TMS Discussion: Misleading Movies 'Based on a True Story'

(DreamWorks / Amblin Entertainment)

Last year I penned an article on the process of making a good biopic versus a mediocre one. That article is now amusingly outdated, because I’ve soon learned one of my favorite ‘true story’ films—Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002)—was allegedly completely fabricated. Back in December 2020, writer-journalist Alan C. Logan coined a biography on the movie’s subject, Frank Abagnale, Jr., called The Greatest Hoax on Earth. In the book, Logan exposes Abagnale as a fraud for fictionalizing his younger years in his 1980 autobiography, also titled Catch Me If You Can. Supposedly the former conman actually spent most of his teen years and early 20s in prison and jail for petty crime; such as theft, faking identities, and only ever forging about a dozen checks throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is quite a different narrative from the story the general public knows of Frank forging thousands of checks in a phony, glamorous life posing as a doctor, lawyer and airline pilot for almost a decade.

When my brief shock ended, I found that while disappointing, the real truth doesn’t take away my enjoyment of Spielberg’s feature. Most biographical based movies already take creative license to change details. From what I remember when Catch Me If You Can was in theaters, Abagnale even confirmed they altered aspects of his life on screen [though, amusingly, not in the context we were led to believe]. Had DreamWorks and Spielberg marketed the film as complete fiction without the ‘based on a true story’ tagline, it still would have done well with critics and viewers. The cast and crew are talented and made a good movie.

(Mad Chance / Miramax Films)

Joel & Ethan Coen even brazenly placed an irrelevant ‘based on a true story’ tag at the beginning of their Oscar winning picture Fargo (1996). The brothers played coy during the film’s promotion, until eventually admitting the story was from their own imagination. I don’t think anyone truly believed TV host-producer Chuck Barris’ claims in his own 1984 memoir, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, that he was a secret CIA agent in the 1960s-1970s. Especially since only a year after publication, Barris confessed during a “Today Show” appearance those passages were fiction. Ironically, George Clooney’s film adaptation of Confessions was released the same month [December] as Catch Me in 2002.

Sometimes the accuracy of the non-fiction story doesn’t even matter to a filmmaker who finds potential for their next movie. The literary world was shook when James Frey’s best-selling 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces was later exposed in 2006 as fabrication. Yet film director Sam Taylor-Johnson still chose to adapt the book to screen in 2018. Similarly, writer Laura Albert began her career under the disguise of a male alter-ego named ‘JT LeRoy;’ which she used to write and publish her work, including a trilogy of seemingly non-fiction novels based on his life. Asia Argento’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (2004) was based on LeRoy’s 2001 novel of the same title. But in 2005, multiple media reports revealed Albert’s real name and gender, and the identity of LeRoy as a hoax.

Revelations like this are usually an unpleasant surprise, especially regarding art. But maybe, in a way, this is the easiest way of separating the art from the artist.