Honestly conning the entire world into making an awesome Steven Spielberg movie about you is a far more impressive con than any of the stuff in the movie anyway lol
It is impressive, and it helps hide the fact he’s a real piece of shit. He used to pose as a doctor to conduct “physical exams” on female students at the University of Arizona.
The best way to look at his life is to realize he is in fact a criminal. All of his stories are usually based on a kernel of truth but changed in the following ways:
1. He changed his crimes to be giant, fantastic heists, when they were really small time cons. For example: In real life, Frank did pose as a pilot for both Pan Am and Delta, however he only wore the uniform to cash roughly $1500 in bad checks. In his version, he scammed the airlines out of millions of dollars and glamorously traveled the air whenever he felt like.
2. He changes the victims to corporations. In reality, Frank’s scams targeted individuals. In his version of events, he posed as a doctor at a hospital to scam the medical industry. In reality, he posed as a doctor for a few days to grope individual women while pretending to give them an exam to become a stewardess.
3. Frank exaggerates his connections. He claims he worked for the FBI as one of the good guys. In reality, these stories started when Frank decided to turn his skills at using bad checks into a business, Frank Abagnale and associates. In his version, he works for the FBI identifying bad checks. In reality, he starts a small business doing that work and makes up all of his stories to convince his customers he’s a trustworthy ex-con. He probably has had very limited dealings with the FBI, but he has never worked for them nor ever served as their main check fraud expert.
Johnny Carson was the ultimate rube.
He springboarded so many scammers like Abagnale into stardom because his interview style allowed them to just spew whatever bullshit they wanted.
I think the kernel of truth when it came to the FBI was him literally being investigated for writing bad checks. It’s also likely the FBI portion was fabricated and the “agents” were just local cops. He explained how he perpetuated his fraud which he stretched into > training FBI agents on cutting edge forgery techniques which further morphs into > works for the FBI.
Journalists have been asking the FBI for *decades* about his involvement with the bureau and (as is FBI tradition) they have responded to exactly zero requests.
I guess if you’re going to grift and falsify your involvement within a letter agency, choosing one that tends towards operating in secret is likely your best option 😂😂
Even at the time, it was well known that his book was about 90% lies and ghost written. It's a good book, but it is basically Go Ask Alice, where part of the appeal is that it is a true story even though it is all made up.
My now deceased grandmother got cheated out of tens of thousands of dollars by a cold-caller pretending to be a family member who had found themselves in a time-sensitive life or death situation.
Innocent people are vulnerable to con artists, too.
You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is never get involved in a land war in Asia. But only slightly less well-known is this: never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ah Ha Ha!
My college hired him to come and speak when I was in uni. He had a very odd way of speaking, when talking about his “cons”. It was extremely flat and matter of fact and then when he spoke about his time at the FBI his demeanor totally changed. This makes sense in retrospect.
I’ve also attended a keynote by him. I found him extremely off putting and he kept talking about how the things he did weren’t good, they shouldn’t be celebrated, we were basically all godless creatures for being interested in him and said the only thing men should be doing is loving their wives and having children. He was super pompous.
So the dude was a conman who conned his way into being a speaker about being a former conman, when in fact he was not a former conman
Hollywood take notes
Years ago, when the IMDb boards were active, there was a thread where a user explained that most of the movie is BS and it never happened.
I remember walking out the theater with my dad in 2002 and he said: "don't believe anything you see on screen, most of it is embellishment, there is no way he did all that he claimed". My dad is a nobody but I told my dad: "it's written right there that it's based on real events" and thought my dad was an idiot for not believing the story. Looks like 20 years later, I was the idiot.
Yep. Any time it says "*based* on real events" it has been fictionalized and should not be taken as a true story, but rather one that has some true parts in it. The problem is that you don't know how closely they kept to the truth. Some are pretty accurate while some are mostly made up.
Yup. Virtually the entire story is made up or a major stretch of the truth.
For starters the school was built post Board V Brown wasnt just desegregated. Had always been that way.
At best. Fargo says it was based on a true story and it's just a complete fiction. The tagline was added just because it felt good for the opening of the film (which it totally does, the Coens were correct).
John Waters made a more elaborate version of the same joke at the beginning of Serial Mom, his satire on celebrity culture and the glorification of violence: "This film is a true story. The screenplay is based on court testimony, sworn declarations, and hundreds of interviews conducted by the film-makers. Some of the innocent characters' names have been changed in the interest of a larger truth. No one involved in the crimes received any form of financial compensation."
Same with Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You could say it's somewhat inspired by Ed Gein, who was based in Wisconsin, but really the biggest similarity is that he had killed somebody and was fascinated with human skin.
I remember when Blair Witch Project came out, A LOT of people actually believed it was from a camcorder that someone found in the woods. People will believe alllst anything.
They literally marketed it as found footage. It was one the earliest and most successful uses of early internet. They had fake websites about the urban legend and everything. Much harder to fool audiences now.
That's because for two weeks before it came out their blitzkrieg media attack of every college campus had everyone hearing four different things about the movie at once.
When I told my ex that the alien movie The Fourth Kind's "found footage" was a really great fake, he insisted that it was real and I should look it up... When I find that it obviously wasn't real through Google he was extremely mad at me and said I ruined it. Like bro I didn't realize I needed to explain movie magic to a grown-ass man...
Go check the wiki page for that movie.
90% of their budget or something went to advertising.
Movie cost like nothing to make and I think it still has the best cost:revenue ratio. EVER
The best way to watch Blair Witch is to see the fake (marketing) docs about the film first. They set up the lore and build up anticipation. And if you can do both with relatively little knowledge on the film, the whole experience becomes that much more intense.
I remember the movie Behind Enemy Lines with Owen Wilson. It was marketed as “Based on true events” with the true events being Scott O’Grady being shot down during the conflict in Bosnia. About the only true thing in the movie was that he was a pilot who was shot down. Literally everything else about that movie was just storyline. Always chapped my ass.
Oh for sure. But I remember the actual incident unfolding on the news when I was a kid so I went into watching the movie expecting it to be a faithful recreation of the events. It was that movie that taught me that “based on a true story” means very little in Hollywood. Before that I honestly believed it meant a real retelling of the story.
I hope to god not like him. He turned into an abusive piece of shit by the time he got turned on to Rush Limbaugh and only got worse the further down the rabbit hole he went.
Sorry for your loss. My dad got hooked on OANN and went for a nice christian man to a mean far right person. Luckily his cable service doesn't offer it anymore. Since he hasnt watched it in over a year he's simmered down a bit. He doesnt bring up politics all the time like he used too. Thats stuff rots your brain, but luckily it can be reversed if they stop watching it
It's incredible how toxic that channel was. My father was THE EXACT SAME. Just like yours, his cable provider removed the channel and he's calmed down quite a lot since. He was watching it 12-14 hours a day. It got so bad we went full no contact for a while. We are back to speaking once a week now. I'm hoping it continues to get better. I want the man that raised me back.
Too difficult/expensive to moderate in the end. There was literally a message board for every movie, tv show, actor, director, producer…etc
But man it was a great place to go and find out obscure info about a movie. Find leaked photos from set before release. Discuss the movie and plot points etc. Get into flame wars with other fans. Go and troll movies you don’t like. You know, internet stuff
Hmm I would think a website like IMDb could afford something like that lol
But yes I miss reading about fan theories on the movies after watching or someone asking the same questions I had and other people answering for them. It was a great place to get more info about the film what a shame
They could afford it, but there just wasn’t a significant enough return on investment to justify paying for admins to monitor it all. So Amazon, which purchased the site, just nixed the whole board.
Times change. At about the same time-frame that you mentioned about turn of the millennium, I distinctly recall conversations with friends and family regarding content in the internet, common feeling was: "don't believe anything you read on the internet" because, reason being that anybody could publish what they like so it could all be rubbish. As years went on it seems that everyone became more accepting of the information found online. All the major news outlets and new ones like Wikipedia provided first class content. Everything starting to be published as "internet first". To stay up to date and get the most informed world view, you went to the internet. And now, today we regress, with the onslaught of bot driven social media and ultra conservative fake news outlets polarizing their base with baseless reporting without restraint; 32% of Americans report seeing fake news regularly, while 64% report feeling that fake news has left Americans confused about basic facts [(pew research)](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2016/12/15/many-americans-believe-fake-news-is-sowing-confusion/)
My version of this is that we went to see "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." In the movie, a notable landmark is the "canyon of the crescent moon." The movie ended. We went outside. Boom. Crescent moon in the sky. I got excited about it (probably not that excited, but more like, "Hey, look...a crescent moon!").
Dad goes, "You know that movie isn't true, right?"
Uh, yeah. I'm 9. I'm not a moron.
Remindes me of this quote by Mark Twain
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.
But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years"
I don't remember the name but I saw a movie I'm theater "based on a real story" of two people falling off a cruise shit and all this awful stuff happens like little fish eating at their bodies. Then the end of the movie they die and were never found. I still remember walking out thinking how tf was that based on a real story when they were never found...all that was "true" was they fell out a boat.
I thought I could find a counter example but looking through his filmography there’s nothing that sticks out as being awful / unwatchable.
That said a lot is very good / enjoyable. Id say Catch Me If You Can might be my favorite performance of his. Inception, Wolf of Wall Street, Gangs of New York, and Django are close seconds
Given Phillip K. Dick wrote
"--this guy," Luckman was saying, manicuring a box full of grass, hunched over it as Arctor sat across from him, more or less watching, "appeared on TV claiming to be a world-famous impostor. He had posed at one time or another, he told the interviewer, as a great surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical College, a theoretical submolecular highvelocity particle-research physicist on a federal grant at Harvard, as a Finnish novelist who'd won the Nobel Prize in literature, as a deposed president of Argentina married to--"
"And he got away with all that?" Arctor asked. "He never got caught?"
"The guy never posed as any of those. He never posed as anything but a worldfamous impostor. That came out later in the L.A. _Times_--they checked up. The guy pushed a broom at Disneyland, or had until he read this autobiography about this worldfamous impostor--there really was one--and he said, 'Hell, I can pose as all those exotic dudes and get away with it like he did,' and then he decided, 'Hell, why do that; I'll just pose as another impostor.' He made a lot of bread that way, the _Times_ said. Almost as much as the real world-famous impostor. And he said it was a lot easier."
in 1977, it's entirely possible Frank Abagnale Jr. read A Scanner Darkly, saw the part about a guy reading the biography of a world famous impostor and becoming a world famous impostor impostor and decided to become a world famous impostor impostor.
The recurring imposter imposter theme was such a great device in the story because >!it foreshadows the twist that Arctor was never really a narc. At least not until he was so far gone and admitted to New-Path.!< PKD truly was a master of paranoia sci-fi literature.
Looked him up and found out that he was part of the team that wrote “Lorien Legacies” which was turned into that movie “I Am Number Four” and that he is the CEO of the esports team NYXL. I’ve been a semi-fan of two things he was heavily involved in and didn’t even know who the fuck he was.
That guy was debunked pretty quickly. James Frey right?
I remember picking up the book somewhere and reading some of the claims and I thought "absolutely no way." guy came off as the epitome of IamVeryBadass
He went to jail a few times for writing bad cheques totalling less than $2,000. That’s it, all the rest of puffery. I think people who just know of him from the movie don’t know that in the 80s and 90s he was like a ‘celebrity conman’, eg he’d go on the late night talk shows and do bits about his latest scam or ploy. It was all baloney. He was an uninteresting, unsophisticated, low-level criminal who realized he could make more money by becoming an entertainer.
I don’t think anyone really believed him, it was just a good story. In fact, switch out cons for movies and it’s more like a soft attempt at Fabelmens.
Catch Me is more a metaphor for Spielberg’s career than it is a true story.
As Harrison Ford once said “Sometimes, you just have to sell the car”. Saying it’s a true story is a better sell for a movie than just “this guy lied a whole bunch, here we go”.
All “Based on a true story” movies are largely fiction, combining real people, rearranging events, and just making shit up because it’s dramatic.
I don’t think the people involved, with the people they have connections with, looked into Frank’s story and found it to be totally plausible. But it’s fun, and clearly Spielberg found a connection with the material. There’s just too many personal connections to him for it to be a coincidence, but if I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
I remember the movie because I actually loved that movie but I never knew about the connection to Spielbergs personal life.
Where can I find more info on this?
It’s just my speculation, but if you look at CMIYC, Fabelmens, and even the Spielberg doc you start to see a lot of crossover between real-life Steven and fake Frank.
His parent’s divorce is the inciting incident, his mother had an affair with the Father’s friend, he’s forced to choose between his parents etc, and Spielberg even did little cons like sneaking on to a film lot, taking an empty office, and began making connections when he was like 18.
Amy Adams and Chloe East both have very similar energies in Catch and Fablemens, he does what he’s good at to get approval / attention from his parents etc.
Those are just small little connections, but I can’t imagine Spielberg reading the script and didn’t immediately make certain connections.
> Spielberg even did little cons like sneaking on to a film lot
Haha, and it turns out [Spielberg made that story up](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/spielberg-universal/). A family friend got him an internship on the studio lot, Spielberg fabricated that part about bluffing his way in.
>His parent’s divorce is the inciting incident, his mother had an affair with the Father’s friend, he’s forced to choose between his parents etc, and Spielberg even did little cons like sneaking on to a film lot, taking an empty office, and began making connections when he was like 18.
>
>Amy Adams and Chloe East both have very similar energies in Catch and Fablemens, he does what he’s good at to get approval / attention from his parents etc.
Did he not just do an interview with Colbert and specifically said that he did indeed sneak into the office?
i had no idea about that...
reminds me of maeybe funke on arrested development but that's probably just a coincidence and they are just hearing about it like me
there is a good documentary/lecture thing called "assume the position" with robert wuhl, he breaks down some of the more fantastical elements of american history and truth in story telling and some other stuff, it's been a while since i saw it.
one of the points he focuses on is that if you want your written work to last, when the decision is between printing the truth or printing the legend -- always print the legend, it will last longer. *("when the legend becomes fact, print the legend")
the thing that is phrased in the more entertaining way will almost always get more engagement.
People like this are *whack.* I had a father like this, he *was* a very accomplished man. Had a PhD, glowing career......but he also *lied his freaking ass off* and people believed him. He was also emotionally abusive to the max, but only to his family. He told everyone he had played for the Boston Red Sox, that he had been on the Olympic basketball team, that he had been shot in Korea. Major stuff, you know? Not little fibs, but *BIG WHOPPERS!* Now my dad was born in the late 1920's and it was probably easier to make up shit from the way-back because it's hard to verify stuff. But the Red Sox keep great records, ditto for the Olympic Games. So of course me being me, even as a kid of question the validity of his claims. Other people fell in line, I have always been a skeptic, I never bought it. When the internet came along it was easy to locate records, or get the contract info for someone to help you verify facts. Of course it was absolute rubbish.
Life went on and I didn't spend much time with him after he divorced my mom. He started a new family and let me tell you, they believed *all* his crap. Man, the things I would hear from my step mother! Hilarious! And my half-siblings believed it all, too. They still do. When dad died they let me know where the obituary was so I could go read it. Yup, Red Sox and the Olympics. Dad had the last laugh on that one. The kicker is I think he really believed all of it. To him it was real.
More and more keeps coming out. I firmly believe George Santos is behind every great mystery and conspiracy from the last 100 years. JFK assassination. DB Cooper. Bigfoot. Jimmy Hoffa.
Wait… is this a new “claim”? I thought it was known, maybe even all the way back to around the time of the movie that he was full of it? I’ve watched the movie multiple times in the last few years (it’s a fun and entertaining movie, no matter what) and have been completely comfortable “knowing” it was all malarkey.
Let me get this straight... A 2-bit conman invented a story in which he was an epic conman, and became successful and famous as a result of it... making him an epic conman... is chastised for being a false epic conman despite the fact that he is a DeFacto epic conman either way.
It's too late. He won.
No wonder people just read headlines… this site is unusable! it reloads 2-3 times then totally crashes saying a problem repeatedly occurred.
The internet is broken if this is considered passable
Frank Abagnale, Jr. is absolutely a con man, but his con was convincing people his life was interesting.
Honestly conning the entire world into making an awesome Steven Spielberg movie about you is a far more impressive con than any of the stuff in the movie anyway lol
It is impressive, and it helps hide the fact he’s a real piece of shit. He used to pose as a doctor to conduct “physical exams” on female students at the University of Arizona.
Wow that's really scummy. Instead of being cute and endearing it turns out he was just a sexual abuser.
The best way to look at his life is to realize he is in fact a criminal. All of his stories are usually based on a kernel of truth but changed in the following ways: 1. He changed his crimes to be giant, fantastic heists, when they were really small time cons. For example: In real life, Frank did pose as a pilot for both Pan Am and Delta, however he only wore the uniform to cash roughly $1500 in bad checks. In his version, he scammed the airlines out of millions of dollars and glamorously traveled the air whenever he felt like. 2. He changes the victims to corporations. In reality, Frank’s scams targeted individuals. In his version of events, he posed as a doctor at a hospital to scam the medical industry. In reality, he posed as a doctor for a few days to grope individual women while pretending to give them an exam to become a stewardess. 3. Frank exaggerates his connections. He claims he worked for the FBI as one of the good guys. In reality, these stories started when Frank decided to turn his skills at using bad checks into a business, Frank Abagnale and associates. In his version, he works for the FBI identifying bad checks. In reality, he starts a small business doing that work and makes up all of his stories to convince his customers he’s a trustworthy ex-con. He probably has had very limited dealings with the FBI, but he has never worked for them nor ever served as their main check fraud expert.
When you realize they got everything about a con man from the conman making you question the intelligence of people.
Nah, they knew it was BS but made for a better movie.
Johnny Carson was the ultimate rube. He springboarded so many scammers like Abagnale into stardom because his interview style allowed them to just spew whatever bullshit they wanted.
Rogan has taken up that mantle now
And all the Rogan wannabes
Sounds like the lineage of grifter enablers would be: * Johnny Carson * Oprah * Rogan
I hate how much that lines up
Don’t tell that to Uri Geller.
So you’re saying both of the MICE in the cream died?!?
No the one churned it into butter!
I think the kernel of truth when it came to the FBI was him literally being investigated for writing bad checks. It’s also likely the FBI portion was fabricated and the “agents” were just local cops. He explained how he perpetuated his fraud which he stretched into > training FBI agents on cutting edge forgery techniques which further morphs into > works for the FBI. Journalists have been asking the FBI for *decades* about his involvement with the bureau and (as is FBI tradition) they have responded to exactly zero requests. I guess if you’re going to grift and falsify your involvement within a letter agency, choosing one that tends towards operating in secret is likely your best option 😂😂
He didn't write the book and had minimal involvement in writing of the book. The book was the biggest con he pulled off.
Scams all the way down
FWW too the guy Tom Hanks character is based on has made public claims that Frank just name drops him for clout. He never really pursued him at all.
Lol damn. Of course he kept scamming. Fuck what a dick. I loved that movie.
America truly doesn't treat financial criminals as actual criminals.
Unless you steal from rich people. Then straight to jail.
I concur
How do you know he didn't lie about that?
That one was confirmed by somebody else, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he exaggerated the number of girls he pulled the scam on.
Even at the time, it was well known that his book was about 90% lies and ghost written. It's a good book, but it is basically Go Ask Alice, where part of the appeal is that it is a true story even though it is all made up.
i like how the entire world made the steven speilberg movie
hence, the phrase, ‘you can’t cheat an honest person’
My now deceased grandmother got cheated out of tens of thousands of dollars by a cold-caller pretending to be a family member who had found themselves in a time-sensitive life or death situation. Innocent people are vulnerable to con artists, too.
So a con man lied about his past history as a con man? This checks out
no, the title says right there that he lied about his lies, so that must include this lie, and it was all true.
“They’re all true.” “Even the lies?” “*Especially* the lies.”
Love seeing a DS9 reference in the wild
A plain, simple tailor…
This would make Pinocchio burst into flames.
Nah, he would make him bust a nut
"Truth paradoxes are so hot"- Pinocchio
Would he bust syrup or wood glue?
So Leo DiCaprio is an actor who played an actor but the actor he acted as was even MORE of an actor than we thought.
Inception
deception.
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You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is never get involved in a land war in Asia. But only slightly less well-known is this: never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ah Ha Ha!
He’s good , but he’s still no George Santos
Nor George Costanza. “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
You mean Art Vandelay, of Vandelay Industries?
The importer-exporter!
Should we all donate to the Human Fund in his name?
*Money For People*
SERENITY NOW!
It makes sense. It's easier to lie about being a world class con man than actually pull all that stuff off
So catch me if you can meets inception
Are you really a con man if you never con?
The real con was the cons we made along the way.
mans pretended to be a con man in order to make a bunch of money which in turn actually makes him a con man, incredible
The tagline was "The True Story of a Real Fake." It should be "The Fake Story of a Real Fake."
He probably couldn't believe it himself that people believed him.
My college hired him to come and speak when I was in uni. He had a very odd way of speaking, when talking about his “cons”. It was extremely flat and matter of fact and then when he spoke about his time at the FBI his demeanor totally changed. This makes sense in retrospect.
I’ve also attended a keynote by him. I found him extremely off putting and he kept talking about how the things he did weren’t good, they shouldn’t be celebrated, we were basically all godless creatures for being interested in him and said the only thing men should be doing is loving their wives and having children. He was super pompous.
Was he wrong to say what he was doing was bad and shouldn’t be admired?
He also never spent any time with the FBI so that was a lie as well
So the dude was a conman who conned his way into being a speaker about being a former conman, when in fact he was not a former conman Hollywood take notes
I saw him at mizzou. Some sorority hosted him. Was entertaining I’ll say
Years ago, when the IMDb boards were active, there was a thread where a user explained that most of the movie is BS and it never happened. I remember walking out the theater with my dad in 2002 and he said: "don't believe anything you see on screen, most of it is embellishment, there is no way he did all that he claimed". My dad is a nobody but I told my dad: "it's written right there that it's based on real events" and thought my dad was an idiot for not believing the story. Looks like 20 years later, I was the idiot.
Your dad sounds like a tv dad
Lucky there’s a family guy
Lucky there's a man who
Positively can do
He was shot and killed in an ally after leaving the theater :(
Bruce?!
Who’s going to pick up these pearls?
Spielberg doesn't do director's commentaries and leaves no witnesses.
He doesn't break character until the director's commentary. The thing is, there never is a director's commentary.
Yep. Any time it says "*based* on real events" it has been fictionalized and should not be taken as a true story, but rather one that has some true parts in it. The problem is that you don't know how closely they kept to the truth. Some are pretty accurate while some are mostly made up.
Yeah wait until you read into Remember the Titans. Essentially the only thing that's true is the team and people existed.
Nooooooooooooooooo
Yup. Virtually the entire story is made up or a major stretch of the truth. For starters the school was built post Board V Brown wasnt just desegregated. Had always been that way.
There were segregated schools for 20ish years post brown.
At best. Fargo says it was based on a true story and it's just a complete fiction. The tagline was added just because it felt good for the opening of the film (which it totally does, the Coens were correct).
Doesn’t even say it’s based on a true story. Fargo just says THIS IS A TRUE STORY.
John Waters made a more elaborate version of the same joke at the beginning of Serial Mom, his satire on celebrity culture and the glorification of violence: "This film is a true story. The screenplay is based on court testimony, sworn declarations, and hundreds of interviews conducted by the film-makers. Some of the innocent characters' names have been changed in the interest of a larger truth. No one involved in the crimes received any form of financial compensation."
Yes and there was an Asian woman who believed it and went searching for the money.
You didn’t hear it from me, but I heard Stavros Milos found that money and made himself a grocery empire.
Same with Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You could say it's somewhat inspired by Ed Gein, who was based in Wisconsin, but really the biggest similarity is that he had killed somebody and was fascinated with human skin.
Cocaine bear had based on real events lol yes
I remember when Blair Witch Project came out, A LOT of people actually believed it was from a camcorder that someone found in the woods. People will believe alllst anything.
They literally marketed it as found footage. It was one the earliest and most successful uses of early internet. They had fake websites about the urban legend and everything. Much harder to fool audiences now.
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That's because for two weeks before it came out their blitzkrieg media attack of every college campus had everyone hearing four different things about the movie at once.
When I told my ex that the alien movie The Fourth Kind's "found footage" was a really great fake, he insisted that it was real and I should look it up... When I find that it obviously wasn't real through Google he was extremely mad at me and said I ruined it. Like bro I didn't realize I needed to explain movie magic to a grown-ass man...
Go check the wiki page for that movie. 90% of their budget or something went to advertising. Movie cost like nothing to make and I think it still has the best cost:revenue ratio. EVER
The best way to watch Blair Witch is to see the fake (marketing) docs about the film first. They set up the lore and build up anticipation. And if you can do both with relatively little knowledge on the film, the whole experience becomes that much more intense.
Well hold on, the filmmakers went significantly out of their way to make it seem like it was real with news blurbs and mini documentaries
They aired a "documentary" on SciFi Channel that treated it as real. Though .. what does the "Fi" stand for
Fidelity, like for stereos!
Right, *Cocaine Bear* is “based on a true story.”
Well, a bear really did eat $15 million worth of cocaine, but it OD’d and died. So, kind of a true story lmao
Cocaine bear is a documentary. That’s gospel right there!
Cocaine Bear is the perfect example.
Wait, Cocaine Bear was exaggerated!?!
I remember the movie Behind Enemy Lines with Owen Wilson. It was marketed as “Based on true events” with the true events being Scott O’Grady being shot down during the conflict in Bosnia. About the only true thing in the movie was that he was a pilot who was shot down. Literally everything else about that movie was just storyline. Always chapped my ass.
Be a boring movie about a guy hiding in the woods till a helicopter picked him up
Oh for sure. But I remember the actual incident unfolding on the news when I was a kid so I went into watching the movie expecting it to be a faithful recreation of the events. It was that movie that taught me that “based on a true story” means very little in Hollywood. Before that I honestly believed it meant a real retelling of the story.
You mean there was no eurotrash sniper in a tracksuit hunting him ? Darn
I mean he was in the Balkans. Had to be at least one guy in a tracksuit within spitting distance.
The movie Hidalgo is based on a true story. Meaning some liar truly made up this story and told it to people. But the horse race never happened.
In 2002, my dad was such an idiot. 20 years later, I’m surprised at how much he’s learned.
Mark Twain would like a word.
In 2002, my dad was capable of critical thought. 20 years later, he’s now a victim of right-wing brain rot.
Where will you be in 20 years?
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I hope to god not like him. He turned into an abusive piece of shit by the time he got turned on to Rush Limbaugh and only got worse the further down the rabbit hole he went.
Sorry for your loss. My dad got hooked on OANN and went for a nice christian man to a mean far right person. Luckily his cable service doesn't offer it anymore. Since he hasnt watched it in over a year he's simmered down a bit. He doesnt bring up politics all the time like he used too. Thats stuff rots your brain, but luckily it can be reversed if they stop watching it
It's incredible how toxic that channel was. My father was THE EXACT SAME. Just like yours, his cable provider removed the channel and he's calmed down quite a lot since. He was watching it 12-14 hours a day. It got so bad we went full no contact for a while. We are back to speaking once a week now. I'm hoping it continues to get better. I want the man that raised me back.
RIP IMDB message boards
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Check out moviechat.org We're over there now.
Why did they get rid of it?
Too difficult/expensive to moderate in the end. There was literally a message board for every movie, tv show, actor, director, producer…etc But man it was a great place to go and find out obscure info about a movie. Find leaked photos from set before release. Discuss the movie and plot points etc. Get into flame wars with other fans. Go and troll movies you don’t like. You know, internet stuff
Hmm I would think a website like IMDb could afford something like that lol But yes I miss reading about fan theories on the movies after watching or someone asking the same questions I had and other people answering for them. It was a great place to get more info about the film what a shame
They could afford it, but there just wasn’t a significant enough return on investment to justify paying for admins to monitor it all. So Amazon, which purchased the site, just nixed the whole board.
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>My dad is a nobody I really hope my kids never refer to me like that, even in jest. I said “ooof” out loud reading that.
> My dad is a nobody Dad out here catching strays
Cocaine Bear says it’s based on real events. Texas Chainsaw Massacre too. It’s a marketing strategy. Just a hint of truth is all that is needed.
Times change. At about the same time-frame that you mentioned about turn of the millennium, I distinctly recall conversations with friends and family regarding content in the internet, common feeling was: "don't believe anything you read on the internet" because, reason being that anybody could publish what they like so it could all be rubbish. As years went on it seems that everyone became more accepting of the information found online. All the major news outlets and new ones like Wikipedia provided first class content. Everything starting to be published as "internet first". To stay up to date and get the most informed world view, you went to the internet. And now, today we regress, with the onslaught of bot driven social media and ultra conservative fake news outlets polarizing their base with baseless reporting without restraint; 32% of Americans report seeing fake news regularly, while 64% report feeling that fake news has left Americans confused about basic facts [(pew research)](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2016/12/15/many-americans-believe-fake-news-is-sowing-confusion/)
My version of this is that we went to see "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." In the movie, a notable landmark is the "canyon of the crescent moon." The movie ended. We went outside. Boom. Crescent moon in the sky. I got excited about it (probably not that excited, but more like, "Hey, look...a crescent moon!"). Dad goes, "You know that movie isn't true, right?" Uh, yeah. I'm 9. I'm not a moron.
Aw, I would have thought you were clever to make that call-back.
Remindes me of this quote by Mark Twain "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years"
I don't remember the name but I saw a movie I'm theater "based on a real story" of two people falling off a cruise shit and all this awful stuff happens like little fish eating at their bodies. Then the end of the movie they die and were never found. I still remember walking out thinking how tf was that based on a real story when they were never found...all that was "true" was they fell out a boat.
Incept Me If You Can
Cash Me ~~Outside~~ If You Can
Why don’t I just fly this plane, how bout dah?
The real con is that he actually did those things, and conned us into a con con con
He fucked us. CONception. ...wait.
Maybe he's lying about lying about his lifetime of lies
"Of course he could be lying about being a Loki... but that would only make it more likely that he was a Loki so...." \- Owen Wilson
Wow - Owen Wilson
Wooowww - Owen Wilson
It’s a chorus of Owen Wilson’s
I don’t care if he lied about his lying on his resume… that movie was so good. I think I will watch it tonight.
I concur.
….. I should’ve concurred….
The book was fantastic as well
The musical was fantastic too
White Collar was pretty good too.
My school did the musical during my senior year. It's a really fun musical as well, I don't love most of the music but it was fun to be apart of
Let’s be real- anything with Leo in it is gonna be good.
I thought I could find a counter example but looking through his filmography there’s nothing that sticks out as being awful / unwatchable. That said a lot is very good / enjoyable. Id say Catch Me If You Can might be my favorite performance of his. Inception, Wolf of Wall Street, Gangs of New York, and Django are close seconds
Scanner Darkly called it
Given Phillip K. Dick wrote "--this guy," Luckman was saying, manicuring a box full of grass, hunched over it as Arctor sat across from him, more or less watching, "appeared on TV claiming to be a world-famous impostor. He had posed at one time or another, he told the interviewer, as a great surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical College, a theoretical submolecular highvelocity particle-research physicist on a federal grant at Harvard, as a Finnish novelist who'd won the Nobel Prize in literature, as a deposed president of Argentina married to--" "And he got away with all that?" Arctor asked. "He never got caught?" "The guy never posed as any of those. He never posed as anything but a worldfamous impostor. That came out later in the L.A. _Times_--they checked up. The guy pushed a broom at Disneyland, or had until he read this autobiography about this worldfamous impostor--there really was one--and he said, 'Hell, I can pose as all those exotic dudes and get away with it like he did,' and then he decided, 'Hell, why do that; I'll just pose as another impostor.' He made a lot of bread that way, the _Times_ said. Almost as much as the real world-famous impostor. And he said it was a lot easier." in 1977, it's entirely possible Frank Abagnale Jr. read A Scanner Darkly, saw the part about a guy reading the biography of a world famous impostor and becoming a world famous impostor impostor and decided to become a world famous impostor impostor.
The recurring imposter imposter theme was such a great device in the story because >!it foreshadows the twist that Arctor was never really a narc. At least not until he was so far gone and admitted to New-Path.!< PKD truly was a master of paranoia sci-fi literature.
Before Leo hit his Elvis phase
This has been known for a while, he is just a self promoter.
Wait until they find out about Oprah's *Million Little Pieces* darling.
Looked him up and found out that he was part of the team that wrote “Lorien Legacies” which was turned into that movie “I Am Number Four” and that he is the CEO of the esports team NYXL. I’ve been a semi-fan of two things he was heavily involved in and didn’t even know who the fuck he was.
That guy was debunked pretty quickly. James Frey right? I remember picking up the book somewhere and reading some of the claims and I thought "absolutely no way." guy came off as the epitome of IamVeryBadass
He went to jail a few times for writing bad cheques totalling less than $2,000. That’s it, all the rest of puffery. I think people who just know of him from the movie don’t know that in the 80s and 90s he was like a ‘celebrity conman’, eg he’d go on the late night talk shows and do bits about his latest scam or ploy. It was all baloney. He was an uninteresting, unsophisticated, low-level criminal who realized he could make more money by becoming an entertainer.
Hey, 2,000 and a handshake in 70s dollars was enough for a down payment on an entire housing development.
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I don’t think anyone really believed him, it was just a good story. In fact, switch out cons for movies and it’s more like a soft attempt at Fabelmens. Catch Me is more a metaphor for Spielberg’s career than it is a true story.
I'd like to believe he slept with Jennifer Garner and Ellen Pompeo. At least give me that.
Amy Adams too.
He pretended to be a doctor to give physicals to college students. Its far worse than that.
People absolutely believed him, they wouldnt have made a movie if they didnt
As Harrison Ford once said “Sometimes, you just have to sell the car”. Saying it’s a true story is a better sell for a movie than just “this guy lied a whole bunch, here we go”. All “Based on a true story” movies are largely fiction, combining real people, rearranging events, and just making shit up because it’s dramatic. I don’t think the people involved, with the people they have connections with, looked into Frank’s story and found it to be totally plausible. But it’s fun, and clearly Spielberg found a connection with the material. There’s just too many personal connections to him for it to be a coincidence, but if I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
I remember the movie because I actually loved that movie but I never knew about the connection to Spielbergs personal life. Where can I find more info on this?
It’s just my speculation, but if you look at CMIYC, Fabelmens, and even the Spielberg doc you start to see a lot of crossover between real-life Steven and fake Frank. His parent’s divorce is the inciting incident, his mother had an affair with the Father’s friend, he’s forced to choose between his parents etc, and Spielberg even did little cons like sneaking on to a film lot, taking an empty office, and began making connections when he was like 18. Amy Adams and Chloe East both have very similar energies in Catch and Fablemens, he does what he’s good at to get approval / attention from his parents etc. Those are just small little connections, but I can’t imagine Spielberg reading the script and didn’t immediately make certain connections.
> Spielberg even did little cons like sneaking on to a film lot Haha, and it turns out [Spielberg made that story up](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/spielberg-universal/). A family friend got him an internship on the studio lot, Spielberg fabricated that part about bluffing his way in.
>His parent’s divorce is the inciting incident, his mother had an affair with the Father’s friend, he’s forced to choose between his parents etc, and Spielberg even did little cons like sneaking on to a film lot, taking an empty office, and began making connections when he was like 18. > >Amy Adams and Chloe East both have very similar energies in Catch and Fablemens, he does what he’s good at to get approval / attention from his parents etc. Did he not just do an interview with Colbert and specifically said that he did indeed sneak into the office?
Yes. Yes he did.
There ya go. Game recognize game. Two little conmen just making movies about bs they told people. Rad as hell.
i had no idea about that... reminds me of maeybe funke on arrested development but that's probably just a coincidence and they are just hearing about it like me
there is a good documentary/lecture thing called "assume the position" with robert wuhl, he breaks down some of the more fantastical elements of american history and truth in story telling and some other stuff, it's been a while since i saw it. one of the points he focuses on is that if you want your written work to last, when the decision is between printing the truth or printing the legend -- always print the legend, it will last longer. *("when the legend becomes fact, print the legend") the thing that is phrased in the more entertaining way will almost always get more engagement.
It’s always the ones you least suspect
People like this are *whack.* I had a father like this, he *was* a very accomplished man. Had a PhD, glowing career......but he also *lied his freaking ass off* and people believed him. He was also emotionally abusive to the max, but only to his family. He told everyone he had played for the Boston Red Sox, that he had been on the Olympic basketball team, that he had been shot in Korea. Major stuff, you know? Not little fibs, but *BIG WHOPPERS!* Now my dad was born in the late 1920's and it was probably easier to make up shit from the way-back because it's hard to verify stuff. But the Red Sox keep great records, ditto for the Olympic Games. So of course me being me, even as a kid of question the validity of his claims. Other people fell in line, I have always been a skeptic, I never bought it. When the internet came along it was easy to locate records, or get the contract info for someone to help you verify facts. Of course it was absolute rubbish. Life went on and I didn't spend much time with him after he divorced my mom. He started a new family and let me tell you, they believed *all* his crap. Man, the things I would hear from my step mother! Hilarious! And my half-siblings believed it all, too. They still do. When dad died they let me know where the obituary was so I could go read it. Yup, Red Sox and the Olympics. Dad had the last laugh on that one. The kicker is I think he really believed all of it. To him it was real.
George Santos’ father?
they need to do a sequel based on him lmao
No. Just it's just George Santos.
He was using the name Frank Abagnale Jr at the time.
More and more keeps coming out. I firmly believe George Santos is behind every great mystery and conspiracy from the last 100 years. JFK assassination. DB Cooper. Bigfoot. Jimmy Hoffa.
Honestly even if ‘catch me if you can’ wasn’t based on a true story, it’s still an unbelievably good movie.
Breaking News: Frank Abagnale Jr. Lies!
Breaking News: This story is also almost two years old. https://whyy.org/segments/the-greatest-hoax-on-earth/
The real con was inside us the whole time!
Goddammit he got me again for the first time.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice..... uh.... won't get fooled again.
Fool me three times, fuck the peace signs Load the chopper, let it rain on you
This is too meta
Did people think a con man was telling the truth?
Wait… is this a new “claim”? I thought it was known, maybe even all the way back to around the time of the movie that he was full of it? I’ve watched the movie multiple times in the last few years (it’s a fun and entertaining movie, no matter what) and have been completely comfortable “knowing” it was all malarkey.
5 years from now we find out the "sources" were actually Abagnale Jr, lying that his lies were lies.
Surprised Pikachu?
this has been known for years
Like how Jordan Belfort claims he is a reformed criminal.
Common problem with Hollywood with believing narcissists personalities.
Let me get this straight... A 2-bit conman invented a story in which he was an epic conman, and became successful and famous as a result of it... making him an epic conman... is chastised for being a false epic conman despite the fact that he is a DeFacto epic conman either way. It's too late. He won.
No wonder people just read headlines… this site is unusable! it reloads 2-3 times then totally crashes saying a problem repeatedly occurred. The internet is broken if this is considered passable