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Based on a Great Big Lie: Difference between revisions
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== Film ==
* The original ''[[
* ''[[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.
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* 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.
** It also borrows heavily from other fictional works, such as ''[[Dances
* The mockumentary ''[[Im Still Here|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 [[Enforced Method Acting|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, [[Fridge Brilliance|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. <ref>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'').</ref>
* ''[[Picnic
* ''[[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 [[Dissimile|names, locations, and events]] have been changed."
* ''[[Plan 9
** And the even more convincing disclaimer "Can you prove it didn't happen?" Take THAT, skeptics!
* The original ''[[The Last House
* 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. [[Blatant Lies|Guess]] [http://io9.com/5397359/the-fourth-kind-is-a-hoax what?]
* ''[[The Men Who Stare
** 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.
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* 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]] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101578/ reports it as "based on a true story"], despite it having unlikely divine intervention incidents, being based on the [http://www.amazon.com/China-Cry-Nora-Lam-Story/dp/0840731876/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274571493&sr=1-1 autobiography] of the woman who's the main character, [http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/cri/cri-jrnl/web/crj0090a.html and apparently not being] [http://books.google.com/books?id=syUupeVJOz4C&pg=PA328&dq=lam 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 (
* An interesting example is ''[[Enemy
* ''[[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 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.
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* 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]].
* This is part of the plot in ''Mike Nelson's Death Rat!'' (by [[
* Lucian's ''[[True
** 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?
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** The book ''[[wikipedia:Maria Monk|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.
*** According to some, Maria Monk was actually a brain-damaged woman [[Kick the Dog|tricked by her publishers or ghost writers into telling these lies.]] They profited from her "experience" and left her destitute.
* ''[[Dangerous Liaisons
* 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 "[[wikipedia:Angel at the Fence|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.
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* [[wikipedia:Anthony Godby Johnson|Anthony Godby Johnson's]] ''[http://swallowingthecamel.blogspot.com/2006/08/boy-wonder-tony-johnson-was.html 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 [[Author Avatar|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 [[wikipedia:Faith (Law %26 Order: Criminal Intent episode)|it inspired a rather popular episode]] of ''[[Law and Order: Criminal Intent]]''. In it, {{spoiler|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.
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** 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
* Horace Walpole originally passed off ''[[
* Several books purporting themselves to be the ''Necronomicon'' have been published over the years, cashing in on the infamy of [[
** 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.
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** 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. {{spoiler|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 [[Raised
** 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 [[Did Not Do the Research|Jews in Poland didn't have to wear yellow stars on chest]], but blue ones on the arm.
* ''[[The Princess Bride (
** 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.
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{{quote| 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 [[Follow the Leader|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 [http://static.byliner.com/original/Three_Cups_of_Deceit_Jon_Krakauer_Byliner_Originals.pdf embellished his narrative] to [[H. Rider Haggard]] (or [[Doonesbury|Red Rascal]]) proportions, insulting his hosts in the process and blaming it all on the [[Funny Foreigner|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 [http://abcnews.go.com/Health/lawsuit-black-maid-ablene-cooper-sues-author-kathryn/story?id=12968562 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 [[You Fail Geography Forever|certain locations in Jordan wrong]] and [[Did Not Do the Research|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 ''[[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]].<br /><br />Before the hoax was revealed in 1972, even President [[Lyndon B Johnson]] was fooled by it (and reportedly "[[Berserk Button|hit the roof]]" when he read it), and there remain [[Conspiracy Theorist|conspiracy theorists]] who believe that it actually ''is'' the real deal, claimed to be a hoax [[Parody Retcon|as a means of damage control]].
* ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'', a notorious anti-Semitic tract claiming to be the records of a meeting by a Jewish cabal plotting to [[Take Over the World]]. In reality, it was written by the Okhrana, the [[Secret Police]] of [[Tsarist Russia]], as a tool for starting pogroms with, and was later carried into western Europe and the US by White Russians in the wake of [[Red October]]. It was exposed as a forgery by ''[[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.]
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== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* 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.
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== Western Animation ==
* This is actually parodied in the episode "Arrgh!" of ''[[
** 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'''!"
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