You can almost feel the adrenaline rush a director has when they get to put “Based on a true story” at the beginning of their movie. Yeah, that’s right, this really did happen. Even better when there’s actual source material available — perhaps a book you can go pick up after you leave the theater, or a news broadcast or social media post you can find. For the highbrow consumers of print media, there are more films than you’d think out there that are based, in some way, on longform magazine or newspaper articles.
Some of these aren’t so surprising — of course a film like Almost Famous, which is literally about a journalist working on his next article, is based on a print media piece; or Spotlight, which follows the Boston Globe investigative journalism unit’s examination into reports of child sex abuse by local priests. But others are a little more out of left field. What, for example, does a speculative piece about the digital age of information warfare have to do with New York’s finest detective John McClane?
Because film is made of infinite possibilities, there are infinite ways to turn a 5,000 words into a high-octane thrill ride, or an emotional character study, or an odyssey through a particular screenwriter’s particular form of writer’s block. What’s fascinating about all of these movies is all of the diverse ways their screenwriters and directors managed to do that. More than a few of the films on this list seem stranger than fiction, but the even stranger part is that everything in them really happened. Well, mostly everything.
10 Movies You Never Knew Were Based on Magazine and Newspaper Articles
It’s hard to believe these movies really happened, but the facts don’t lie.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
