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12. Based on a True Story
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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c h a p t e r t w e l v e Based on a True Story This survey of problems in adaptation has considered a wide variety of films, from silent shorts aiming at epic weight to heritage adaptations of canonical English novels to adaptations that choose video games or theme-park attractions as their source texts. It might seem that postliterary adaptations mark a vanishing point in adaptation studies. But one last kind of adaptation is still more problematic and more seldom treated as adaptation: films that profess to be based on no source text at all but on a true story. The label“based on a true story”seems to have come into common use only during the 1990s. The earliest films I have been able to find that carry the label are Awakenings (1990) and GoodFellas (1990). If the label is recent, however, the concept is much older. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) begins with the title, “What you are about to see is true—it happened in Brooklyn, New York, on August 22, 1972.”A film may establish its credentials as based on a true story by the detailed historical prologues that begin Empire of the Sun (1987), Schindler’s List (1993), or Kundun (1996) or the epilogues that indicate the fate of the leading characters at the end of The French Connection (1971), Amistad (1997), and The Insider (1999). But the presence of such titles is no guarantee that the film has any basis in a true story. Tobe Hooper introduces his wholly fictional film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) with the announcement:“The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. . . . The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, the Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” Hooper’s claim is echoed and sharpened twenty years later in the opening title to Fargo (1996): “This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” Only when the film’s screenplay was published the following year did Ethan and Joel Coen acknowledge what hundreds of Web commentators had been arguing for months:Fargo only“pretends to be true.”1 Its claim to be a true story—or,more accurately, to be based on a true story, with a few identifying details changed as a gesture of respect for the dead—was itself untrue. Animal House (1978) ends with a far more transparently duplicitous montage sequence that freezes on the leading characters over subtitles that identify, for example, Bluto (John Belushi ) and the coed he has just grabbed as “Senator and Mrs. John Blutarski.” Even though they lack any such overt identifying labels as the legend“based on a true story”or the contextual titles that seek to situate them in history,films recognizably based on true stories go back still further, to I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), Rope (1948), The Great Moment (1944), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and Kameradschaft (1931). All of Sergei Eisenstein’s films from Strike (Stachka [1925]) to Ivan the Terrible (1946) could reasonably be described as based on a true story. Of course none of Eisenstein’s films carries any such label, and not only because it would not become fashionable for another fifty years. Each of them poses as history (Strike and Battleship Potemkin [1925] as chamber history , October [1927] and Ivan the Terrible as epic history), and their historical claims would be reduced, not elevated, by the claim to be based on a true story. So would the claims of From the Manger to the Cross (1912), Intolerance (1916), or any biblical adaptation that plays fast and loose with history by filtering it through variously reliable intermediate sources or inventing new incidents in the interest of dramatic impact. These examples suggest that “a true story” has a unique status among source texts. “Based on a true story” indicates a source text that both is and is not a text, one that carries some markers common to most source texts but not others. Most source texts have authors and publishers who have sold the adaptation Based on a True Story...