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)