Real People, Fake Movies

The Raven, in theaters today, is a work of fiction in which real-life historical figure Edgar Allen Poe teams up with the police to catch a serial killer who’s basing his crimes off of Poe’s stories. It’s kind of terrible, but it marks the return of an intermittently popular subgenre of movies where real people are depicted in wholly fictional circumstances – not just revisionist history, mind you, but circumstances in which they either demonstrably didn’t find themselves in or never could have possibly found themselves in. For example, a few months from now Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter will attempt to stretch a single joke – “Isn’t it funny that this thing that totally sounds like a fake movie is a real movie!!??” – across an entire movie.

Here are four other movies about extremely real people doing extremely fake things. Enjoy!

Malcom McDowell is legendary Victorian Age science fiction author H.G. Wells, and in this amusing late-70s diversion it turns out he didn’t just write The Time Machine … he actually built one! Sadly, his genius for machinery both real and imagined does not translate to a genius at choosing friends – he subsequently discovers that one of his dinner guests (David Warner) is actually the serial-killer known to history as Jack The Ripper and that Jack has used the Time Machine to escape police capture and flee to the “present” of 1979. So Wells goes after him, and soon the two are playing time displaced cat and mouse in Carter-era San Francisco.

It’s a clever little romp; the sort of premise-oriented sci fi that these days only recurs on episodic TV shows rather than movies. The central social commentary running gag – Wells, a forward-thinking progressive of his day in addition to being a futurist, is utterly flabbergasted by the actual future while the psychotic “Jack” feels right at home – plays a little heavy handed today, but the central pitch of a Back to The Future for backward-looking bibliophiles pays fun dividends.

Time After Time writer/director Nicholas Meyer is also a novelist, and he pitched in on the screenplay for this adaptation of his book; essentially a high grade work of Sherlock Holmes fan-fiction.

Purporting to tell the “true story” behind the ruse of Holmes’ faked death, hiatus and resurrection; in this version Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall) is concerned that Holmes’ (Nicol Williamson) theory of the seemingly innocent Professor Moriarty (Laurence Olivier) being a secret supervillain seems to have no basis in reality … and it soon becomes clear that the great detective’s cocaine habit has rendered him delusional and threatens to destroy his brilliant mind. The only hope to save Holmes’ sanity: Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin), who not only helps break Holmes’ addiction but also susses out the repressed source of his eccentric behavior as the three men team up to solve a mystery with international implications.

Folk history is so deeply ingrained in the Asian Martial-Arts cinema it’s occasionally difficult to suss out if there are any trustworthy “facts” about some of the technically real people who keep popping up in them.

Case in point, this well regarded period superhero flick from Hong Kong action legend Tsui Hark is about a martial-artist (Donnie Yen) forced by a corrupt governor to hunt down the titular costumed vigilante/crimefighter (Yu Rongguang) in order to win freedom for his imprisoned son. Said son gets a curious amount of screentime, with his (or her, since the character is played by a young female wushu athlete) own fight scenes and subplots. Curious, that is, until various characters start making sure to constantly say his name out loud and in full: Wong Fei-Hung.

Fei-Hung was a real person, and exaggerated accounts of his exploits plus various professional and familial connections to the nascent days of the modern martial-arts theater and film tradition in China (one of his students, Lam Sai-Wing, was the teacher of many of the early pioneers who created the Hong Kong film industry) led to him becoming by far the most popular folk-hero to be depicted in Chinese period action movies – well over 100 films have been made about him or with him as a character. Fei-Hung is one of those martial-arts folk legends whose myth is so pervasive that it’s actually difficult to discern where his real story ends and the movie versions begin; though it’s obviously pretty unlikely that his dad was ever forced to fight what amounts to Chinese Ninja Zorro.

The version modern western audiences are likely most-familiar with are the Once Upon a Time in China movies, where Fei-Hung is played by Jet-Li. Hark created that series as well, and the Fei-Hung sequences in Iron Monkey drop lots of not so subtle hints that this is the same Fei-Hung as Li’s, making it an unofficial prequel. To give you an idea how deep this particular rabbit-hole goes; Jackie Chan is also playing Fei Hung in the Drunken Master movies, and he also encounters his actor pal Sammo Hung doing a cameo as Fei-Hung in Around The World in 80 Days. Hung, meanwhile, memorably portrayed the above-mentioned Lam Sai-Wing in The Magnificent Butcher opposite an older Fei-Hung played by Hong Kong icon Kwan Tak-hing – the actor who originated and popularized the Fei-Hung movie persona and played the role 77 times – the most times any actor has ever played the same character in separate films. Why are Chinese action movies so good? Pedigree.

Here’s a movie with at least four real people being very, very unreal … though not as unreal as you might think. And the story behind it is even stranger than the story it tells …

Here’s how this happened: In 1997, Columbia Pictures decided to try and make a movie out of Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief; which told the story of Orlean’s encounter with an oddball rare plant poacher. Offbeat writer Charlie Kaufman of Being John Malkovich got the job of writing the screenplay … but immediately found the book to be un-adaptable. Struck with severe writer’s block, Kaufman chose to deal with the stress of the situation by turning the screenplay into an exaggerated chronicle of his own difficulties in writing it, inventing increasingly bizarre (fictional) scenarios for himself and the other “real” people in the story and even imagining a twin brother for himself named Donald – to whom he gave a co-writing credit on the script. Kaufman said he thought he’d be fired for turning the screenplay in … instead, it became this movie and was nominated for multiple Oscars (and Chris Cooper won one of them!)

Nicolas Cage plays both Charlie and Donald. Charlie becomes obsessed with Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) as he tries and fails to turn her book into a script, and to his horror perennial screwup Donald begins to see real success after he bangs out a cheesy Shyamalan-esque twist-based screenplay on his first try after attending a seminar by infamous (real-life) screenwriting guru Robert McKee (Brian Cox); so Charlie heads to McKee himself looking for answers. McKee’s advice is, essentially, to retrofit the offbeat, meditative Orchid Thief into a conventional Hollywood potboiler full of sex, violence, drugs, gunfights, forced conflict and contrived emotion. And wouldn’t you know it, suddenly Adaptation‘s final act begins morphing into a completely different kind of movie …

If nothing else, one has to marvel at the level of honest introspection Kaufman displays in having his fictionalized version of McKee so decisively dress-down the kind of “anti-formula” storytelling Kaufman himself is so often praised for.

Bob Chipman is a film critic and independent filmmaker. If you’ve heard of him before, you have officially been spending way too much time on the internet.