Egan and Grosso served as technical advisers on set for the entirety of production, as well as both acting in small cameos in the film.
To aid with this, he brought on Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, the NYPD detectives who provided the inspiration for the film’s protagonists, Detective “Popeye” Doyle (played by Gene Hackman) and his partner Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (played by Roy Scheider). While Friedkin took some liberties with the film, including its iconic car chase, he was committed to keeping the story fairly realistic. Two years later, director William Friedkin’s Oscar-winning film of the same name debuted, with a slightly fictionalized twist on the thrilling real-life drug seizures.
yearly, prompting then-President Richard Nixon to dramatically crack down on drugs-and providing plenty of fodder for Robin Moore’s 1969 nonfiction book about some of the NYPD’s busts during the time, The French Connection. By the 1960s, up to 44 tons were being moved in the U.S. The complex drug trafficking scheme known as the French Connection was cooked up by Corsican gangsters in the 1930s: poppy seeds were shipped from Turkey and Lebanon to Marseille, a major French seaport, where they were processed into heroin, before being shipped out to U.S. “Beautifully crafted and impeccably acted,” Reidy says, “ Selma offers a memorable tribute to the ordinary people whose extraordinary courage helped to reinforce a basic right of American democracy: the vote.” - Suyin Haynes Johnson to condemn the violence inflicted on the marchers. Reidy, Emeritus Professor of History at Howard University, the film’s strength lies in both depicting the debates between leaders like King and John Lewis, and the stories of unsung local heroes “immortalized in contemporary newsreels,” which fueled public outrage and forced President Lyndon B. These events are the backdrop for the Ava DuVernay-directed film Selma, which, with its re-creation of the months leading up to the marches, illustrates the complexities of social justice movements and their leaders. But the protesters (led by Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Hosea Williams and other civil rights leaders) did not give up. The day would-known as “Bloody Sunday,” after 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 treated for lesser injuries-would become a key moment in the fight against racist voter suppression in the U.S., as televised images of the attacks on the marchers stunned the country. On March 7, 1965, as voting-rights demonstrators attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., during a march to the state capital in Montgomery, they were met by heavily armed police. And the more we learn about them, the more we want to learn. Their lives may be very different from our own, yet the movie screen opens a portal between us. Heroes of investigative journalism, bank robbers and mob informants and gunslingers, ordinary citizens who fought for justice: These people can come to seem more real to us through movies. In order to qualify, the central story in a film must be at least inspired by a real story that happened to real people-not just a fictional story set against a real backdrop-and a central character based on a real person must do things that his or her real-life counterpart actually did.
Each of us can live only one life, but movies that draw on history are windows into the selves that we might have been, had we been born in another time or place or circumstance.įollowing is our list of the top 10 movies based on a true story, as chosen by TIME staff and a select group of historians. To see cities and towns recreated as they were 20, 50 or 100 years ago, to look at the clothes people wore, to hear patterns of speech that have since become outmoded: all of these things remind us that the past was a real place, peopled with human beings who cared about the same things we do, who faced challenges that nearly broke them and who found delight in the same joys we ourselves treasure. And movies based on true stories put us in touch with the past in a visceral way. Sometimes we’re drawn to the library or bookstore, so we can read more about what really happened. But a vivid, enveloping film can draw us close to the spirit of an event or a person in ways that make us want to expand our view.