Based on a true story (except parts that aren’t)
Historical dramas riddled with inaccuracies spawn public spats, lawsuits
The following stories are not based on real events. In fact, they’re completely made up — even thought they’re meant to seem real. No, Queen Elizabeth II’s staff never hid a copy of the Sunday Times from her because of a devastating, but nonexistent, front-page headline: “Queen Should Abdicate in Favour of Prince of Wales — Half of British Public Agrees.”
No, former Los Angeles Lakers head coach Jerry West didn’t fly into fits of rage so violent that he snapped a putter over his knee and tossed his Most Valuable Player trophy through a window in his office.
And no, the two police officers who unwittingly missed an opportunity to arrest Jeffrey Dahmer before he could kill again were not given honors as officers of the year by the Milwaukee Police Department.
But the millions of people who watched three of the most popular historical dramas of the last year — “The Crown” and “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” on Netflix and HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” — were left to separate fact from fiction on their own.
These series are hardly outliers in the flourishing genre of based-on-atrue-story entertainment.
As the number of shows and movies that depict real events has grown in recent years — never before have dramatizations of well-known people and events been so popular and prevalent — so, too, have the liberties that screenwriters are taking with the facts.
In many instances, these are not mere embellishments for dramatic flair but major fabrications. Some of the people who claim they’ve been reduced to crude caricatures on screen are suing for defamation. And shows like “The Crown” have been forced to belatedly add disclaimers stating that what people are watching is in fact a dramatized version of real events.
Sometimes disclaimers are enough to protect a studio from legal liability, especially if they are prominently displayed in the opening credits and offer detail of what has been
fictionalized — beyond a generic acknowledgment such as “based on real events,” legal experts say. The First Amendment offers broad protections for expressive works like film and television productions that depict real people by their real names.
But if someone can convincingly claim that he or she was harmed by what screenwriters made up, that is grounds for a strong defamation suit, said JeanPaul Jassy, a lawyer who works on media and First Amendment cases in Los Angeles.
“A disclaimer is not a silver bullet,” he said.
“And this is where it gets very tricky with docudramas,” Jassy added. “A court could say: ‘I understand there are fictionalized elements of your show. But you used a real person’s name, and you presented as fact something that’s false that hurt their reputation.’ ”
Lawsuits fail more often than not because very few fans of these shows probably believe they are watching history as it literally unfolded. Hollywood has, of course, always amped up the drama when telling — and selling — true stories.
But when shows like “The Crown” become so popular because — at least to some degree — viewers believe they are getting an education, the liberties taken by writers go beyond dramatic license, say those who have a stake in getting the facts straight.
Netflix added a disclaimer after criticism from high places about the inaccuracies in “The Crown,” including from famed British actor Judi Dench and former Prime Minister John Major over a scene that depicted an imagined conversation between Major and Prince Charles about the queen’s possible abdication. But the disclaimer, saying the series is “inspired by real events,” appeared not on the show itself but rather on its press materials and in the trailer, which aired on YouTube.
A disclaimer also appears in HBO’s show on the Lakers, saying in part, “This series is a dramatization of certain facts and events.” But West, the former coach, and some of his players found that wholly insufficient. Through his lawyer, West demanded an apology from HBO, saying the show “falsely and cruelly” maligned him as “an out-of-control, intoxicated rage-aholic.”
HBO said in a statement that it “has a long history of producing compelling content drawn from actual facts and events that are fictionalized in part for dramatic purposes.” The network added, “‘Winning Time’ and its depictions, as with other similar shows, are based on extensive factual research and reliable sourcing.”
With the heightened sensitivity toward confronting racial and gender inequality, many Hollywood screenwriters are turning these issues into major storylines, even if that means sometimes exaggerating the details. This was the case in “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” one of Netflix’s biggest hits of the last year.
While the series uses historical records to accurately portray much of how Dahmer, the cannibalistic serial killer, preyed on young men and got away with it for so long, including court transcripts from his 1992 trial, it invents moments to convey how systemic failures in the criminal justice system allowed him to remain at large.
The opening scene of “Monster,” for instance, shows one of the characters, a Black woman, watching a report on the evening news that unsettles her: Five white Milwaukee police officers had beaten up a Black undercover officer, thinking he was a criminal.
But when the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel fact checked the series — and revealed more than a few inaccuracies — it found no reports of any incident like that in Milwaukee. The only report that seemed to match, the paper said, occurred in Tennessee a year after Dahmer was arrested.
Anne E. Schwartz, a former police reporter who was on the scene the night Dahmer was arrested and later wrote a book about the case, faulted the writers for projecting themes that are far more salient today onto events that happened more than 30 years ago.
“We’re going back and looking at this case from the lens of 2022, not 1990,” she said.
Filmmakers often try to be as sensitive as possible to the people whose stories they’re telling, said Brad Simpson, producer of the “American Crime Story” anthology, which covered dramatic moments in recent history — the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the assassination of Gianni Versace and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. That’s why, Brad Simpson said, he and his colleagues involved Monica Lewinsky in their series “Impeachment” to help her regain control of her version of what had happened.
“I think when you’re making TV based on real people, you always have to be incredibly aware that there are real victims at the center of all these stories,” he said.
But Simpson, who likened the current popular fascination with true crime to what the nation experienced in the 1960s and 1970s with “In Cold Blood” and “Helter Skelter,” acknowledged that at the end of the day, what he and other producers were doing was creating entertainment.
“It’s really hard for people when you have been part of a true story and then you see your experience on screen. Your natural instinct is to feel violated and to feel like: ‘Well, nobody spoke to me. Or I should be paid for my story,’ ” Simpson said.
“That’s not the way the law works,” he added. “That’s not the way these shows get made or written.”
And the cold reality, he said, is “your story can be used to sell streaming subscriptions.”