The Onion defends right to parody in Supreme Court brief

Re:The Onion defends right to parody in Supreme Court brief by jhbadger on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @09:14AM (#33079862)

Of course some films like Fargo (1996) went the opposite direction, claiming in the introductory text that it was "based on a true story which happened in 1987" which drove people crazy trying to figure out what real 1987 event it was based on before the Coen Brothers finally admitted that they were just messing with the audience.

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Re:The Onion defends right to parody in Supreme Court brief by ben_w on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @10:40AM (#33081056)

When I was a kid, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was found in the "True Stories" section of my local VHS rental.

Also took child-me far too long to realise the "Famous Historian" scene and the witch/duck trial in Monty Python and the Holy Grail wasn't supposed to be real.

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Re:The Onion defends right to parody in Supreme Court brief by bena on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @11:06AM (#33081427)

My favorite "based on a true story" film is Hidalgo (2004). It's about a guy who takes a mustang horse to some multi-day desert race in the Middle East. He wins, gets a bunch of money, buys a shitload of mustangs and frees them all.

And it really happened... ish. Like, the guy the movie is based on, he did tell that story. But the actual race, never happened. There's no record of the guy ever setting foot in that part of the world. But yeah, he did tell the story in that movie.

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Re:The Onion defends right to parody in Supreme Court brief by jhbadger on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @10:46PM (#33103747)

We are beginning to realize that many of the events of Catch Me If You Can (2002), despite being based on the memoirs of conman Frank Abagnale, never happened. Abagnale was even a conman about the cons he performed.

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