5 ‘True Story’ Movies from 2024 That Just Made Stuff Up

5 ‘The Young Woman and the Sea’ Turns Trudy’s Allies into Enemies

Daisy Ridley stars as Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel, who manages that feat despite being told from an early age that girls shouldn’t swim. People in the past saying girls can’t swim before being proven wrong makes for a very Disney setup, and in this movie, the person who most opposes young Trudy learning swimming is her father. In real life, her father was the one who taught her swimming. And in real life, one of her motivations for crossing the Channel was that her dad said that if she did, he’d by her a new red roadster. 

Ederle had two coaches, which the movie neatly categorizes as the bad coach and the good coach. In the movie, she convinces the good coach (Bill Burgess) not to pull her out of the water, no matter what, and he obeys. In real life, Burgess was going to pull her out of the water during her successful run, fearing that she was about to pass out and drown, but her father kept him from intervening. It’s a good thing she did succeed, and we can celebrate the father for being supportive. If she failed and drowned, we’d be condemning him as a crazed sports dad. 

As for the “bad coach,” Jabez Wolffe, that’s even more interesting. During an earlier failed crossing, he did pull her out of the water when she went limp. The movie says that Ederle fails this attempt because Wolffe drugs her. He sabotages her because he envies her, since he himself never managed to cross the channel. The real Ederle did accuse the real Wolffe of drugging her drink. But the drug that the real Wolffe allegedly used wasn’t sleeping pills like in the movie. It was cocaine. It was a stimulant, meant to keep her going. 

That was still wrong of him — because we’d consider that cheating, and because by taking her by surprise, he almost knocked her out and killed her — but this wasn’t a case of someone on her team trying to kneecap her. Wolffe wanted her to succeed, and if she did so under his tutelage, he’d have shared in the glory. Also, Movie Wolffe limits her diet so she’ll look like a “lady.” No one starved the real Ederle, and this could be the movie’s way of joking about how Daisy Ridley’s kind of tiny compared to muscular Gertrude Ederle. 

One more bit that the movie invents comes at the very start. A ferry sinks in New York, killing a thousand people. The women should have been able to swim to shore, which was just a few hundred feet away, but they didn’t know how. This convinces young Trudy that girls must learn to swim.

There aren’t a whole lot of ferries that sink in New York with a death toll like that, so the movie has to be referring to just one: the 1904 sinking of the PS General Slocum. The real Ederle didn’t read about the Slocum in the newspaper, as it sank the year before she was born. And the real passengers of the Slocum didn’t die because no one taught them to swim. They died because they leapt into water wearing life jackets that contained metal bars, dragging them under. 

4 ‘The Apprentice’ Keeps Inventing Silly Lawyer Scenes

One scene attracted the bulk of the controversy in The Apprentice, as well as the bulk of the accusations of defamation: the one where Donald Trump rapes his wife, Ivana. It’s based on a deposition that Ivana Trump gave during divorce proceedings, and she later retracted that accusation. The other big controversial scene is when Donald gets hair plugs and liposuction, taking on his final form like Anakin becoming Darth Vader. With this scene, too, the writers claim sources back it up, while Trump’s reps say it’s inaccurate.

We’re going to have to leave the litigation of those scenes to actual lawyers as well as perhaps to the presidential death squads that will execute everyone involved in the movie’s production. But there’s less ambiguity with some of the scenes featuring the movie’s other big character, Trump lawyer Roy Cohn. The writers freely admit to inventing some stuff to do with him, which is permissible for several reasons (for starters, you can’t defame the dead). 

In the movie, Cohn lands Trump the Hyatt Plaza hotel by blackmailing a city official. That’s made-up. There are sources saying Cohn liked to blackmail people in general but not that he used it in this exact case. Equally fun, there’s a scene where Trump shows up at Cohn’s place and stumbles on an orgy. He has to struggle to avoid getting humped by a partygoer in a Nixon mask. The real Cohn didn’t host orgies at his home. He had his raves at Studio 54, like a normal person, and the movie found it inconvenient to build a Studio 54 set. 

Late in the movie, Trump gifts Cohn a pair of “diamond” cufflinks, which turn out to be pewter and zirconia. This happened in real life. But in the movie, Ivana reveals to Cohn that the gems are fake, taking the opportunity to call out Donald as shameless. In real life, it was a friend of Cohn’s who later had them appraised — and it’s possible that Cohn died without ever learning they were worth nothing. 

3 Margaret Thatcher Wanted the Berlin Wall to Stay Up

Reagan is, by all accounts, a very dumb movie. We’re not going to go into much detail about all the ways it gets Ronald Reagan wrong. Mostly, we’re not going to do that because we actually haven’t watched it. But we did see this clip from it:

That’s Reagan speaking in Berlin in 1987 and saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Even with the amount of importance people today place on that line, you’ll giggle at how over-the-top they frame its delivery, complete with a montage of people celebrating around the world. In fact, no one celebrated the line at the time. Reagan’s speechwriters hadn’t been itching for him to say it like that team in the movie do — they (correctly) figured it would come off as bluster and have no effect. Gorbachev didn’t tremble at the line, and the American press barely reported on it. 

History notes all that, and we’ve told you about it before. But there’s some more context that makes the montage even more inaccurate. The movie shows Margaret Thatcher cheering the line on, saying, “Well done, cowboy.” But if the line were seen as a real call to bring the Wall down, and Thatcher were tuning in live, she wouldn’t have been pleased. She wanted the Wall to stay in place.

In 1989, Thatcher went to Moscow and met Gorbachev. She told him that Britain didn't want Germany to reunite, and that the West was fine with the communists continuing to terrorize East Germany. The current situation was stable, she said, and any change would risk the security of the continent — and of Britain.

Two months later, the Wall came down. Either Thatcher was a terrible leader or a politician’s strongest weapon is reverse psychology. 

2 Bob Marley Never Confronted His Assassin

Unlike many musical biopics, Bob Marley: One Love doesn’t start by plopping us into the childhood of its subject and make us sit through his whole chronological life. Instead, we begin in 1976, right before an assassin tries to kill him. That’s interesting enough, but it leaves the rest of the movie without a lot more interesting to cover. 

Then, at almost the very end of the movie, they bring the assassination subplot back. The shooter comes to Marley’s home and requests forgiveness. This didn't happen in real life; it’s just an artistic addition. Of course it didn’t happen — the scene is absurd. Six years on, the guy appears out of nowhere, the two exchange three sentences, they embrace and then he leaves.

So, this is just a vision, or a way of depicting Marley mentally coming to terms with his assassination, right? Except, as the assassin leaves, Marley’s son walks by and sees him. The kid now walks up to Bob and asks, “Daddy? Who was that man?” 

Based on our experience with various movies featuring people who aren’t really there, this is the movie’s way of telegraphing to us that the assassin is real. Marley could be imagining his son’s reaction as well, but why would he be? If this were just another vision (much like an earlier vision Marley once had of the shooter, at a concert), what purpose would the child serve? 

If we didn’t know better, we’d say someone in the production of this movie was high. 

1 No Serial Killer Survivor Was in the Room for ‘Woman of the Hour’

In 1978, serial killer Rodney Alcala appeared on television as one of the bachelors on The Dating Game. He’d end up killing at least eight women in total, but that night, he was just one of three guys looking to date the show’s contestant, and he actually was the one she picked as the winner.

Woman of the Hour dramatizes this, alternating between showing us the episode in production and seeing Alcala’s crimes, past and future. Contrasting with what the audience knows about him, Alcala sounds like the most desirable bachelor to contestant Sheryl Bradshaw. One bachelor is an idiot, one’s a jerk and Alcala is the enlightened feminist. 

As entertainingly ironic as that is, that’s not how it went in real life. We have the tape of the original segment, and Alcala was definitely the creepiest of the three.

That’s probably confirmation bias on our part, though. The whole point of the show is for everyone to exchange as much ridiculous innuendo as they can, for the audience’s sake, and Alcala’s just playing to that, not revealing his true self. And yet, when we hear him say, “The best time is nighttime; that’s the only time there is,” or that he is a banana and wants you to peel him, that doesn’t sound less skeevy than the other bachelors, which is how the movie plays him. 

The movie’s conceit is that he’s the least physically attractive of the three but projects the most emotional maturity, to lure you in. The real Alcala was the most attractive of the three and played the same game of horny answers everyone else was playing. In the movie, contestant Sheryl Bradshaw finds the show’s questions inane and starts ad-libbing, because she has her own aspirations as an actress. The real Bradshaw just asked the questions she was given. The movie changes the spelling of her name from “Cheryl” to “Sheryl,” further marking this as a fictionalized portrayal. We don’t know much about the real Bradshaw, other than that she was still alive in 2012 and has since died.  

Besides Sheryl wanting to take control of the show, the bachelors fighting among themselves and Alcala killing women in a different timeline, the movie has another subplot. One of the spectators in the studio audience recognizes Alcala from a previous attack. She tries unsuccessfully now to report him. Had some previous survivor of an Alcala attack really been present during that taping, that would have been one hell of a coincidence, but no. In real life, other people tried to report him, and this character represents them, but none happened to be right in the room that day. 

Still, this movie might be an example of when it’s fine to make some stuff up to turn real events into a story. Here, they didn’t have an obligation to do the game show segment exactly as it originally played out. If you want to see that, you don’t need a movie. The original footage is right there. 

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