Truth is often stranger than fiction: What movie based on actual events had a scene/moment that made you go "That can't be true" and then you found out it was?

It's a longtime tradition that movies based on real events will fabricate, even if just a little, if it makes sense to the narrative (or for whatever reason, sometimes maliciously). And yet there's often cases where a historically based movie will have a moment or scene that makes you go, "Come on, that's got to be made up, no way can something like that be true" and then you find out it's VERY true. Because real life of often far weirder and less "believable" than anything in the movies.

One recent example that comes to mind is from "I, Tonya", a film that intentionally makes you distrust everything shown onscreen because practically everyone shown is an unreliable narrator trying to make themselves look better. The plotters to take out Nancy Kerrigan are the dumbest potential criminals this side of a Coen Brothers film, so much so that you go, "This has to be exaggerated, there's no way they could have been this cartoonishly stupid and incompetent." And then you check the history and find out yes, they really were this idiotic. In particular, Shawn Eckardt's surreally stupid interview where he continues to insist he's an "intelligence expert" despite being told repeatedly he isn't ("But I doooooo...") is almost word for word from his actual interview with Diane Sawyer (helped even more by Paul Walter Hauser's uncanny resemblance to the real Eckardt). So yes, as unbelievably dumb as they may seem to be, the truth was just as stupid.

What is your favorite example?

Submitted May 07, 2023 at 07:20PM by Mst3Kgf https://ift.tt/pnV5kjx