People are always talking about how life imitates art, but rarely do they ever mention art imitating life. Actually, they do mention it — where else would art come from? — but a lot of credit for that inspiration still slips through the cracks. We’re talking, of course, about art that is based on some event or some person or some thing loosely enough that there’s still a little bit of plausible deniability. We’re pretty confident in saying that your favorite movie (unless it’s Avatar or Batman) is probably based on something that really happened, or someone who really existed, and you might never know it.
It’s not like the filmmakers were pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes — many of them have been totally open about where they drew the inspiration for all of these projects. But these films do exist in this sort of limbo between fact and fiction, mixing and remixing true events and mashups of real people into something that fits into a three-act structure rather than attempting to go full Wikipedia page biopic. These movies are not historical by any means, but there’s something of history in all of them.
Most of the time, this was intentional. Maybe a director or writer really wanted to make an authorized drama about the life of a real person and just couldn’t get the rights. Maybe it was simpler to use reality as a mere reference, a jumping-off point from which the fiction unfolds. Whatever the reason, that subtle flavor of “this really happened” and “this person was real,” whether or not you notice it as an audience member, grounds these movies in just enough of a reality that their wilder, weirder moments can also ring true.
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
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