Quantifying truthfulness in films "based on a true story"

Andrea James 4:58 am Fri Jan 6, 2017

With awards season upon us, lots of films "based on a true story" are in contention. It gives films a little emotional boost to say it really happened, but how much of the film is true? David McCandless created a metric to quantify it based on scene-by-scene analysts. So Selma hets a 100%, and The Imitation game gets 41.4%.

Here’s how the truth levels break down.

» UNKNOWN We couldn’t verify it or the sources were secret (i.e. personal diaries)

» FALSE Out and out didn’t happen, or outrageous dramatic license taken.

» FALSE-ISH Pretty false but with reasonable / understandable dramatic license.

» TRUE-ISH Some tweaks but true in spirit. Or a mix of true and false.

» TRUE Pretty much as it happened.

• Based on a True True Story? (Information Is Beautiful)

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