Lucky for Hollywood, a decent music biopic is practically guaranteed to be a smash hit
at the box office.
Unfortunately, Hollywood isn't actually very good at making them - and it definitely doesn't
help that so many of them play so fast and loose with the truth.
Here are a few of the times that music biopics have lied about what really happened.
The story of Freddie Mercury was so extraordinary and dramatic that it almost seemed perfect
for a big-screen adaptation.
"Freddie, we're a family.”
“No, we’re not!
We’re not a family.
You’ve got families.
Children, wives.
What have I got?"
And that's why it was such a shame that Bohemian Rhapsody wasn't Freddy Mercury’s real life
story - but just fantasy, instead.
Despite what Bohemian Rhapsody told you, Freddie Mercury didn't introduce himself to Brian
May and Roger Taylor after the gig in which Smile lead singer Tim Staffell quit; in fact,
he already knew all three of them, and they were even roommates for a short amount of
time.
The movie would also lead you to believe that John Deacon was their original bassist, although
they went through three other men between the band's founding and Deacon's first show
in July 1971.
And then there's the treatment of Paul Prenter, Mercury's former manager.
Although he's rightfully portrayed as the villain in the story, Bohemian Rhapsody got
many of the details surrounding his firing wrong.
For starters, the film says he was fired prior to the Live Aid concert in 1985 and that he
went on television to out Mercury in retaliation.
However, the truth is that Prenter was fired in 1987 after he sold his story about Mercury
to The Sun, a notorious British tabloid.
Seeing as how Motley Crue made a whole career out of being unapologetically excessive, it
may seem strange to play with the truth for The Dirt, the film version of their notorious
2001 memoir.
But strangely enough, the cinematic take on The Dirt gave short shrift to those times
when either Vince Neil or Tommy Lee weren't in the band.
And while it makes sense for the film to focus on the lineup with whom they made their biggest
hits, the firing of former manager Doc McGhee depicted in the movie doesn't jibe with the
official story.
In the movie, Nikki Sixx gets upset when McGhee tries to reunite Sixx with his estranged mother,
but in reality the firing happened after McGhee slotted them below headliners Bon Jovi at
the Moscow Music Peace Festival.
Upon learning that they were to be Bon Jovi's opening act, Lee wrote in The Dirt that he:
"[...] hunted Doc down and found him backstage.
I walked right up to him and pushed him in his fat little chest, knocking him over onto
the ground like a broken Weeble."
The Buddy Holly Story received uniformly strong reviews on its release in 1978 - except from
those closest to Holly.
Shortly after the film hit theaters, Chet Flippo of Rolling Stone spoke with some of
those who were slighted.
Because Jerry Allison and Joe B. Mauldin - two of the other members of The Crickets - had
sold their rights to another studio, their names were changed in the film to Jerry Charles
and Joe Bob Simmons.
Norman Petty, who produced the bulk of Holly's classic recordings, was also left out of the
story entirely.
And neither Holly's mother nor his brother were happy with the way his family life was
portrayed, claiming the filmmakers went back on their word to consult with them.
In response to the film's claim that she and her husband pushed Buddy to quit rock 'n'
roll, Ella Holley said:
"We were behind Buddy one hundred percent.
We were very anxious for him to make a career as a singer.
We were his biggest fans."
Buddy's brother Larry added:
"It didn't portray his life at all, really.
They didn't ask us about a thing.
[...] I didn't feel that was my brother up there on the screen.
We weren't happy with the movie at all."
Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff received an Oscar nomination for their screenplay about
the formation of N.W.A., but Straight Outta Compton earned just as many headlines for
what they left out of it.
Some of the film's omissions are fairly minor, such as the fact that Dr. Dre was arrested
for unpaid tickets rather than for defending his brother, or the lack of mention of the
contributions of founding member Arabian Prince.
Perhaps more importantly, however, Straight Outta Compton completely omits Dre's early
history of violence against women - particularly high-profile incidents involving his girlfriend
Michel'le and hip-hop television host Dee Barnes, who wrote a lengthy Gawker article
about it in 2015.
"He grabbed me by my hair and started slamming me up against the wall."
Barnes wrote that she didn't necessarily want to relive the experience on-screen, but that
she did want some acknowledgement that it was part of his character.
She wrote:
"In his lyrics, Dre made hyperbolic claims about all these heinous things he did to women.
But then he went out and actually violated women.
Straight Outta Compton would have you believe that he didn't really do that.
[…] That's what they're trying to do with Straight Outta Compton: They're trying to
stay hard, and look like good guys."
Jamie Foxx earned an Academy Award for his portrayal of Ray Charles in Ray, Taylor Hackford's
2004 smash hit biopic about Ray Charles.
But a week before it was released, David Ritz, the co-author of Charles' autobiography, wrote
an article for Slate discrediting the film for its portrayal of the music legend's life.
Although he praised Foxx and the film's key supporting players, he said that Ray was a,
quote, "saccharine movie" that "trivializes the compelling complexity of [Ray Charles']
character."
Ritz said the film left out the importance of one of his father's ex-wives, Mary Jane,
who indulged him where his actual mother, Aretha, instilled in him the need for self-reliance.
The writer also took exception to how the film downplayed the jazz side of Charles'
music in favor of his soul hits, and reduced many of the important people in his life to
one-dimensional stereotypes.
According to Ritz, the movie ends with the implication that Charles lived in a happy
marriage with Della and never used drugs again, but in reality they divorced in 1976 - and
Charles continued to drink and smoke marijuana until his death.
Like Ray, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line was also a popular, award-winning movie
about an American music icon that focused largely on his drug use - and how he was redeemed
by the love of a good woman.
But Kathy Cash, daughter of the American music legend to one of his other wives, didn't like
how her mother was depicted in Walk the Line.
She told The Tennessean:
"My mom was basically a nonentity in the entire film except for the mad little psycho who
hated his career.
That's not true.
She loved his career and was proud of him until he started taking drugs and stopped
coming home."
Another of Cash's daughters, Rosanne, broadened the scope of criticism against Walk the Line,
arguing that the film reduced his complicated life to a bland love triangle.
She told The Guardian:
"The movie was painful.
The three of them [in the film] were not recognizable to me as my parents in any way.
[…] It's a Hollywood movie - very complex lives reduced to two hours - so how can it
possibly show the depths of truth?"
Floria Sigismondi's 2010 movie about the Runaways was based on singer Cherie Currie's 989 biography,
Neon Angel.
Currie told the AV Club that she was mostly happy with the movie, and especially Dakota
Fanning's portrayal of her, but admitted that Sigismondi took license with some of the band's
history.
Notably, she said the depiction of manager Kim Fowley whose behavior Currie alleged to
be abusive, was toned down for The Runaways.
She said:
"My book is the real story.
This is just a lighter kind of flash of what the Runaways were for a specific amount of
time.
How do you possibly take two and a half years and make it a film that's an hour and a half,
and make it even closely touch what was truly going on?"
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Fowley himself didn't dispute anything specific that
took place in the film's plot, but agreed it was Currie's side of the story with Sigismondi's
perspective added.
He said:
"Every movie needs a villain, and I'm a good one.
The issue is whether or not this is a good movie, and the answer is yes.
This is not a historical document."
It took 43 years, from his death in 1970, for a Jimi Hendrix biopic to finally be made.
And even then, Hendrix's former girlfriend Kathy Etchingham wrote a lengthy post on her
website denying some of the accounts shown in the film.
2013's Jimi: All Is By My Side starred Andre 3000 as the guitar legend and dealt with the
period between his arrival in England in 1966 and his guitar-burning U.S. breakthrough at
the Monterey Pop Festival a year later.
Most importantly, she revealed that a scene in which Hendrix beat her with a telephone
never actually happened, and that when she complained that it was fictional, the filmmakers
told her that they had heard from a different source that it was true.
She also criticized how the love triangle between herself, Hendrix, and Linda Keith
was portrayed.
She also lambasted the accuracy of the costumes, and even the music - since Hendrix's estate
wouldn't authorize its use in the movie and they had to rely on a trio of studio pros
to recreate it.
Etchingham also disliked the film's characterization of Hendrix.
She wrote:
"The biggest disappointment of this film was that after expecting at least some kind of
depiction of Jimi's humor and creativity and the amusing and creative times that were happening
in London, instead we were shown a gloomy and depressing dark tale that pictured Jimi
as some sort of moronic mumbling mystic."
Speaking to the L.A. Times in 1991, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek spoke out about Oliver
Stone's biopic about his band.
Although he admitted that Val Kilmer managed "a nice attempt" at playing Jim Morrison and
liked the re-creation of their concerts, he told the paper that he walked out of the film
- having mostly become upset at Stone's interpretation of Morrison.
Manzarek said:
"All you see is Jim as a drunken hedonist.
The tragedy is that fame consumed him.
But that wasn't Jim's message.
He was intelligent.
He was loving.
He was a good man who believed in freedom and in questioning authority.
But you'd never know that from seeing this film."
CBGB wasn't really a biopic, but rather a movie about the famed New York club that was
at the heart of the birth of punk rock - but it still wound up being widely panned for
its mistakes.
"You're not telling me the whole story."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
The Village Voice, which chronicled the rise of New York punk in its pages back in the
mid-'70s, was all too happy to point out where the film went wrong.
In addition to bemoaning the lack of people of color - even though plenty of bands that
played the club had black members - they noted that the club's walls are shown littered with
band stickers even before it had opened, and that Patti Smith is shown singing her hit
"Because the Night" long before it had been written by her and Bruce Springsteen.
In their piece on the film, Village Voice wrote:
"The whole thing has about as much punk credibility as an off-the-rack $30 Ramones t-shirt from
Hot Topic."
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