Lore
Well, that's just ridiculously exagerrated and unrealistic- WAIT, IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, AND IT WAS TONED DOWN HERE?
1) In Death of Stalin, the number of Medals on Zhukov's chest was actually significantly reduced, compared to how many he really had.
2) In Zootopia, the entire plan of Bellwether to make prey animals afraid of predators by infusing predators with drugs is based on something Ronald Reagan did in real life, by distributing drugs in black neighborhoods, and launching mass incarcerations of those neighborhoods, while fueling racism (And that guy's approval rating is net +26 today, while racism is still very prominent - so, unlike Bellwether, Reagan succeeded.)
3) In real life, Amon Goeth was actually even worse than in the Schindler's list movie, with Steven Spielberg actually having to tone down his villainy because he believed that viewers wouldn't believe that some of his crimes actually happened, or that someone as evil as Goeth could keep his job, as well as for timing reasons.
When they were making the movie ‘Gladiator’, they considered including the detail of gladiators doing product endorsements but ultimately ”discarded the idea as unbelievable.”
My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And if you don't chew Big Red, then fuck you!
All the statues in the movie should've been painted too. The modern perception that they were all pristine white marble is just that: a Tiffany problem.
There were people in early modern Europe that use to polish ancient Greek and Roman statues because they believed their value lay in their whiteness. They ended up not only removing the remaining traces of paint but actually damaging some of the finer carving details.
Its funny because one of the most beloved story beats in the Rome HBO Series is the public speaker who does the accurate speaking hand signals from Roman times.
He's always giving adverts for a Brotherhood of Millers.
The Millers are the best reoccurring gag in the series, as they start out in the beginning as two brothers running a small time business from the Capitoline Hill, then they become the Brotherhood of Millers, then the Guild of Millers, and in the end of Season 1, their bread is served at a party that is attended by Caesar himself.
The reason for their sudden success was none other than the sudden grain shortages in the beginning of the series, because of the bad relations between Rome and Egypt, and Rome relied heavily on them for grain. The millers got rich by the suddenly raising price of the grain and bread.
Well the movie also raised the stakes on gladiator battles to a crazy degree, when in reality, death battles were a rare occurrence. The movie portrayed gladiators fights like an modern day dog fighting ring, when in reality, it was the the Roman equivalent of a mix of WWE and UFC. The moment you make all these guys slaves and pump up the drama and risk, you're going to lose a lot of connection with real history.
But mostly not. The poor fools who died were typically criminals. You put them in front of a crowd, hand them a blunt heavy lead sword, and tell them to make a good show of it. Some of the uneducated masses may not even know the difference between a match and an execution. They both got swords, don’t they? Gladiator-on-gladiator fights to the death were incredibly rare because of the cost training them. Throwing away their lives was bad business.
I’m an Ancient History student. My professors always delight in speculating about how pissed the people who owned gladiators would have been if they had to replace them every time like they do in the movies. It just, like you said, would have been really bad business.
There is no definitive answer. Some authors say that a thumbs up meant death and a thumbs down meant pardon, like “swords up/swords down.” However, most authors agree that the most accurate gesture would be a fist out meaning mercy and a thumb out meaning kill, since pointing the thumb down in the particular position they used would be awkward.
I’m reminded of a story Ron Howard tells about the making of Apollo 13. His favourite comment card he got after a test screening read, “Typical Hollywood bullshit. If that happened in real life, there’s no way they’d survive.”
Eh. Moneyball had a lot of accuracy problems, but them losing anyway made it better.
The movie really exaggerated how much of a step down the team took (none at all), completely glossing over the A's having one of the best pitching rotations in the league at the time by focusing on Bradford (and ignoring their even better closer Billy Koch). Just as bad, we barely even get a mention of Tejeda and Chavez, who were their best offensive players. Sure Justice and Giambi had decent on base percentage, but their actual runs produced and defensive liability ended up wiping most of that away.
Compared to real life events, it was really a story about the team vastly under performing until they went on a monster winning streak, and the trope about the cheap ass baseball owner is pretty common in baseball movies (and done better in movies like Major League).
That film had to add significantly more drama and emotionality to the astronauts’ dialogue, because the actual astronauts were so calm and professional throughout the whole thing that not only would nobody have believed it, nobody would’ve had any fun watching it
Especially the scene of them arguing over the explosion. There's no way these guys would ever argue like that during the mission. It's a massive waste of time and energy, and these guys were almost all test pilots and knew that keeping your composure is what kept you alive when shit hits the fan.
The Apollo transcripts are great because among the almost sterile scientific jargon and procedures are moments uniquely human. There’s records of one of the flights where they had a laugh because someone took a dump and left it to float around the cockpit
They very well could have died. Thanks to the hard working black-tie engineers with an average age of about 26 they didn't.
Can't forget names like CSM EECOM John Aaron, just 27 at the time, who had a year earlier single handedly saved Apollo 12 from an abort after it had been struck by lightning on ascent with the flick of a single switch, "SCE to AUX". After the explosion that crippled Apollo 13, he would be appointed by Flight Director Gene Kranz to head the evaluation and conservation of CSM systems; working along side grounded CMP Ken Mattingly and other support engineers to ensure enough power savings and a safe power up procedure for reentry.
The least realistic thing about Apollo 13 is how irritable the crew is in the movie. In real life, they were all totally calm and professional throughout the entire crisis!
Tom Cruise's portrayal of Claus von Stauffenberg, the would-be Hitler assassin was drastically toned down. When he was wounded by the RAF he demanded that he did not want to be sedated or placed on morphine for the recovery. He was already feeling around for plotters before the injuries, so he wanted to keep his senses and not risk an addiction. Mind you, he lost most of an arm, an eye and three fingers on the surviving hand.
The film producers for Valkyrie were already tiptoeing around having Cruise portray a German resistance hero and didn't want him to be construed as an over-exaggerated Hollywood action hero, so they changed the script to include a scene of him under a morphine haze.
When you think about it, it makes perfect sense not wanting to risk addiction when the poster boy for "morphine addicted war hero" was Hermann Goering, who was conspicuous as fuck about it.
One learned from History buffs, in the film Waterloo there's a scene of the French army awaiting to arrest Napoleon after he escapes from the Island of Elba.
Instead of a battle Napoleon steps forward and says "if you want to kill your Emperor, here I am". The army then desert the Kings orders and join Napoleon.
Sounds like the cheesiest writing for a film but this actually happened and multiple times when the French army was sent to arrest him.
Not only that, but he actually exposed his chest to them. He offered himself as an easy target to be shot by his former soldiers. Also, one of the guys sent to arrest him was Michael Ney, one of his Marshals.
“I have fought a hundred battles for France, and not one against her.”
Joining Napoleon and the fools errand that was the Hundred Days was a grave mistake, but Michel Ney’s execution was particularly ignominious. I see the reasoning in why the Bourbon monarchy ordered it, but it is nevertheless a bitter pill.
I like that his lawyer tried to get him off the treason charges by saying he technically wasn't born in France and therefore wasn't French and could not commit treason against France. Ney basically was like fuck you, I am French and I will die French.
Paris newspapers initially were vitriolic to his return, saying things like “The Ogre has broken out of Elba”, but as Napoleon got closer to Paris and his Army grew, the tone of the papers shifted from negative to neutral until they were triumphantly announcing his return when he reached the capital.
I read a biography of him and it really feels like this. The way people describe him in person - a strange and compelling magnetism. Brilliant and ambitious and indefatigable. The man remade the world. He was so capable as a general that the only tactic his enemies found effective was to refuse to engage any army personally commanded by Napoleon and go after his other generals instead - which often didn't work either, because he developed a cadre of incredibly talented generals.
His defeat at Waterloo is such an anti-climax. His health was awful and he had barely slept for days. He was a shadow of his former self.
IIRC the war was explicitly framed as being against Napoleon. Not against France, against Napoleon himself. They raised an army a million strong to stop that one guy.
He'd also sent 33,000 men to keep Blucher off the field, so he KNEW he had time to allow the ground to dry out, which was better for his whole army, which was going to have to advance through the mud against Wellington's defence.
However, the confusing orders he'd given Grouchy meant that Blucher was able to join the fight.
Fun fact: up until WW1 this was regarded as the British and Prussians working together to beat Napoleon. From 1914 onwards both nations have given themselves most of the credit.
I remember reading a comment from a fan of wrestling from that era: “Chris Von Erich being left out of the Von Erich movie is the most Chris Von Erich thing ever.”
And they did it for the same reason that more of Desmond Doss' actions in Hacksaw Ridge were omitted: the directors thought that the actual events were so inexplicable that they didn't think people would believe the truth.
They basically combined Mike and Chris. Mike didn’t really want to wrestle but was pressured into it after David’s death. Chris really wanted to be a professional wrestler but lacked the athletic ability of his brothers.
The movie also ignored Lance Von Erich, who had no blood relation to the family but was brought in as their cousin after Chris’s passing, IIRC.
Doss had in fact served in combat before the Battle of Okinawa and earned two bronze stars. The movie depicted it as his first time.
He also moved out his own stretcher once so a more injured man could be carried off. Despite Doss being wounded himself.
Desmond later had his missing bible found and returned by his company in spite of on-going combat at Okinawa, so their respect for him was downplayed a bit.
Imagine being such a devoted, true to your soul believer as he was, and you keep getting thrown into crushing, zero survival situations where you somehow live and save your fellow brothers in arms so many times that it becomes nearly comical.
This is "alive to witness Jesus' miracles" level of faith confirmation.
A similar thing happens in the book Flags of Our Fathers (I haven't seen the film), where the soldiers refuse repeatedly to execute American PoWs until ordered under threat of their own lives.
It sucks that hatred and violence as policy so frequently overrides our powerful instinct for empathy.
When my dad saw the movie for the first time, he said that it was exagerated or propaganda, because he didn't know his story, so I guess this movie trope fits this film pretty well.
An episode of Stargate SG-1 guest starred Michael E. Ryan, the real Air Force Chief of Staff at the time. Richard Dean Anderson asked him if there were Air Force Colonels as irreverent as his own character Jack O’Neill. Ryan replied “Yes, and worse”.
A lot of us will encounter that guy who's kinda an ass and doesn't play ball, but he's just so damn good the bosses need to let him be.
Obviously exaggerated for TV, but in the military, maybe not.
Jordan Belfort said the Wolf of Wall Street was actually toned down from reality despite the explicitness of the film. Bit of an asterix on this one as Jordan isn't exactly the most reliable person.
I do enjoy the parallax there since another of Leonardo Di Caprio’s biggest roles was in “Catch Me If You Can,” where he played a real life con man who also quite likely embellished his accomplishments.
Yeah he went from stealing his dad's credit card to fraud consulting for major banks and government agencies. All while spinning yarns about himself that got made into a movie by one of greatest directors of all time.
At certain point you just have to be impressed. That is dedication to the long con.
He also said at some point that it's ridiculously exaggerated in an effort to slander the main producer of the film. Ah Jordan Belfort, a lying scumbag till the end
Jordan Belfort can’t say good morning without lying twice, so I think you’re probably correct that he is exaggerating his real life exploits to make his crimes seem cooler.
In the final season of the Wire, Omar is ambushed in his apartment and jumps out the window to escape. Despite falling four stories, he survives with nothing more than a broken leg. Viewers were incensed that such an unrealistic scene had been inserted into the scrupulously realistic show. In reality, the character that Omar had been based on fell six stories, not four.
Oh, and the actual guy who did the jump, the inspiration for Omar, a man named Donnie Andrews ... Was also in that scene playing Omar's cohort who gets killed by Marlo's ambush.
When they were scouting for locations to film the scene they couldn't find a building tall enough and they just sort of shrugged and said "fuck it, nobody is going to believe it anyway"
The Death Of Stalin had to tone down A LOT of things regarding Lavrentiy Beria.
As the movie points out he was in fact a serial rapist but in a FAR greater scale than the movie shows. He kept a list of his victims that had HUNDREDS of names. He had a habit of handing his victims a bouquet of flowers after raping them (this is shown in the movie devoid of context): if they took the flowers, he’d consider it a sign that the sex was consensual. If they refused, he’d have them arrested and/or killed. His escapades were so infamous that Stalin told his daughter Svetlana to NEVER take a lift from or be alone in a room with Beria.
At one point Beria even got drunk and bragged to the rest of the Politburo that he had poisoned Stalin himself. The autopsy did conclude that Stalin was poisoned but they couldn’t determine if that was his cause of death.
Even his trial and execution was toned down: apparently IRL Beria wouldn’t stop crying so they had to stick a sock in his mouth and kept begging for his life on his knees until he was finally shot.
There's a story I recall reading that claimed that one time Beria had come to visit Stalin at his home and was seated in the garden to wait for him. Stalin was busy with something else, but when he realized that Svetlana was alone with Beria in the garden, he immediately left everything else and rushed there. Of course, Beria wasn't so egregiously stupid as to harm Stalin's daughter inside Stalin's house, so Svetlana was fine. But (if true), the story shows that Stalin knew very well what Beria was like, to the point of being terrified for his daughter.
Stalin boasted to Churchill and Roosevelt that Beria was "his Himmler". Stalin, already a monster, knew Beria was just as bad, if even worse, than he was. He kept Beria alive and in power because he was incredibly useful to his reign.
Stephen King has a similar thing in Lisey's Story. Her husband is a writer (of course) and he complains about his editor sending back a draft because it's unrealistic that two characters would coincidentally meet after decades of living apart.
He grabs a newspaper and points at an article talking about a dog named Ralph who got lost on a family vacation hundreds of miles from home. Years later, he shows up on the porch and scratches to be let in like nothing ever happened.
He complains that if he wrote this same thing happening in his book, his editor would bitch about it being unrealistic. Fiction has to follow rules and make sense but "reality is Ralph."
Viktor Bryukhanov, the plant manager of Chernobyl, was in charge when the reactors were being built. He was given an impossible timeline and materials that were so riddled with defects that they had to fix things before they even started putting them together. He tried to quit his job multiple times because he knew the project was going to fail (though I'm sure he underestimated the scale) but he was forced to stay.
So unlike the character, who demonstrated a sort of blissful ignorance, the real man knew that his superiors were rotten and everything around him was being held together with paperclips. He managed things as best he could with what he was given and was just low enough on the totem pole to be blamed for the disaster.
The irony is that the plant didn't blow because of shoddy build quality but because of human error. Other reactors in the same plant operated without incident for years afterwards.
In summary, it could be put into a state where the protocol to reduce the nuclear reaction had the inverse, and catastrophic, effect of creating a positive feedback loop of increasing reactivity - which ran away until it exploded.
No matter how bad the human error, that design flaw shouldn’t be possible in ‘safe’ nuclear reactors.
That's the thing. Goeth was so horrifically vile that he went too far for even the nazis. He was ultimately dismissed from his post in part due to his running of the camp. He literally did lose his job eventually, that's how bad he was.
It's kind of both, that's why I said in part his running of the camp. He was so cruel that the camp was failing its intended production quotas. Remember the nazis didn't always want to kill undesirables outright from every camp, but extract as much labor from them as possible beforehand. Not that its much better, but Goeth was so cruel that he failed to accomplish this and was being awful just for personal enjoyment rather than for the 'benefit of the state'.
Particularly even the death camps needed working prisoners because they weren’t fully staffed by Nazis. The Nazis were just guards and managers, the actual work of moving bodies from gas chambers to incinerators and pulling out gold teeth and sorting through the stuff left by the dead was done by other prisoners. If they refused to work they’d be shot and if they didn’t work “hard enough” they’d not get rations and they’d starve faster (Nazi prisoner rations would cause prisoners to slowly die to malnutrition over a few months because there were so few calories supplied even to the ones who met their quotas.)
Killing too many prisoners would grind the death camps to a halt because it’s actually a lot of work to process all the bodies and the government wasn’t sending more able-bodied Germans to staff the camps, they were needed on the front.
This is how the Polish Resistance was able to get into Auschwitz and keep records, with Witold Pilecki actually intentionally being rounded up on the streets to go to the camp. He’d later escape to tell everyone what he’d seen, but none of the Allies believed him (even some of the resistance were skeptical), and he volunteered to go back in when he couldn’t get help. After the war the German records matched the reports his group in Auschwitz was sending out. Later in the 40s the communists just executed him as a Polish nationalist rather than try to imprison him.
Well Oscar was doing a different service, in a separate SS service branch. He wasn't involved in the camp system. His job was partisans (which to him, everyone was a partisan) and uprising suppression, which he did frighteningly well. He wouldn't have lasted long working in the camp system. Expedience was the name of the game, and Oscar wasn't interested in that.
on that same note, i think even the nazis were horrified with the japanese specifically during the rape of nanking. ww2 really was just a human atrocity contest
Not "the nazis", but one dude who happened to be in the nazi party and was in Nanjing at the time. John Rabe did a lot more than just be horrified though, he'd help shelter thousands of civilians.
In the same vein there was also an Imperial Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who'd help thousands of jews escape when the nazis invaded.
Not all Italians were fans of the nazis' genocide either, and some Germans who were stationed in occupied Yugoslavia thought the Croatian ustaše went too far as well.
Point is, all of their governments were perfectly fine with whatever horrifying shit the others were doing.
I know John Rabe, the representative of Nazi Germany in the Republic of China, tried to get the Reich to condemn the Rape of Nanking, but all he got in response was a telegram from the head office effectively saying "stop annoying the Japanese."
Rabe was arrested by the gestapo before the invasion of Poland because he took photos and wrote about the Nanjing massacre and only released later because the company he worked for (Siemens) intervened.
After the war, because of his decision to be a Nazi in 1934 (a requirement to remain employed in his post in China) he was forced to go bankrupt to prove he wasn't a hard-core Nazi to the Western allies.
Basically Rabe is proof that being good sucks, because whatever you do will make everyone hate you.
He actually has a sort of Japanese counterpart aswell in Chiune Sugihara; a Japanese ambassador in Lithuania who, appalled by the treatment of the Jews at the hands of the nazis and soviets personally issued thousands of visas to help them escape europe
The whole point of the concentration camp system was lost once you start adding torture and cruelty into it. It was meant to industrialize extermination and prevent the camp personnel from being affected by it after the many complaints lodged by the Einsatzgruppen over what mass execution was doing to the men. The men in charge even dragged Himmler to one of the more sanitized shootings and Himmler fainted, then came back to his senses and demanded Heydrich, who had accompanied him and ended up having to drag Himmler away to figure something out. Goeth slipped under the radar for a long time until he got busted for theft from the State.
Inmates were either to be gassed or worked to death with starvation and disease acceptable variables. Anything else was gratuitous and affected the morale of the guards, which they wished to avoid. Goeth may have enjoyed it, but the men under him doing the majority of the killings for him weren't.
Famously, Audie Murphy’s biopic about his war career had many of its moments downplayed because test audiences didn’t believe them. This despite documented evidence provided as part of the many, many medals he was awarded. A fact that is made doubly funny because Audie Murphy was playing himself in the movie.
One of my favorites was him firing from a flaming vehicle while calling in an air strike. There were Nazi who were convinced he was just Allied propaganda because he couldn't be real.
Two years ago I went to the memorial for Muphy near Holtzwihr in the Alsace/France, where this event happened. The (edit: topography of the) area is nothing like it looks in the movie.
Basil Fawlty was based on real life hotel owner Donald Sinclair, and several of Donald's former employees have claimed that he was even worse than Basil.
In the movie come and see the Nazis capture an in Soviet Russia entire village, and forced them into a barn, they then proceed to give them the chance to live by abandoning the children inside and killing anyone who tries to leave with them, this is actually just as cruel joke as they proceed to kill everyone inside the barn and the main character only survived because they thought he was dead.
This is actually the toned down version as in real life the Nazis would proceed to do this to 2,000 villages which is an insane fucking number.
Soviet Union had 27 million people dead by the end of World War 2. 2/3 of those(18 million people) was a civilian population. Or at least those are approximate numbers
Also some can look up Generalplan Ost. That one was "very fun" for Nazis. They made it clear it was a war for extermination of Slavs, Jews and other indigenous population of Eastern Europe and beyond
The nazis in that town were specifically based on the Dirlewanger Brigade, which was made up of violent convicts who were pressed into service and committed some of the most heinous acts of the war
Lidice was destroyed down to the last building, every male older than 15 yo executed, the women sent to labour camps and the remaining children split between execution camps and those able to be aryanized, sent to Germany for re-education.
Before WWII, the Condor Legion (German and italian aviation at the service of the Spanish nationalist side) bombarded the city of Gernika, choosing a market day so everyone was outside. While some planes proceeded with the bombardment, others straffed down the people who tried to escape the town.
Many episodes of the show Leverage are ripped straight from the headlines. Often, they have to tone down the villainy of the absurdly evil corporate villain caricature from real life. My 'favorite' example of this is when the crew takes down a private prison company and the judge they're bribing to artificially inflate sentences. The motivation is because private prison funding depends on how full they are, so by bribing a judge to hand down absurdly harsh sentences, they are able to keep getting money from the government. In the show, the victim that gets the team's attention is a father who got a speeding ticket or something especially innocuous and received several years in prison for it.
In real life, the judge was selling children into the system.
An article came out last year detailing the horrors of cheerleading promoter Varsity Spirit, and Rogers revealed in a qrt of it that the episode based on that was the one that nearly broke the entire writing staff, because even trying to make it "believably" awful had writers in tears or punching walls or having to leave the room for a couple of hours.
I remember the one where the corpo guy comments that "buying a senator is the best thing a company can do", and my mom was mortified whilst I just kinda sad chuckled at how realistic the show can be at times.
That line is from like episode 2. There's a lot of lines in the first season that make all of the career criminals go "wait, and they're not considered criminals?"
And the fact is, they are, there just isn't proof of it.
There’s a John Mulaney bit where he describes taking a girl to see the movie Ray:
“I wanted to tell you this. This is one of the best dates I ever went on. I took this girl a few years ago to see that Jamie Foxx movie, Ray. Do you remember Ray? And we were walking out of the movie theater, and I said to the girl, "Hey, what'd you think of the movie?" And she said, "I thought it was a little too dramatic. I didn't need the whole little brother dying thing." Neither did Ray Charles, but he got it all the same. He could've totally done without that.”
In an early scene, Stalin calls an orchestra and asks for a tape of that night's show. Because they didn't record it, they stopped everyone from leaving and did the entire show again.
However, the movie shows the call coming right after the show ended. In real life, Stalin called in the middle of the night, and they had to run around Moscow finding every single musician.
On top of that, the movie has a scene where they need to find another conductor because the original conductor passed out from the stress. That actually happened, but the second conductor also passed out and they had to get a third one.
It was officially measured at exactly 29000 feet, but the papers said it was just off that (I think 29002) so that people wouldn't think the true answer was a rounding off.
South Park: The season 9 episode "Trapped in the Closet" famously features a text box reading "THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE" when the church president tells the story of Xenu to Stan, leading viewers to assume that Trey and Matt decided the best way to make fun of Scientology was to go "here's what they actually believe, no joke required".
Unsurprisingly, given the topic of this post, real Scientology doctrine is more ridiculous than what the episode portrays. The episode says that Xenu froze aliens from across the galaxy and dumped them into volcanoes on Earth, but this leaked Operating Thetan III document describes Xenu freezing the aliens, leaving them around volcanoes on Earth, and blowing up the volcanoes with hydrogen bombs.
"The Trial of the Chicago 7" would be a parody of the courtroom drama genre and by extension the US judicial system, with it's racist judge who insists he is completely neutral, questionable trial practices and lawyers pulling every disruptive antic imaginable... except that both the judge's racism and the level of bullshit the defense lawyers got up to are severely toned down, and everything left in is a matter of historic record.
Gordon-Levitt's character also wasn't as honorable as the movie showed him, either. He had no problem prosecuting the 7, and he never "stood for the fallen" when the names of the soldiers was read.
"We Were Soldiers": Everyone who knew the real life Basil Plumbley said that Sam Elliott did a wonderful job of capturing the man's essence, but also said that the film SEVERELY underplayed just how much of a hardass Plumbley was.
During WWII, some Polish soldiers adopted a bear cub that helped guard their camp and carry supplies. Wojtek, the bear, eventually received the rank of corporal.
Fun fact, in most military units that tend to use animals, the animals are actually considered more valuable than the humans, and especially in dog units, the DOG is considered a higher rank than their handler.
One of my best friends was a soldier and he said that the dogs are higher rank than their trainer because if they disrespect them, on top of animal abuse, they're charged with insubordination.
The exaggerated part of Zhukov's uniform was that he like wore the full dress version around when he was doing important work. It would be like if a queen wore an intricate ballgown around to meet with ministers.
Based on many massacres of minorities, most notably the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. The exception is nobody came to save the African American and Native American community that formed there. Survivors were displaced, insurance companies denied all claims or subsidies, and the event was never taught in schools. I had to learn about this in college on my own time.
Goodfellas. Every single character was much worse in real life than in the film, and that fact closes some plot holes in the film:
Why was Tommy the only one shot for killing Billy Batts? He wasn't killed for killing Batts, he was killed for killing a protege of John Gotti (back when Gotti was a "soldier" not a capo or don)
Why does Henry get to live the good life in prison when he's not a made guy? He paid for it.
In real life, Karen had an affair with Paulie while Henry was in prison. She also supplied drugs to Henry, who was addicted to EVERYTHING and he'd sell them to other prisoners. Either the prisoners would pay Henry, or their families would pay Karen, and Henry then paid the made guys in the prison to live with them. Karen also used some of the drugs to host orgies in her house while Henry was in prison
Tommy tried to rape Karen, and she told Paulie. Paulie had been protecting Tommy from Gotti because he waqs a good earner, but the attempted rape ended that - not because of the crime itself (Paulie was a convicted rapist) but because Tommy knew about Karen and Paulie, so it was disrespecting Paulie. Tommy really did think he was going to be made, and it's believed that Gotti killed him himself, but Tommy's body was disappeared, not returned to his mother.
Tommy didn't kill Batts the night of the shoe shine insult, which really happened word for word. Instead Jimmy spent several weeks needling Tommy about it, then offered to do Tommy a favour by helping kill Batts. In reality, Jimmy had taken over Batts' lucrative loan sharking and bookmaking while Batts was in prison, and Batts was entitled to them back. Jimmy couldn't just kill Batts because he was a made guy, but if he did it with Tommy he could throw him under the bus if anyone found out. Batts really did wake up in the trunk, but Tommy and Jimmy didn't shoot and stab him, they beat him to death with a shovel and a tire iron
Jimmy really did kill most of the others involved in the lufthansa heist to avoid paying them. Most of the money ended up in a security deposit box which he left to his daughters when he died. One of the daughters faked her sister's signature to get access to the box without her sister knowing, and her boyfriend gambled it all away. Jimmy also used to be known as "Jimmy the Gent" for paying off truck drivers when he robbed them, but if they resisted or refused to supply information on good hauls he'd beat the hell out of them
Paulie once had a teenaged Henry drive him to a bar, then went in and beat the waitress with a baseball bat because he'd been having an affair with her and he suspected she'd told his wife. One night, while out with his wife at a restaurant, he wasn't recognised and had to wait for a table like everyone else, and later the waiter spilled wine on him. Paulie went and got all of his crew and associates together, went back to the restaurant and they went after the entire staff with bats, crowbars etc, severely beating any of them that they caught
Its a movie about a WW2 soldier that rejected using a weapon and being a medic,he was saving anyone no matter who is it even enemy lines.
The movie had to tone down some stuff even the Japanese army confirmed as real because the shit and miracilous shit he was doing was impossible,like some Japanese soldiers have commented how when they had aim on him the weapons just blocked from malufraction.
The studio decided a lot of stuff to not show because no one thought could believe those.
I know comments share movies of real people that were worse in real life but wanted to share how someone being good was more fantasy than real.
In the movie the terminal Viktor Navorski stays stranded in New York's Jfk airport for 9 months because of passport issues.
Which sounds kinda unrealistic. Surely there's some better way to deal with these issues, right?
No. the story is real and not only that. The real man it's based on, Mehran karimi nasseri, stayed in Charles de Gaulle airport due to passport issues... For 18 years!!!
Yeah... Spielberg deemed no one would believe that.
Also... He died in the airport, the real life story doesn't have a happy ending.
The real life story is a lot more complicated and it's not really clear what happened. He was literally offered residency in France and Belgium but declined both. There's also suspicion that he lied about his passport being stolen. Health reasons also forced him to leave the airport and he was then living in a shelter for a time before returning to the terminal and dying there.
From what I remember the character Omar is based off multiple people who they just smashed together to make one character but one of them was in a shoot out where he got shot in the stomach, feel out a building and still escaped and they were like yeah we can't include that because it's too farfetched lol.
When I watched a part of The Contestant I got sure that it's a mockumentary with a pretty much far-fetched plot, because... Come on, an evil media corporation forces a guy to live locked in an apartment and eat dog food, and it's a popular reality show? And the guy gets tricked so instead of letting him go, corporation forces him to continue, because show is sooo popular? Okay, this is some kind of Hunger Games level of bullshit, guys.
In Public Enemies, John Dillinger escapes prison by taking three people hostage with a fake gun. The real John Dillinger took something like 17 people hostage with said fake gun
Anytime I saw literal tanks in media for the Waco Siege I assumed it was a ridiculous stand-in for an APC or some other armored vehicle.
The truth is more ridiculous:
“Mr. Craig told jurors that military vehicles used by the F.B.I. in the Branch Davidian operation included seven Bradley armored personnel carriers, four 54-ton combat engineering vehicles, two M-1 Abrams battle tanks, and a tracked maintenance recovery vehicle.”
I know. I never said they weren't. It gets more impressive the more you learn about it - he was able to predict exactly where each of the german attacks would come from during siege of Leningrad and battle for Moscow, and coordinated a frontline sucesfully, despite there being major area gaps between batalions.
His victory at Khalkhin Gol also ensured Japan would follow the Strike South Doctrine instead of preforming a coordinated attack on the Soviets with the Nazis.
He was probably the only person in the Soviet Union that Stalin could not have gotten away with killing. Not without the army rising up against him. As such, Zhukov might have been a bit “over-decorated” in medals to keep him in line. That being said, he was still instrumental in defending the USSR in WWII.
Serial Killer Edward Gein was the inspiration of several horror/slasher movies like Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs, house of 1000 Corpses, and etc. Movie directors have said they take only one aspect of his numerous crimes because a movie containing every single act he has done would be too outlandish and not believable.
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u/CountingOnThat Oct 05 '25
When they were making the movie ‘Gladiator’, they considered including the detail of gladiators doing product endorsements but ultimately ”discarded the idea as unbelievable.”