The Sixties|'60s]] counterculture book written by Leonard Lewin as a [[Stealth Parody]] of [[The Vietnam War|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 Sport|blood sports]], the creation of new enemies to scare the people (including [[Alien Invasion|alien invaders]] and environmental destruction), and [[Refuge in Audacity|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 ''[[British Newspapers|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.

* [http://www.cracked.com/article_17003_the-5-most-ridiculous-lies-ever-published-as-non-fiction.html Cracked.com has a whole article devoted to this.]

 

* Kids' show ''Wacaday'' had something very similar to this with its fictionalized historical fact segments, as they'd always [[Catch Phrase|remind you at the end]] that ''"We know it's true [[Hypocritical Humor|because we made it up ourselves!]]"''

* ''[[Lie to Me (TV series)|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.

 

 

* 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.

 

* 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]]''/''[[Market-Based Title|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.

 

* ''[[Cracked.com]]'''s Photoplasty contest [http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_1050_26-inaccurate-movies-theyll-make-about-recent-history/ 26 Dramatic Movies They'll Make About Modern History] varies between [[Very Loosely Based on a True Story]] and this.

 

* 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.

* 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".

 

{{reflist}}