14 Shockingly Accurate "Based On A True Story" Movie Scenes Versus 14 That'd Make A Historian's Eye Twitch

The airport escape in Argo was way more chill (and Canadian) in real life.

When Hollywood makes a movie that's "based on a true story," nobody's expecting that they'll value accuracy over a more exciting (or funny, or emotional, or marketable) story. But some scenes and plotlines are surprisingly accurate, while others are...not.

Fox / giphy.com

Here are 14 movie moments that are pretty close to exactly how things went down in real life, and 14 ones that took a little more creative license.

Not every inaccuracy is in an overall inaccurate movie, and vice versa. And these are just singular scenes and storylines, so they're in no way representative of everything a movie got right or wrong. 

1. Apollo 13 took pains to get its story right (and impress their still-living inspirations), and it shows. And one scene that seems too much like a cinematic bad omen to be real — astronaut Jim Lovell's wife, Marilyn, losing her wedding ring in the drain on the morning of the launch — actually happened, Lovell told the New York Times.

Universal Pictures

Another cinematic (but nonfictional) moment was Marilyn's pre-launch nightmare of her husband being sucked into space, though Jim didn't know about it until he got back. He guessed it had something to do with them having recently seen a movie called Marooned, where an astronaut named Jim suffers that same unfortunate fate. 

2. But in real life, the famous line wasn't "Houston, we have a problem."

Universal Pictures / youtube.com

What Lovell really said was, "Uh, Houston, we've had a problem." (He actually said it twice, because Mission Control had to ask him to repeat himself.) William Broyles Jr., an Apollo 13 screenwriter, explained to the Washington Post that he made this minor change because, "The past perfect tense wasn’t as dramatic as ‘We have a problem’ — which meant that the problem was happening right then and was continuing, which in fact it was and would shortly cause the mission to abort." The past tense, in comparison, would imply to the viewer that the conflict was already over, when in fact it had just begun. 

Here's the full scene:

Universal Pictures / Via youtube.com

3. In Hidden Figures, astronaut John Glenn personally requests that Katherine Johnson double-check the numbers generated by the IBM computer for his launch. According to chief NASA historian Bill Barry, the real Glenn did the same thing.

20th Century Fox

Barry told CNET that Johnson "matched the computer's results exactly." However, Glenn didn't make this request at the last minute; instead, Johnson was "called in well before the launch," and spent about a day and a half making her calculations. The fact that Johnson and the computer generated matching results both reassured those involved and proved that the "critical computer software was reliable." 

4. But the scene where Al Harrison knocks down a "Colored Ladies Room" sign with a crowbar isn't accurate, mostly because Al Harrison wasn't a real person, but a "fictionalized composite of three NASA directors at Langley during the time."

20th Century Fox

However, someone did make a stand against signs enforcing segregation, but it wasn't a white man: It was Miriam Mann, an African American woman who worked in West Computing. Mann consistently tore down the "Colored Computers" sign in the cafeteria and "banish[ed] it to the recesses of her purse." Every few days, it would be replaced, and Mann would promptly tear it down again. Eventually, the sign "disappeared into Miriam Mann’s purse and never came back."

Here's Miriam Mann's granddaughter Duchess Harris speaking about Mann's life and legacy:

Miriam Mann / Via youtube.com

5. In Argo, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards hire carpet weavers to piece together shredded documents from the American Embassy. According to the Wired article that inspired the film, that really happened.

Warner Bros. / youtube.com

The method was apparently effective, and the Iranian government eventually published the reassembled documents in "a series of books entitled Documents From the US Espionage Den."

6. But that pulse-pounding sequence at the airport, with multiple near misses and Revolutionary Guards chasing after the would-be hostages' departing plane? That's all movie magic, and the real Tony Mendez said that the real escape went "as smooth as silk," excepting a "brief holdup over a mechanical problem with the plane."

Warner Bros. / youtube.com

And you can't mention Argo and accuracy without pointing out the fact that, as former Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor put it to the Toronto Star, "In reality, Canada was responsible for the six and the CIA was a junior partner." Affleck ultimately changed the postscript of the film to account for the huge role the Canadian government played in what is called, after all, the "Canadian Caper." 

Here's the final part of the airport sequence:

Warner Bros. / Via youtube.com

7. The story King George VI tells his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, about an abusive nanny in The King's Speech is, unfortunately, true.

Paramount Pictures / youtube.com

According to history professor Charles Carlton, the king's tale about the anonymous pinching nanny is based on his real childhood experiences. The young Prince Albert was also forced to write with his right hand rather than his dominant left, and to wear painful leg braces to "strengthen his knocked knees." 

Here's the full scene:

Paramount Pictures / Via youtube.com

8. But there's no way in hell that the recurring plotline of Logue referring to King George as his family pet name "Bertie" could've happened in real life.

Paramount Pictures / youtube.com

Logue's grandchildren said that "their grandfather never used Christian names with the king." That being said, the pair did "hit it off immediately" when they first met in 1926, as opposed to the slow building of trust and fondness that the movie depicts. 

9. A Titanic scene in which a wealthy passenger and his valet turn down life jackets in favor of dying "as gentlemen" is based on a real story verified by multiple eyewitnesses.

Paramount Pictures / youtube.com

The older man is Mr. Benjamin Guggenheim, and the younger one standing behind him is his "manservant" Victor Giglio. They got dressed in "dark formal suits, starched shirts and ties" upon realizing that the ship was going to sink, and Guggenheim really did utter this undeniably badass line. 

Here's the full scene, which is deleted in some versions of the film:

Paramount Pictures / Via youtube.com

10. But even though several witnesses "allege[d] an officer killed himself" as the ship sank, there is no "definitive evidence" pointing to that officer being First Officer William McMaster Murdoch.

Paramount Pictures / youtube.com

In the movie, Murdoch accepts (then retroactively rejects) a bribe from Cal Hockley, shoots two people to keep them from boarding a lifeboat, and takes his own life. Murdoch's descendants were outraged by this depiction of a man historians say did his "utmost to save passengers." In National Geographic's documentary Titanic: 20 Years Later with James Cameron, director James Cameron reflected, "I wasn’t thinking about being a historian, and I think I wasn’t as sensitive about the fact that his family, his survivors might feel offended by that and they were." In 1998, the vice president of 20th Century Fox personally visited Murdoch's nephew to apologize.

Here's the full scene:

Paramount Pictures / Via youtube.com

11. In Harriet, Harriet Tubman threatens a group of escaped slaves who are too scared to cross a river with a gun. Tubman did in fact carry guns while operating as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, for "both protection and intimidation for slaves who dangerously got cold feet mid-run."

Focus Features / youtube.com

The "you be free or die" line can also be traced back to the real-life Tubman. 

Here's the full scene:

Focus Features / Via youtube.com

12. But Marie Buchanon, the free Black woman who "teaches [Harriet] how to live as a free woman," is a fictional character.

Focus Features / youtube.com

Marie is portrayed by Janelle Monáe, who described her to Out as "an amalgamation of historical figures and the women who did help women like Harriet come to the North and make a better life for themselves.”

Here's the full scene:

Focus Features / Via youtube.com

13. The scene in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood where kids on the subway serenade Mr. Rogers with the theme song from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is based on a real event depicted in one of Tom Junod's profiles of Rogers. (The character inspired by Junod is named Lloyd Vogel in the film.)

TriStar Pictures

In the profile, Junod wrote, "Though of all races, the schoolchildren were mostly Black and Latino, and they didn’t even approach Mister Rogers and ask him for his autograph. They just sang." 

Here's the full scene:

TriStar Pictures / Via youtube.com

14. But the plotline about Vogel's frayed relationship with his father has very little to do with Junod's real life. Junod wrote for The Atlantic that his father was "a boozy philanderer, to be sure...but unlike my character in the script, I had never rejected him or his message."

TriStar Pictures / youtube.com

Thus, Junod never got in "a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding," like Vogel does in the film. (Nor, Junod writes, did his sister even have a wedding.) And the scene where Mr. Rogers visits the dying Mr. Vogel "pie in hand" didn't happen, either. After reading the first draft of the script, Junod requested that the producers change the names of the characters based on him and his family, not because he was angry, but because he wanted to write "the truth about Tom and Lou Junod" and let the filmmakers handle "the truth about Lloyd and Jerry Vogel." 

Here's the full scene:

TriStar Pictures / Via youtube.com

15. The scene in Lion where Saroo flashes back to his childhood while eating jalebi, an Indian sweet, is based in the experiences of the real Saroo Brierley.

Transmission Films / youtube.com

Speaking to Vanity Fair, Brierley said, "What happens in the jalebi scene, that's actually what happened. They're expensive and were a delicacy for us to have." 

Here's the full scene:

Transmission Films / Via youtube.com

16. But Lucy, Saroo's onscreen girlfriend, isn't a real person; she's a "compression" of women in Saroo's life.

Transmission Films / youtube.com

In the same Vanity Fair interview, the real Saroo praised the film's accuracy, and said that despite the fact that he thought he'd be "fully desensitized" to seeing his own story onscreen, he often cried when the movie reached its emotional "crescendo." 

Here's the full clip:

Transmission Films / Via youtube.com

17. In The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort demands that the captain of his yacht sail through a storm, which ultimately results in the boat sinking. This really happened.

Paramount Pictures / youtube.com

The yacht was originally owned by Coco Chanel, and "sunk off the coast of Italy" when Belfort insisted on sailing through blatantly unsafe conditions. Former FBI Agent Gregory Coleman, who "spent six years investigating Belfort," was quoted by the Bucks County Courier Times as having said, "I’m ready to have parties on that boat with the FBI. But it’s gone. It’s at the bottom of the ocean."

Here's the full scene:

Paramount Pictures / Via youtube.com

18. But the real Mark Hanna didn't do the unnerving chest thumping thing at lunch with Belfort, or any other time, for that matter.

Paramount Pictures / youtube.com

Matthew McConaughey, who played Hanna, said during an interview on The Graham Norton Show that the chest pounding and humming is "something I'll do before scenes to relax myself." DiCaprio noticed this habit and asked Scorsese if it could be incorporated into the character. Scorsese agreed, and McConaughey noted that the strange motion actually makes perfect sense in the context of the scene, since Hanna is "getting [Belfort] on the same rhythm" and "pass[ing] the torch" to him. 

Here's the full scene:

Paramount Pictures / Via youtube.com

19. In Invictus, a plane bearing the message "Good Luck Bokke" flies low over the stadium before the climactic final rugby match. Amazingly, this isn't an invention of the filmmakers.

Warner Bros. / youtube.com

According to Laurie Kay's obituary, published in Tulsa World, the stunt "electrified tens of thousands of fans." The Boeing 747, piloted by Kay and a small crew, remained empty of passengers to make it as "maneuverable" as possible. Kay and Mandela actually met personally at an earlier date, and Kay was "charmed by Mandela's gracious manner." While the flyover was planned and carefully practiced, Mandela himself was "startled." 

Here's the full scene:

Warner Bros. / Via youtube.com

20. But Nelson Mandela was not the "lone voice" to argue to the African National Congress that they should restore and support the Springbok rugby team as an "olive branch to white Afrikaners."

Warner Bros. / youtube.com

Makhenkesi Arnold Stofile, who later became sports minister, and "Mandela's fellow Robben Island inmate Steve Tshwete" were both "key advocates" in arguing that the Springboks ought to be allowed to continue to play. 

Here's the full scene:

Warner Bros. / Via youtube.com

21. Alan Turing proposed to Joan Clarke and then ended their engagement, just like he does in The Imitation Game, and Clarke did have a nonchalant response when he told her about his homosexuality.

The Weinstein Company

However, Turing didn't tell her that he was attracted to men while breaking off their engagement; he let her know the day after he proposed, according to Joan Clarke herself. Clarke once reflected in a 1992 BBC documentary, "Naturally, that worried me a bit, because I did know that was something which was almost certainly permanent, but we carried on." And Turing called off the marriage because he believed that it would "ultimately fail," not to protect Clarke. 

22. But the scene where Clarke visits Turing following his conviction of "gross indecency" (aka homosexuality) is "invented."

The Weinstein Company

Turing wrote to Clarke in 1952 to tell her about his upcoming trial, but if she visited him while he was being forced to carry out the draconian sentence of chemical castration, they never spoke publicly of it. Speaking of which, Turing's despondent and confused state of mind in that scene doesn't accurately reflect how the real man reacted to the unjust punishment. Those in Turing's circle recalled that he "bore the injustice with fortitude, then spent the next year enthusiastically pursuing projects." 

Here's the full scene:

The Weinstein Company / Via youtube.com

23. Walt Disney tells P.L. Travers that he's determined to adapt her Mary Poppins books into a movie because of a promise he made to his two young daughters 20 years prior in Saving Mr. Banks. This was the real Walt Disney's motivation too.

Disney

It took around 20 years for Disney to keep his promise, and as Saving Mr. Banks details, it was not an easy road. 

24. But Disney was not nearly as involved in the development of the script under Travers' watchful eye as he is in the movie.

Disney

According to "Disney historian" Jim Korkis, who spoke with Orlando Weekly, Disney "got fed up after the first day and went to his vacation home in Palm Springs" in the hopes that "the Sherman Brothers would ‘work something out’ with Travers.”

25. Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon met when she heckled him at one of his comedy shows, just like the characters based on them do in The Big Sick.

Amazon Studios / youtube.com

And just like in the movie, Nanjiani's move was writing Emily's name on a napkin in Urdu. However, while movie Emily sees straight through him, real Emily told the Guardian that she "fell for it completely." Writing that scene was a way for Gordon to "correct my gullible reaction.” 

Here's the full scene:

Amazon Studios / Via youtube.com

26. But the scene where Emily's father asks Kumail his opinion on 9/11 is, thankfully, not something that really happened.

Amazon Studios / youtube.com

During an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Nanjiani clarified, "I want to say that that is not what my wonderful father-in-law asked me when we first spoke. He warmed up to it...I'm joking! He never asked me that." At the time, both of Nanjiani's in-laws were in the studio audience. 

Here's the full scene:

Amazon Studios / Via youtube.com

And here's Nanjiani's Colbert interview:

CBS / Via youtube.com

27. The argument Jane has with Stephen's doctor about whether he should be taken off his ventilator in The Theory of Everything is true to life.

Focus Features / youtube.com

And Jane really did rebuff his suggestion by saying, "Stephen must live." However, the circumstances leading to Hawking's hospitalization for pneumonia and subsequent tracheotomy were "less dramatic" than they are in the film; instead of Hawking "coughing up blood during a concert," Hawking's friends noticed his persistent cough and insisted he see a doctor, who then diagnosed pneumonia. 

28. But unlike in the film, the real Stephen and Jane didn't start dating until after Stephen received a diagnosis of motor neurone disease (aka ALS).

Focus Features

Jane found out the news "by accident," not through one of Stephen's friends deliberately sitting her down and telling her. The couple-to-be knew each other but weren't yet dating. Jane reflected on hearing the news, "I was stunned. I had only just met Stephen and for all his eccentricity I liked him."