Based on a Fake Story: The Peculiar Rise of the Vanity Biopic

Fake biopics, vanity biopics, and approved-by-the-subject biopics.

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The Peculiar Rise of the Vanity Biopic

TL;DR, I wrote about the state of the biopic industry for The Ringer, which you can read for free here.

This is a topic I’ve been circling around at least since Flamin’ Hot, which, if you’ll remember, retold the story from the memoir of the guy who said he invented the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto, even after the LA Times reported that he didn’t actually do that. My concern here isn’t so much the lying, which you’re allowed to do in art, as with the telling of a boring corny story when the interesting one is right there.

That topic was (flamin’?) hot again after Netflix released Nyad this week, a movie about marathon swimmer Diana Nyad’s swim from Cuba to Florida. Details are a little more granular this time, but a major sanctioning body refused to verify the swim and there’s a whole website (NyadFactCheck.com) dedicated to documenting Diana Nyad’s history of fabrication (Defector wrote about Nyad, and the guy that runs the fact check website a while back). One telling bit was her calling herself “the first woman to swim around Manhattan island” in a 2015 memoir, after previously having mentioned other women who had done that in an earlier autobiography.

It’s easy to get bogged down in those kinds of details (which was part of what made this one of the hardest pieces to write that I’ve done in a long time), but in general the fake biopic seems to be a peculiar outgrowth of the biopic being driving by a subject’s PR team rather than by an artist who happened to find that subject interesting. There are inspirational Latino biopics, like Flamin’ Hot, A Million Miles Away, and Cassandro, businessmen-are-the-real-heroes biopics, like Air, Tetris, and Blackberry, every musician that hits legend status gets their own hagiographic biopic produced by their own family. Sports stars seem to come in for the same treatment now, or with sanctioned documentaries like The Last Dance and Beckham. (See also King Richard, produced by the Williams family).

The taxonomies of biopics are complex, but the common thread is the hype machine seeming to take over any other considerations. It was a lot to get in one piece, and maybe I should’ve just done the taxonomy itself. But what can I say, I did my best to try to capture it all. Hope you like it!

Stuff To Listen To!

-We had a dang ball talking about the HBO exec who was paying an underling to troll TV critics on the latest Frotcast. Don’t miss this one.

-We had Roy Wood Jr. on the latest Pod Yourself A Gun (season: Pod Yourself The Wire). Not only did Roy feel like a big “get,” he was incredibly knowledgeable about The Wire, not to mention his run-ins with some of the actors. Again, don’t miss it.