Why “Based on a True Story” is Barely Based in Truth: The Needs of Historical Fiction

 

We have all been there, sitting in the theatre or at home, when a new trailer begins to play, and those five complicated words appear on the screen: “Based on a True Story.” It’s been decades and many iterations of Law and Order that tout the phrase “Ripped from the Headlines.” There is something about a “true” story that is value-added for the viewer. The voyeurism that drives many kinds of narrative storytelling upticks in the presence of those five words.

But as we know, narrative storytelling barely resembles the truth of its source material.

Admittedly, “truth” is a slippery slope. Flaws in human memory and self-protective ego mechanisms have created the following maxim: “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.”

As storytellers faced with telling a “true story,” the challenges are immense. At the end of the day, we still have to follow tried and true narrative rules. Most of us adhere to some form of the 3-Act model, which requires certain ingredients and proportions to work.

“Real life” rarely holds to such rules. In my previous blog entry, I looked at The Greatest Showman, which is loosely based on the life of PT Barnum, which got me thinking about historical fiction, which is what all “based on a true story” narratives really are.

Of all the stories I have told over 35 years as a professional writer, my favorites are “based on a true story.” Many of my social justice plays take some or all of their narratives from stories I was told during the research phase and I have written three screenplays that take as their starting point actual people. I have also written and/or directed several projects for the stage “based on a true story”—some of them acted in whole or part by the actual people who lived a version of what we were dramatizing.

I am also a writer and performer of Chautauqua pieces and one-man shows that are based on real people, from several pirates who sailed with Blackbeard, to a Civil War Captain who fought with an all-Black regiment, to the iconic revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, poet Allen Ginsberg, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Father of Route 66, Cyrus Avery (in preparation for a 2026 tour celebrating the Mother Road centennial).

As some of the best actors in the business—award-winners like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sam Rockwell—have said about their portrayals of real people (in their case Truman Capote and Chuck Barris), they are simply doing an actor’s interpretation of a writer’s interpretation of the person in question.

That’s a brilliant assessment of what the storyteller does. The writer’s interpretation is based on several important things:

1.     1. We need to “heighten and compress”: This is a term I learned from playwright and screenwriter David Mamet’s books about dramatic structure, The Three Uses of the Knife. Think about your life. Even if it is at times more dramatic and filled with tension points than you may be comfortable with, we are telling a story that averages 120 minutes. So tensions have to be heightened (made more dramatic, with bigger stakes and harder adversaries than might have been the case) and events (and the time between them) compressed. Here’s a metaphor I like to use with my students: Hold a tube of toothpaste vertically and compress it. The toothpaste will heighten in the sense of rising out of the tube. The cable TV series Black Sails is a good example, especially when it comes to Blackbeard, although characters, locations, and timelines were all manipulated to both heighten and compress events.

2.     2. We need to combine repetitive occurrences into fewer, more impactful ones: This goes hand in glove with heightening and compressing. Many of our tension points happen day in and day out (disagreements with colleagues, lovers’ spats, the frustrations of traffic on the daily commute) but rarely culminate in big blowups and screen-worthy conflicts. As writers, instead of showing a dozen arguments between two people we build in early tension between them, followed by one mid-level argument, followed by a major conflict that puts the hero’s goals in jeopardy (“raising the stakes”), which makes for a lot of sparks.

3.     3. We need to be faithful to the maxim that “Action is character”: Robert McKee, the most celebrated of all screenwriting teachers, famously and repeatedly said that personality and behavior are revealed through action. In other words, “show, don’t tell.” If you put a person in intense enough circumstances, their true “character” will be revealed. Do they stay and fight? Do they run? Do they commit acts of betrayal? In order to reveal a person’s true character, we need Rivals and Villains to drive and challenge them. The bigger the obstacles presented by these antagonists, the more our Hero will be forced to dig deep and show who they really are. In real life, the true villains are few and far between. This need to make antagonists Villains often causes tension with either the person who serves as the model for the Villain or the person’s family. Art Howe, former manager of the Oakland A’s, took offense to how he was portrayed in Moneyball (ironically by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Olivia de Havilland is suing the writers/producers of Feud, about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, for lying about what she said and did. The family of the real Commander Denniston in the Imitation Game (played by Charles Dance) was upset at how he was portrayed. This was the character chosen by the writer to relentlessly threaten and deride Alan Turing. In truth, he did neither.

4.     4. We need to fill the uneventful gaps with constant action: Life is rarely nonstop and intense all of the time. There are lulls even in the most adventurous of lives. These lulls can be deadly to narrative drive and tension. More compressing and heightening is needed.

5.    5.  There must be a clear “character arc”: The previous four points create the conditions in which our Hero can truly change from start to finish. People rarely change in real life to the extent that narrative storytelling requires. Storytellers are often looking for opportunities for “redemption” in the arc. That means the Hero has to make mistakes. Big ones. Often families of good subjects for biopics and other historical fiction will fiercely protect the image of their loved one as flawless and always on the right side of history. This makes telling a compelling story impossible. What they want is a documentary—and a tame, boring one at that.

While working with these five points, the storyteller is watching for opportunities to fill in what is unknown with strong narrative material. This is the great reward of doing work “based on a true story.” Is there a period of the person’s life that is relatively unknown (e.g., the 18 years between Jesus’ episode in the temple at 12 and his re-emergence at 30, when he gathered the disciples). In my award-winning screenplay based on the nonfiction book The Man at the Foot of the Bed about a family of mediums and my forthcoming audio drama The Cannon and the Quill as well as in Escape Rooms narratives and historical education tours I have designed, the gaps in history are the places where the writer can take the most liberties with the  story. A good example is the recent AMC series The Terror, based on a book by Dan Simmons who is a master of filling in the gaps with paranormal material. His novel Drood is a brilliant take on the last months of Charles Dickens’s life.

At times a writer will opt for a cleaner, more translatable version of the truth, such as Peter Morgan did with Episode 109 of The Crown, when he had Winston Churchill’s wife burn the controversial Graham Sutherland portrait of the prime minister rather than having a maid hide it. In an episode that centered very much on character (with brilliant interpretative performances by Stephen Dillane and John Lithgow) it would have been unnecessarily “busy” to unfold a conspiracy to hide the painting. In the scheme of things, it is a minor change with great effect.

Some films and longform narratives take so many liberties with the truth that they are somewhere beyond historical fiction. They are more mythological in nature, like Oliver Stone’s The Doors, a film that caused a great deal of fighting among the remaining members of the band. Rob Roy with Liam Neeson is another film that takes broad liberties, elevating the character and the story to the mythic.

Ryan Murphy's Monster (Jeffrey Dahmer and The Menendez Brothers) and Feud series (Capote vs. the Swans) push the limits of truth for artistic and thematic purposes to sometimes extreme levels, fabricating meetings with people who never really met and employing other fantasy-type sequences.  

For those who want to see how these five points work in practice, I suggest watching A Beautiful Mind and The Imitation Game and then doing some research into the two men on which the films are based (John Forbes Nash and Alan Turing) and then reading (or at least skimming) the biographies that were the source material. Tracking the various iterations is a fascinating process.

As I was working on this piece, I watched the 2018 film Winchester. The filmmakers used the phrase “Inspired by actual events.” I like this one. It gives the storytellers more leeway than “Based on a true story” by evoking Inspiration. No matter which term is used, take it with a grain of salt and enjoy the ride the storytellers have crafted.

In the end, it is important to remember one simple thing: Never mistake "based on a true story" or its iterations for a documentary (it's surprising how many people actually do).

For more how-to tips, see my article at Stage 32 about adapting true stories, "Seven Essentials for Projects Based on a True Story":

https://www.stage32.com/blog/Seven-Essentials-for-Projects-Based-on-a-True-Story