It's true that the more accustomed Hollywood has become to boasting the words "Based on a true story" at the beginning of their movies, the less fact-based those movies have actually become over the years. Filmmakers taking liberties with people's real life stories is nearly as old as film itself. And those liberties are being stretched more and more every year. Most of the time, when Hollywood uses the husk of a perfectly good, entirely true story and takes a machete to its innards, they're just trying to make it more appeasing for the masses. And that sounds...bad. But sometimes--just sometimes--they really do improve the final product by stripping away some of those pesky facts and adding their own imaginative spins to the story. So rather than always focusing on the things that Hollywood gets wrong in these cases (fact-checking, or perhaps just adhering to said fact-checking), let's take a look at how some of the movie industry's most glaring omissions or gratuitous changes to real-life events have made for the best cinema.
8. Remember The Titans
Another underdog football story, this time told using racial tensions as the ultimate obstacle the team needed to overcome to find victory...and themselves. Based on real events that happened at T.C. Williams High School, Remember the Titans showcases Denzel Washington at his PG finest, playing the hard-nosed Coach Boone. He was the one tasked with the unique challenge of guiding a mixed-race football team from a recently desegregated school to a football championship. Except that this wasn't a unique challenge at the time. Hell, it wasn't even really a challenge at all. Because the truth is that integration had occurred at T.C. Williams six years before Remember the Titans takes place, allowing for plenty of time for the community to work through the worst of their racist bitterness. There weren't any protests during this championship season. And the only infighting among the teammates was over who got to be a starter at each position. Oh, and despite Denzel's rousing speech delivered after a midnight run through Gettysburg (also fictional), T.C. Williams was not the only high school working through challenges of integration. Because literally every other team in their league was integrated by then. As for the final championship game, it wasn't exactly a nail-biter. The Titans didn't have to pull off a miracle play to pull out a last-second win. They crushed their opponent, 27 to nothing. So...yeah. Without those little factual inaccuracies there wouldn't have been much to the movie except some routine football and a few sideways glances from some of the leftover racist white folks, of which there weren't very many.
