History Main / BasedOnAGreatBigLie

* ''Film/CatchMeIfYouCan'': A lot of the movie [[VeryLooselyBasedOnATrueStory embroiders Abagnale's memoir]]--the fraught relationship with his father is fictional, Brenda is a composite of two different people described in Abagnale's book, etc. But later research has shown that most everything that the movie ''did'' take from Abagnale's book, in fact the whole book, is essentially made up. Abagnale never impersonated a doctor. He never took the bar exam in Louisiana or practiced law. He didn't escape custody by climbing out of an airplane toilet--that's physically impossible. He never worked for the FBI as a consultant in fighting check forgery. While he did sometimes wear a pilot's uniform as part of his check kiting, he did not use it to hitch plane rides around the world. And he was convicted of forging not up to $4 million in checks, but only $1,448.60. Wikipedia has [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale#Veracity_of_claims much more]] about this.\\

* ''Film/{{Anonymous}}'' is centrally about the idea that Creator/WilliamShakespeare did not actually write his plays, and they were instead written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford--the overwhelming consensus from Shakespearian scholars is that he did indeed write his plays, there is significant documented evidence that he wrote his plays, and the idea that de Vere wrote them has little evidence beyond simply comparing events in the plays to de Vere's life and assuming them to be autobiographical. Even if one does subscribe to the Oxfordian view and take the film as a SecretHistory, most of the actual historical details are just flat-out wrong. Most notably, the depiction of Elizabeth I as not only not a virgin, but having carried countless bastard children to term, is baffling even on its face--how would she have hidden the pregnancies?

** The short ''Drag-Along Droopy'' begins with the disclaimer: "This is an absolutely authentic account of the grazing land battles of the sheep and cattle wars of the early West. We know this story to be true. It was told to us by -- ''A TEXAN''!"

* ''Film/CatchMeIfYouCan'': A lot of the movie embroiders Abagnale's memoir--the fraught relationship with his father is fictional, Brenda is a composite of two different people described in Abagnale's book, etc. But later research has shown that most everything that the movie ''did'' take from Abagnale's book, in fact the whole book, is essentially made up. Abagnale never impersonated a doctor. He never took the bar exam in Louisiana or practiced law. He didn't escape custody by climbing out of an airplane toilet--that's physically impossible. He never worked for the FBI as a consultant in fighting check forgery. While he did sometimes wear a pilot's uniform as part of his check kiting, he did not use it to hitch plane rides around the world. And he was convicted of forging not up to $4 million in checks, but only $1,448.60. Wikipedia has [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale#Veracity_of_claims much more]] about this.

* Creator/WilliamShakespeare bent ArtisticLicense to the snapping point when writing some of his history plays. Nowhere is this more evident than in ''Theatre/{{Macbeth}}'', which was commissioned by King James I of England, who was also King James VI of Scotland and the descendant of the people who overthrow Macbeth in the play.[[note]]Not Malcolm, but rather Banquo's son Fleance (whose descendants the witches prophesy will be kings); in hindsight, it makes Fleance's relatively minor role in the play quite interesting.[[/note]] As such, the play glosses over Macbeth's reign as King of the Scots, which in real life lasted 17 years -- long enough for him to go to Rome and be personally blessed by the Pope. Macbeth in real life didn't kill Duncan in his sleep to take his crown, but rather defeated him in battle. Nor was Macbeth directly succeeded by Duncan's son Malcolm (who was a child, not a young adult, at the time when Duncan was killed), but rather by his own stepson Lulach (who doesn't even appear in the play), who had a brief and apparently rather dismal reign as King before Malcolm had him assassinated (and only ''then'' became King Malcolm III). Malcolm, for his part, apparently assassinated Macbeth in real life; in the play, Macbeth is killed by Macduff, who doesn't appear to correspond to any real person. In any event, it's not as if Shakespeare's audience really cared about historical accuracy, and even the contemporary history books were notoriously inaccurate.

* ''Film/SaturdayNightFever'' was based on Nik Cohn's article [[https://nymag.com/nightlife/features/45933/ "Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,"]] about Cohn witnessing a fight outside the 2001 Odyssey disco. 20 years after the article's publication, Cohn admitted it was complete fiction.

* ''Film/TropicThunder'' viciously parodies this as part of a larger satire on OscarBait movies, with the [[ShowWithinAShow Movie Within A Movie]] being based on the falsified memoirs of a PhonyVeteran who is so devoted to upholding the lie that he wears fake prosthesis in public to make it seem like he has hooks for hands.

* ''Film/WeirdTheAlYankovicStory'' does this deliberately, as a parody of music biopics that play fast and loose with history. It would probably be quicker to list the film's similarities to the life of the real Music/WeirdAlYankovic than it would to list the many blatantly false deviances, such as Weird Al having an affair with Music/{{Madonna}}, [[spoiler:getting into a gunfight with Pablo Escobar, and being assassinated at an award show in 1985]].

* The book ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Monk The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk]]'' does the same thing for the Catholic Church, suffering from extreme ArtisticLicense that clearly indicated it was fiction. Some claim that Maria Monk was actually a brain-damaged woman who was [[KickTheDog tricked by her publishers or ghostwriters, who profited from her "experience" and left her destitute.]]

* ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Education_of_Little_Tree The Education of Little Tree]]'', first published in 1976 as "A True Story," was purportedly the memoirs of a boy who lived with his Cherokee grandparents in the Appalachian mountains during TheGreatDepression. It was popular enough for many high schools to put it on their reading lists. Then it was discovered that the author "Forrest Carter" was really [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Earl_Carter Asa Earl Carter]], a Ku Klux Klan member and author of George Wallace's famous "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" line. [[Series/TheOprahWinfreyShow Oprah]] had to [[OverlyLongGag pull this book from her reading lists too]], but it took her a while -- she recommended it in 1994 only to pull it from her website ''in 2007''.

* ''Bravo Two Zero'', the memoirs of former SAS trooper and Gulf War veteran "Andy [=McNab=]"[[note]]a pseudonym, real name Steven Mitchell ; he is also famous for his face never being visible on camera on the grounds that a lot of people still want to kill him[[/note]], ended up becoming a severe embarrassment to the British Army thanks to this trope. First, another member of the squad, "Creator/ChrisRyan",[[note]]also a pseudonym, real name Colin Armstrong although he does show his face -- he's now a minor TV personality in the vein of Ray Mears[[/note]] chimed in with his own memoir, painting [=McNab=] as a ''very'' UnreliableNarrator and blaming him for the mission's disastrous end. Another SAS veteran flew out to Iraq in 1993, retraced as much of the squad's route and interviewed as many witnesses as he could find, and discovered that both of them were equally guilty of inflating their stories. If they were exaggerating for the sake of a good story this would be bad enough, but they were apparently less than truthful during their debriefing sessions as well. Unfortunately, by the time this became generally known, there were [[FollowTheLeader half a dozen other "true accounts"]] of the SAS in the Gulf War that showed equal regard for fact-checking. Peter Radcliffe, then-Regimental Sergeant Major of the SAS and the only Gulf War veteran of the Regiment to publish his memoirs without a pseudonym, devotes an entire chapter to the whole wretched business.

* Done for satirical effect by ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Report_from_Iron_Mountain The Report from Iron Mountain]]'', a [[TheSixties '60s]] counterculture book written by Leonard Lewin as a StealthParody of [[UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar Vietnam-era]] military think tanks. Posing as a leaked document written by a "secret government panel", it claimed that war was a necessary part of the economy and served to divert collective aggression, and that society would collapse without it (basically, the plot of ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid4GunsOfThePatriots''). Therefore, in the event of peace, [[Literature/AModestProposal they recommended]] that new bodies be created to emulate the economic activities of war, including {{blood sport}}s, the creation of new enemies to scare the people (including {{alien inva|sion}}ders and environmental destruction), and [[RefugeInAudacity the reinstatement of slavery]]. Before the hoax was revealed in 1972, even President UsefulNotes/LyndonJohnson was allegedly fooled by it (and reportedly "[[BerserkButton hit the roof]]" when he read it), and there remain {{conspiracy theorist}}s who believe that it actually ''is'' the real deal, claimed to be a hoax [[ParodyRetcon as a means of damage control]].
* ''Literature/TheProtocolsOfTheEldersOfZion'' is a notorious anti-Semitic tract claiming to be the records of a meeting by a Jewish cabal plotting to TakeOverTheWorld. In reality, it was written by the Okhrana, the SecretPolice of UsefulNotes/TsaristRussia, as a tool for starting pogroms and otherwise convincing people that anything other than reactionary Christian monarchy was directly authored by {{Satan}}. It was later carried into western Europe and the US by White Russians in the wake of UsefulNotes/RedOctober, and popularized in the Anglosphere by Henry Ford who serialized the ''Protocols'' in his newspaper ''The Dearborn Independent''. It was exposed as a forgery by ''[[UsefulNotes/BritishNewspapers The Times]]'' of London in 1921, who revealed that large sections of the book were cribbed wholesale from a 19th century anti-Napoleonic tract by Maurice Joly. Even so, it was made part of the school curriculum in UsefulNotes/NaziGermany, and anti-Semites to this day cite it as "evidence" of a Jewish conspiracy.

* Played with regarding ''Comicbook/FromHell'', which is based on one of the myriad theories behind the murders of UsefulNotes/JackTheRipper -- specifically, a variation on the theory that the murders were committed by a high-ranking member of Victorian society, on the orders of Queen Victoria herself, to prevent the victims from revealing the existence of an illegitimate heir to the throne. Creator/AlanMoore has publicly acknowledged that he doesn't believe a single word of this particular theory, but it worked for the story he wanted to tell.
* ''ComicBook/BlazeOfGlory'' has an InUniverse variant, with the dime novels based on the fictional gunfighters of the story, which look suspiciously like the covers of comic books published by Creator/MarvelComics. Reno Jones of the ComicBook/{{Gunhawks}} spends a few panels [[RetCon Retconning]] them out of existence.

* Creator/NeilGaiman didn't expect anyone to believe that ''Comicbook/{{The Sandman|1989}}: The Dream Hunters'' was ''really'' based on an ancient Japanese folk tale; that was just something to make the story more interesting, like saying your Literature/SherlockHolmes pastiche was found in a box marked "J.H. Watson M.D.". But a number of people did, including the artist of the comic book adaptation, who said it completely seriously in interviews until Gaiman tactfully corrected him. If you google "The Fox, The Monk, and the Mikado of All Night's Dreaming", you can see the story is still out there.

** ''Jay's Journal'' purports to be the true diary of a teenage boy's involvement with a Satanic cult. In fact, the book was largely fabricated by author Beatrice Sparks, best known for the equally fictitious anti-drug novel ''Literature/GoAskAlice''. The real "Jay" had suffered from depression and ultimately took his own life. His grieving parents approached Sparks with their son's diary, hoping that his story could be used to help other at-risk teens. Instead Sparks fabricated the majority of journal entries featured in ''Jay's Journal,'' inventing a tale of Satan worship, demonic possession, and animal mutilation out of whole cloth--but, crucially, not changing anything enough to hide "Jay's" real identiy if you knew anything at all about him--to the horror of the real Jay's family, who saw their son's memory tarnished.

* ''Film/TheConjuringUniverse'' makes heroes out of Ed and Lorraine Warren, a pair of self-described "demonologists" with Lorraine claiming to be a full-on psychic who can sense ghosts. While the Warrens were real and most of the films are based on real cases of supposed hauntings that the Warrens were (to various degrees) involved in, most of the actual plot points are completely fictional, including the Warrens being the primary investigators of the Enfield Poltergeist (They were turned away by the family) and especially the historical facts involving the ''Film/Annabelle'' doll and its origins. In fact, aside from the fact that the Warrens were real people who really did investigate hauntings, and the cases in the films are all at least based on actual claims (and the families' names are kept the same), practically everything else is made up. But, as you'll see below with ''A Haunting in Connecticut'', the Warrens were not above making things up.

* ''Fist of Fear, Touch of Death'' is a supposed documentary about American karate promoters trying to find a successor to the deceased Creator/BruceLee. The film was lambasted by Lee fans for playing loose with his actual life, such as claiming that he was killed by a TouchOfDeath, that his great-grandfather was "China's greatest samurai", and that a young Bruce was "karate crazy" in order to emulate his samurai ancestor, even though samurai and karate are [[InterchangeableAsianCultures Japanese, not Chinese]], and Bruce Lee studied kung fu. All of these claims are poorly dubbed over some early Bruce Lee films and interview footage.