Based on a True Story

Florence Foster Jenkins is up for a couple Academy Awards. Let's find out how accurate the movie is by comparing Hollywood with history. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment:  https://galas.fm/episode/cb3ed6f2-14e0-4311-ad22-1e4a24231185 Find the transcript and full show notes:  https://links.boatspodcast.com/39 Support our sponsors: https://links.boatspodcast.com/advertisers Remove the ads...

Compare history with Hollywood's version of Black Mass. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment:  https://galas.fm/episode/62fa1200-fce2-4ac6-a2a6-8017ca21e90c Find the transcript and full show notes:  https://links.boatspodcast.com/38 Support our sponsors: https://links.boatspodcast.com/advertisers Remove the ads by supporting the show:  https://links.boatspodcast.com/support Leave a voicemai...

Compare history with Hollywood's version of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi . Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment:  https://galas.fm/episode/e0e8fa46-763b-471d-9e68-9c05e6b9f4bb Find the transcript and full show notes:  https://links.boatspodcast.com/37 Support our sponsors: https://links.boatspodcast.com/advertisers Remove the ads by supporting the show:  https://links.boatspodc...

Compare history with Hollywood's version of The Big Short . Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment:  https://galas.fm/episode/dcfa9136-2431-445f-93e2-a30f53a8487e Find the transcript and full show notes:  https://links.boatspodcast.com/36 Support our sponsors: https://links.boatspodcast.com/advertisers Remove the ads by supporting the show:  https://links.boatspodcast.com/support Leave a voic...

You've seen the movie. But how much of Titanic  was true, and how much of it was made up for the film? Let's compare history with Hollywood's blockbuster film,  Titanic. Links Titanic movie Last Dinner On the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment:  https://galas.fm/episode/c4eadab1-ac8f-468e-8540-34466835a068 Find the transcript and full show n...

He lived through unthinkable measures. At a time when millions were slaughtered, including his family and friends, Wladyslaw Szpilman managed to survive the Holocaust. He was The Pianist , and in 2003 there was a movie starring Adrian Brody telling his incredible story. But how much of it is true? Let's compare history with Hollywood's version of  The Pianist . Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a...

This week we'll do something a bit different as we look ahead. Instead of learning about a movie that's already been released, we'll look ahead to a movie coming out this next weekend. Hidden Figures  tells the remarkable story of women at NASA who worked as Computers. Before you go see the movie in theaters, learn more about the women so you'll be able to tell just how accurate the movie is on yo...

On October 11th, 1994, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced their Nobel prize winners. Three brilliant scientists jointly won the coveted award. They were Professor John C. Harsanyi from the University of California, Berkley, Dr. John F. Nash from Princeton University and Professor Dr. Reinhard Selten, from the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany. Less than a month later, on November 13...

With the Christmas season upon us, I wanted to cover a film that'd help represent the Christmas spirit. In 2005, French filmmaker Christian Carion released his second full-length feature film. Joyeux Noël, which translated to English means Merry Christmas, was released in France on November 9th, 2005, and only ended up making about $3.5 million at the box office. That's significantly less than the...

Tom McCarthy started his acting career with a short movie in 1989 called Roast Suckling. Although that's probably not something most have seen, he's one of those actors that you'd recognize when you see him. Probably because he's been in a lot of movies and TV shows you've seen. He played a background character in Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts' 1997 thriller Conspiracy Theory. In 2000, Tom has a re...

There are few movies that stand near the top of the all-time list for income. One of those movies is The Sound of Music. With a budget of about $8 million when it was produced in the 1960s, it was one of the bigger budget films when it was made. That $8 million is about $62 million in today's United States dollars. When it was released in 1965, it raked in over 35 times that amount, about $286 mil...

Between 2004 and 2016, Paul Greengrass directed a total of six movies. Four of those have Matt Damon in them. Three of them are about the fictitious Jason Bourne character. Two of them are based on a true story. Today, we're going to be looking at one of those movies. In an effort to make 2013's Captain Phillips as authentic as possible, Paul Greengrass kept two groups of actors separate. One grou...

With the Thanksgiving season upon us, I thought it'd be a great opportunity to travel back in time to the days of Colonial America. Then I realized there's not really a lot of movies about the actual Thanksgiving story. So I decided to go with something that, although not about the Thanksgiving story itself, could transport us back to those days. And it's also a great opportunity to do something w...

Nechama Tec was born in Lublin, Poland in 1931. When she was eight years old, her life would forever change as Nazis invaded her hometown. As a Polish Jew, she survived the Holocaust thanks to Polish Catholics who hid her from the Nazis. Over forty years later, in the 1980s, Nechama started doing research on the events that she had lived through. Her book, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christia...

The latest in the line of collaborations between actor Leonardo DiCaprio and director Martin Scorsese is 2013's The Wolf of Wall Street. It received positive reviews, and also held the honor of topping the most-pirated films list of 2014. That's according to copyright tracking firm Excipio, which puts out a list of the most pirated films each year. Their report indicated The Wolf of Wall Street wa...

Happy Halloween! I wanted to do something special this week. I thought it'd be fun to cover the true story behind something scary. But after starting to look for some movies to fit the bill, I quickly realized most of the scary movies that claim to be based on a true story also require a belief in something extraordinary—something supernatural. Some stories are simply strange, and we don't know th...

Few can debate the huge impact Steve Jobs had on the world. So it's no wonder that after Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, there was in influx of news and media surrounding the life of the outspoken Apple co-founder and CEO. If you listened to episode on The Social Network, you'll already know how Aaron Sorkin dropped the true story for a good story. So how did he do for his movie about Apple's famo...

You've probably heard of the song Amazing Grace. It's one of those Christian hymns that just about everyone has heard, or at least heard of, at some point. It was first published in 1779 by John Newton. While you may think the named after John's song is about John's life, it's not. Instead it's about a man who was perhaps the first to be influenced by John's moving life story and the song. It's ab...

In a retelling of one of the greatest moments in U.S. Coast Guard's history, The Finest Hours is a feel-good movie of true heroism. When sitting down to write the film, screenwriters Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson had the chance to do something not everyone does: interview the actual people who lived the story. Since they had the chance to talk to the survivors, does that mean the story was historic...

Elizabeth Short's murder was considered to be the crime of the century. And it's a mystery that many are still fascinated by, decades later. So when Brian De Palma directed a 2006 movie of the same name, many moviegoers wanted to see a true crime story of The Black Dahlia. They were sorely disappointed. Let's dive into the real story of The Black Dahlia and find out just how accurate the movie was...

The movie Deepwater Horizon comes out on this Friday. So again we're going to take some time to look ahead at a movie. Before you go see the movie in theaters, let's take a few minutes to learn what happened before, during, and after the disaster so you'll know just how accurate Hollywood was during its retelling. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment:  https://galas.fm/episode/ca08a419-7062...

Despite having an all-star cast and being based on a true story, most of the characters in the film didn't actually exist. Instead, Hollywood opted to merge together multiple people into a single character to help push the story forward while not having to deal with an ensemble cast in the hundreds. As I'm sure you can guess, this also forced them to change the story around from the way things rea...

Even though Argo starts off with text that says it's based on a true story, the movie was actually based primarily on two sources: a book by Tony Mendez, the CIA agent Ben Affleck plays, and a 2007 article on Wired by Joshuah Bearman. So how much of Argo is true? And how much of it was fictionalized for the film? Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment:  https://galas.fm/episode/f6ae86e0-8a64-...

Pawn Sacrifice tells the story of one of the greatest chess players of all time—Bobby Fischer. How do you make the game of chess into an interesting story? With Bobby Fischer's life, you don't need to stretch it too far. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment:  https://galas.fm/episode/c9febc84-e115-42ec-aecb-c9313316ef43 Find the transcript and full show notes:  https://links.boatspodcast.co...

Ron Howard and Tom Hanks teamed up for their second of now four movies the duo have worked on together in 1995 with Apollo 13 . Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment:  https://galas.fm/episode/79646d4b-573a-4e00-8213-783f2e402dd7 Find the transcript and full show notes:  https://links.boatspodcast.com/15 Support our sponsors: https://links.boatspodcast.com/advertisers Remove the ads by suppo...