by L.A. Mood Comics and Games

By Dan Brown

Based on a true story.

Inspired by real events.

Based on the incredible true life story.

When it comes to marketing movies, phrases like these matter a lot.

How do I know?

Because no studio marketing team in Hollywood history has ever passed up a chance to use them in their ad campaigns, even if the film in question bears only a passing resemblance to the truth.

But my purpose today isn’t to argue movies inspired by real-life events aren’t all that real or true.

It’s to try to understand why these phrases keep popping up on movie posters and in trailers.

So here’s the thing: When a motion picture is marketed as a true story, it lands differently. 

In the minds of movie fans, it’s not in the same category as fictional stories. It’s more compelling.

In 1976, the film version of All the President’s Men debuted. It was based on the reporting of Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who were real journalists whose Watergate stories helped to force Richard Nixon, an actual U.S. president, to resign.

About a year later, a George Lucas movie called Star Wars was released. It featured actors playing aliens, starship dogfights in space, laser swords, and a mystical power called the Force. None of that stuff is real. 

These two studio productions were received by audiences in radically different ways, and no discerning movie fan would put them in the same category.

All the President’s Men horrified audiences because it told a story that everyone had lived through in real life.

Even if Star Wars enthusiasts loved wookies or droids or Jedi Knights, no one expected to bump into them on the street.

All the President’s Men appealed to a different part of an audience member’s brain, the part that detects BS.

As I’ve noted in this space before, I work with young adults in both of my day jobs. And the word I hear the most from university students these days is “authenticity.” 

They are starved for it. They distrust its opposite – the fake, the plastic, the constructed.

If a product is perceived as authentic, they will want to try it. If a celebrity is suspected of being a different person from how they outwardly present themselves, they are repelled. They distrust slick, surface representations.

They want the real deal.

And the big brains who work in the marketing departments in Tinseltown are aware of this, and they use this knowledge to their advantage. 

That’s why you still see films being sold on the fact they are true stories. That is, they are authentic.
 
Which is why another 1970s release, The Amityville Horror, had the tagline “The terrifying truth behind a real-life haunted house.” 

The 1993 UFO-abduction flick Fire in the Sky had a similar advertising prompt: “Based on a true story. White Mountains, Arizona . . . Six  workmen entered the forest. One didn’t come out. What really happened?”

And it’s never going to stop. 

Even decades from now, when hologram technology has been perfected, or the studios invent a way to beam movies directly into the human brain, you can bet future marketing professionals will be making the same claims.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.