Jonathan Vankin

I write about film & history for a living, and I have shelves full of books about it. None of them, however, does what Based on a True Story does: clearly, succinctly explain where -- and how much -- a hundred well-known films diverge from the historical realities of the stories they’re based on.

The key phrase here is “well-known.” The films covered are heavily weighted toward recent, mainstream Hollywood productions and acknowledged classics: the kind of thing that fills most show more American film fans’ DVD shelves, Netflix queues, and download folders. Independent filmmaker John Sayles is represented by Eight Men Out rather than Matewan, and World War II by Patton and Pearl Harbor rather than Bataan and The Battle of Britain. Films about major historical events share space with those that, though based in reality, tell smaller stories: Mask, A Civil Action, Hoosiers, and The French Connection. The authors’ seems to have been to write a book about movies that most of their readers are likely to have seen, or at least heard of.

It’s a worthy goal, oddly underserved by existing film & history books, and Vanken and Whalen handle it well. Their analysis is rigorous without being pedantic, nuanced without being obscure, and amusing without being snarky. They accept “Hollywoodization” (streamlining, condensing, and tweaking the details of reality for dramatic effect) when it’s done with care, and attack it without mercy when it’s done clumsily or gratuitously. It’s a testament to their craftsmanship that their gleeful demolition of (say) Men of Honor and their praise of (say) Apollo 13 are equally readable, and equally fascinating.

For everyone who’s seen the title card “Based on a True Story” flash on a movie screen and wondered: “Yeah, but which parts?” . . . here’s your book. show less

My employer used to laugh whenever I would mention the existence of vast conspiracies working around us in the world today. Then I lent him this book. Now he merely smiles and nods, with the occasional nervous glance over his shoulder.

Two main sections help deliver tone that exists in the world of conspiracy theory. The first section examines a cross-section of the theorists themselves; from the flaky personalities capitalizing on the public's need to know, to the ordinary people (like you show more or I) that find themselves sucked into the realm of the unbelievable, the explainable, and the unavoidable. The second section then broadsides you with a vast collection of some of the most intense and complicated examples of what conspiracy theory is all about.

The key to this book's success at making you think is that it doesn't pick and choose which plots and cover-ups are real or imagined. Instead, it merely dumps all of the facts and theories right in your lap, leaving you no choice but to decide for yourself what you can or can't dismiss as paranoid folly. Highly recommended for believers & skeptics alike. show less

This is the 2004 'upgrade' of a 1995 book that had 70 rather than 80 'conspiracies' and was originally published at the peak of the X-Files era's popular fascination with secret government. Between the two editions, 9/11 took place and the tone changes somewhat.

The two authorial voices are hard to distentangle. One is straight-talking and shows no particular political bias. The other sometimes adopts a slightly irritating 'gonzo' style and is clearly prejudiced in direction of liberal show more narratives. Clinton seems to be taken off every possible hook.

Perhaps the authors or an author matured over a decade and started to worry about the monster they had played a part in unleashing. The final post-2001 mood is more sombre, irritated with 911 conspiracy theorising that (in their view) detracts from serious 'parapolitical' analysis.

One can play conspiracy theory in a number of ways - as a form of fictional entertainment that descends into its own abyss of lunacy, as legitimate political expression of impotence and ignorance or as sincere analysis of the very odd and nasty things governments get up to.

The book tends to smile or laugh at the first, ignore the second and be unreliable yet thought-provoking on the third. Few writers on conspiracy adopt the necessary 'constructively critical' approach that gives us a methodology to be taken seriously. This book is no exception.

Vankin and Whalen want their cake and to eat it, to entertain and sell the book and to purport to be seriously considering the lengths to which the so-called deep state will go to cover its tracks. As a result, the worthy latter project flounders in a grey area of uncertainty and sometimes nonsense.

Still, the relatively short but full chapters give source books and clues for further reading. Even a cursory catch-up on the internet will modify their theorising in constructive ways. And they raise questions that still need to be answered and where state villainy is fairly obvious to all but an idiot.

I suspect most such stories are generally more tales of bungling than of adroit plotting but it is clear that the American State's discovery of itself as a superpower with an existential enemy in communism and a will to domination created many opportunities for fanatics and sociopaths.

The book closes with a rather moving account of Frank Olson son's attempt to uncover the truth about his death: Frank implausibly threw himself out of a window under the influence of LSD but was just as likely (more likely in my view) to have been a victim of interrogation or murder.

This and other stories create a picture for us of the malfeasance of the so-called 'deep state' having a considerable basis in reality as unaccountable sociopathic parts of an unwieldy and ill-administered state that consider themselves beyond ordinary morality and the law.

It is plausible to see the fringes of these networks being seduced into the violent anti-communist Right or into co-operation with organised crime networks under conditions where it might not be clear who was using whom. The system then has to cover up group blunders and crimes.

There are certainly nodal points where many conspiracy theories start to come together and where there is no smoke without fire - the early post cold war panic about brainwashing blowing back into domestic experimentation, the obsession with Cuba, the Iran-Contra fiasco.

There seem to be lineages of collusion and relationships that go well beyond the coincidental and which create overlaps between the security apparatus and politics. This is not peculiarly American. The British have a similar nodal point in the Troubles. The Russians probably many more.

Books like this are fun. They will even make you think but they 'conspire' themselves to obfuscate even when, as in this case, they make considerable efforts to draw a distinction between the silly, the possible and the probable.

We seem to have two absurd wheels in motion culturally. One wheel turns on the tales of Illuminati, a reptilian House of Windsor, the priory of Sion and alien intelligences. The other wheel turns on tales of conspiracy theory being extremist and neurotic fantasies with no connection to reality.

The first offers us paranoid fantasy to such an extent that it discredits all parapolitical research to the point where it becomes legitimate enquiry to ask how much of our entertainment is created harmlesly and how much has been 'seeded' by psychological operations to confuse matters further.

Certainly the known scale and complexity of psychological operations in international relations and the facts of media manipulation mean that it is unlikely that so much secret resource is designed to tell us nothing but the truth or that it does not engage in imaginative games to peculiar ends.

The second approach - denial (usually cast as a moral tale of the invention of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion as if this settled the matter of JFK or MLK's assassinations) - is equally absurd because, even if flawed, there is now plenty of proven evidence of state dodginess.

What is required is something in the middle - an abandonment of pseudo-archaeology, pseudo-history and pseudo-science but a realisation that human actors will both conspire to meet their ends and get into hot water by following the logic of their unthinking institutional trajectories.

So, it is possible that JFK and MLK were both assassinated as part of much more far-ranging plots, that Olson was murdered, that the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II was part of a 'strategy of tension', that the Japanese Far Right and Yakuza were collusive and so on and so forth.

The book is 'fun', usefully rubbishes a lot of stuff that needs to be rubbished, opens lines of enquiry (even if we find that other resources soon close them again as may be the case with the mysterious 'Raoul' in the James Earl Ray case) and demonstrates that 'something is up'.

What is 'up' is the existence of a repeated pattern of unaccountable power in the struggles between security and intelligence networks. These spill over at the margins into amorality, criminality and politics and make these networks subversive of the values they seek to defend.

Sometimes elected politicians (as in the 1970s investigations into the CIA) get somewhere in exposing crimes, sometimes they are collusive. It is not enough to dismiss the charges laid against unaccountable secret warriors as mere 'conspiracy theory'.

A book for the shelves but not the book we really needed and which may never have. Certainly we may need a final encyclopedic sceptical review of idiot conspiracy theory on the one hand wherever and whenever it starts to cause people to believe in it as 'truth' but most of this is just fun.

What is needed far more urgently is a definitive and provocative history of the role of state funded secret organisations in both the actuality and cover up of incompetence, freeloading, criminality and murder in every nation since the emergence of intra-state ideological competition.

Such a history would give due place to the possibilities of collusion in a world of shredded documentation, private unminuted meetings, deniable hirings, secret funds, misperceptions of reality and special interests with men on the inside.

Above all, what is required is the sustained exposure to domestic populations not so much of secret wars against others (which might be justifiable) but wars against we who pay for this nonsense with our taxes (and lives) and wars against the values that the State purports to be defending.

I tend to the view that incompetence and subsequent cover up is generally more likely than malice. After all, major state crimes (like the bombing of civilians) are generally not secret at all. But I am prepared to accept that malice and sociopathy are to be found within our state machines.

Above all, it is the leaching into politics of the conduct of secret organisations and special interests that need exposure, especially when they go over a line and enable the deaths of elected officials and ordinary citizens and plunder the Treasury for their hobby horses.

Why worry? Many might be happy to turn a blind eye if the apparat protects us. Perhaps because, if we are employing idiots and sociopaths, we need to know this is so in order to replace them with more intelligent and mentally balanced people who will do a better job of preserving our values. show less

An ideal primer for those who don't have the time to read the vast volume of conspiracy literature. This book will not only introduce you to perennial conspiracy favorites involving JFK, the CIA, UFOs, Marilyn Monroe, and Jim Morrison but also more obscure conspiracies. There's that dead reporter in the bathtub. He was working on something called the Octopus file involving stolen software and arms smuggling. And what about those machines in the polling booth? Are they really counting your show more vote? There's the "Fighting Quaker" who stopped a cabal of American fascists from overthrowing FDR. Who really did the killings at Jonestown? Is fluoride not a plot to steal our precious bodily fluids but to sell us more candy?

You get a briefing on 50 conspiracies and suggestions for further reading, so, the next time someone at a party begins to go on about their favorite conspiracy (and doesn't everyone have at least one?), you'll be able to look them square in the eye and say, "Well, I have a theory ... " show less