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"True" Stories That Are Almost Entirely Fictional

Christopher

There are a ton of movies that purport to be based upon true stories, but how true are the stories, really? One expects dramatic and creative license to be taken with the subject matter, of course, but some allegedly "true" stories bear little to no resemblance to the real-life events that inspired them. So I've done a little research, and have comprised the following list of movies that are marketed as true stories, but are really 99.99% fiction.

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	MetalMario2's Rating	My Rating
1	They Died with Their Boots On (1942, Unrated)
2	Stars and Stripes Forever (Marching Along) (1952, Unrated)
3	The Three Faces of Eve (1957, Unrated) Great movie, but I remain skeptical that kissing a corpse is traumatic enough to give a person multiple personality disorder.
4	Lawrence of Arabia (1962, PG)
5	1776 (1972, PG) Not strictly historically accurate, but fun, with good music, good acting, and plenty of humor. One of my very favorite musicals.
6	The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, R)
7	The Amityville Horror (1979, R)
8	The Elephant Man (1980, PG)
9	Victory (Escape to Victory) (1981, PG)
10	Amadeus (1984, R) About as historically accurate as Disney's "Pocahontas", but a great movie nonetheless.
11	The Last Temptation of Christ (1988, R) The film itself is not badly made, and it even has its good points, but its mostly repugnant for its unworthy depiction of Jesus as arrogant, cowardly, prone to violence, and possibly bipolar. This movie is often lauded by atheists and left-wing pseudo-intellectuals, but that's because they have no kinship with God. Rather than see a truly great film about the life and work of Christ (my personal favorite is "The Greatest Story Ever Told", starring Max Von Sydow), these film school geeks and cynical nihilists would rather hunker down and get all analytical with a banquet of the Son of God being cut down to size and dragged through the mud.
12	Good Morning, Vietnam (1987, R)
13	Mississippi Burning (1988, R)
14	Hoosiers (1989, PG)
15	Lean on Me (1989, PG-13)
16	Rudy (1993, PG)
17	Cool Runnings (1993, PG)
18	Squanto: A Warrior's Tale (1994, PG)
19	Braveheart (1995, R)
20	Pocahontas (1995, G)
21	Pocahontas II - Journey to a New World (1998, Unrated)
22	Elizabeth (1998, R)
23	The Hurricane (1999, R)
24	Noah's Ark (1999, PG-13) A completely inaccurate retelling of the story of Noah and the flood. Apparently, the filmmakers thought that they needed to flesh out the story with out-of-context events from other places in the Old Testament (I'm rather surprised Goliath didn't show up somewhere, actually). The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is here, along with Abraham's nephew Lot, who, in perhaps the most unforgivable bastardization of all, is portrayed as a ruthless, amoral cutthroat. (In the Bible, Lot was the one good inhabitant of Sodom, and God spared him from the destruction of that city.) There are a lot of good Biblical epics out there. Don't bother with this misbegotten tripe.
25	Gladiator (2000, R)
26	Quills (2000, R)
27	Remember the Titans (2000, PG)
28	Pearl Harbor (2001, PG-13)
29	A Beautiful Mind (2001, PG-13)
30	The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003, R)
31	The Last Samurai (2003, R)
32	Friday Night Lights (2004, PG-13)
33	Kingdom of Heaven (2005, R)
34	The Pursuit of Happyness (2006, PG-13)
35	The Last King of Scotland (2006, R)
36	300 (2007, R)
37	Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007, PG-13)
38	American Gangster (2007, R)
39	21 (2008, PG-13)
40	The Strangers (2008, R) This film is very eerie and very tense. My heart was in my throat the whole time. Very refreshing to see a horror movie that relies on fear and emotion, rather than gratuitous buckets of blood and gore, intermixed with shots of topless co-eds.
41	Frost/Nixon (2008, R)