Biopics That Lied To Your Face

It may shock you to hear this, but even with Hollywood's reputation as the capital of moral decency, a lot of what it produces isn't, strictly speaking, for realsies. Facts get stretched, stories get bloated, and the words "based on a true story" read as shorthand for "someone might have had the same first name as the main character, maybe."

This has become especially apparent in the increasingly popular genre of biopics. The tales of larger-than-life characters are routinely made, well, even larger than larger than life. Real people become distorted amalgamations of two or three folks, or are written out altogether. Other times, entirely new characters are created out of whole cloth. Sometimes P. T. Barnum is portrayed as a singing, dancing force for equality instead of a manipulative slave owner, but now we're getting ahead of ourselves. Here are a few of the times when biopics looked you dead in the eyes, promised not to hurt you, and then lied to your face.

Stephen Hawking was a lot of things to a lot of people. A visionary genius to some, an inspirational tale of mind over body to others, and to still others, that guy who played poker with Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. For the sake of The Theory of Everything, he was Newt Scamander in Clark Kent glasses.

The Theory of Everything was based largely on the memoirs of Jane Hawking, Stephen's first wife, but it cuts a lot of unpleasantness for the sake of building up a likeable protagonist. For example, while the movie shows Stephen as being unaffected by fame and fortune, Jane described an intense personality shift in the professor, describing him as behaving like "an all-powerful emperor." She also said that, unlike in the movie, he became more resentful of her Catholicism as he got older.

Stephen's second marriage gets an airbrushing, too. Things between him and Elaine Mason, who he was with for 16 years, were at worst abusive (as his kids and staff alleged) and at best, um, "passionate." His words, not ours. Either way, things got weirder than the third act of an inspirational biopic is usually comfortable with.

A lot of Alan Turing's life really was ripe for the Hollywood pickings. He really was a brilliant computer scientist and mathematician and is still considered father to the idea of artificial intelligence. The concept of a test distinguishing a human mind from a machine is named after him, and his work decrypting Nazi transmissions was a huge factor in the Allies winning World War II. He really was convicted of "gross indecency," a blanket term used to punish homosexuality under the Labouchere Amendment, and was sentenced to chemical castration by the country he helped to save less than a decade prior.

However! The Imitation Game took a lot of liberties with his story. For one thing, Turing didn't name his code-breaking machine "Christopher" after his old boyfriend, probably on account of how he was, as previously mentioned, smart. He called it "Bombe," much less alluringly, after another machine. He was also never blackmailed by the Soviets. The discovery of his lifestyle was a lot less "international intrigue" and more "whoops." He himself reported the burglary of his apartment and admitted to the police that he'd had a relationship with the suspect, Arnold Murray.

Back in the 1980s, in days long since forgotten, Kevin Costner was a movie star and people were willing to accept that every Sean Connery character talked like Sean Connery. And that, in a nutshell, is how we got The Untouchables.

Directed by Brian De Palma, The Untouchables is the (pretty much entirely fictional) story of Eliot Ness and his team of supercops working to take down Al Capone in Prohibition-era America. Jimmy Malone, the role that won Connery a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, was a complete fabrication. That scene where Capone beats a guy's head in with a bat at a Batman-esque gangster meeting? Definitely didn't happen. And Ness' involvement in Capone's eventual takedown over tax evasion was pretty well nonexistent. As screenwriter David Mamet said in an interview, "the real history isn't all that dramatic."

As a side note, one thing the movie did get right was Ness' excitement at the prospect of nabbing a drink after Prohibition ended. He lived and died a heavy drinker.

Oliver Stone has spent the last several decades causing the public to tilt their heads back and to the left in confusion. The guy has made a career out of creating semi-historical movies and documentaries based on controversial topics like the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, and 9/11, all with varying levels of accuracy.

As an occasional palate cleanser, Stone has made flicks like The Doors, the 1991 biopic about the band of the same name. In it, Val Kilmer plays frontman and lizard king Jim Morrison. It's a haunting performance with more than a few high points. It's also, according to his old band mates, totes made up.

They weren't quiet about it, either. Pretty much as soon as he was allowed to, Doors member Ray Manzarek hit back publicly. He went so far as to say that "Oliver Stone assassinated Jim Morrison," giving Kilmer's performance a maybe-slightly-condescending "nice attempt" and calling the rest of the picture "sensationalistic." He said that while the Doors were all about love and understanding, Stone bent over backward to turn Morrison into a troubled, violent, unrecognizable jerk.

In 2017, Hugh Jackman, then the better part of 20 years into playing a superhero with cutlery for knuckles, decided it was time to put aside childish things. No longer would he play Wolverine, the unlikely leader of a group of social pariahs cast aside for their physical abnormalities. No, he was going to stretch his muscles and try something new: playing P. T. Barnum, the unlikely leader of a group of social pariahs cast aside for their physical abnormalities. But with singing this time.

The Greatest Showman is pretty far removed from reality, which isn't necessarily shocking considering how it is, unlike much of real life, a musical. Aside from that, there are plenty of discrepancies. The Zac Efron and Zendaya characters didn't exist, and if they had, Barnum's views on the inherent humanity of non-white people were, at best, super gross.

Exhibit A: When he was 25, Barnum (illegally) purchased an elderly slave named Joice Heth, whom he billed as the nurse to George Washington. Advertising her as 161 years old, he fed her a strict diet of whiskey and eggs to bring her weight down and then got her drunk and had her teeth pulled out. It was sort of what started his career, and weirdly, the movie sort of glosses over it, presumably because it's hard to turn a story about a white kid buying you and torturously forcing physical change onto your body into a song about loving yourself no matter what you look like.

Released in 2019 hot on the heels of Bohemian Rhapsody's success, Rocketman tells the story of Elton John, the popular music icon and first man in history to synthesize a rock made entirely from crocodile. The film starred Kingsman's Taron Egerton as Sir Elton alongside a cast of thousands of sequins.

As was pointed out by Rolling Stone shortly after the film was released, Rocketman takes a lot of liberties with the details of its subject's life. There are scenes set in one time period where he plays songs that wouldn't be written until years later, like his 1967 audition where he plays "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues," which wasn't, as historians say, a thing until the '80s. Anachronisms aside, the movie also tells us that our hero got his stage name from John Lennon when, in reality, he lifted it off of another musician he admired, Long John Baldrey. And if at any point while watching Rocketman, you thought to yourself, "Wow, that sure feels a lot more like a Hollywood thing than an Elton John thing," you were probably right. It probably didn't hurt that the movie was produced by Elton John's film production company.