They say fact can be stranger than fiction. In the case of these four movies that is certainly true

Movies are the great escape, the fantastical way out of an otherwise boring and mundane existence. We love movies but we fall in love with those that cross with our world and reality: the movies that are based on real-life events.

Movies that depict actual events usually go to great lengths to accurately portray them on the silver screen, using the connection as a marketing tool to boost interest and sales. ‘Based on a true story’ is a huge selling point for any movie.

Then some are so wild, so outrageous, that people won’t believe events like that ever took place. But they would be wrong!

You Don’t Mess With The Zohan

I know, I know. The outrageous story of an Israeli super agent who decides to drop everything, fake his death and become a hairstylist. Comedic hijinks aside, this is a 100 per cent true story.

Nezi Arbib served his mandatory military service in the mid-1980s in the Israeli special forces but decided to leave the country and see the world. In 1986 he moved to Los Angeles where he and his brothers decided to open a hair dressing salon in the Beverly Hills area. It became increasingly popular and was soon frequented by musicians and celebrities, among them an actor named Adam Sandler.

Footloose

The 1984 musical movie, starring a frustratingly young Kevin Bacon, tells the story of a rural town in the US where dancing is banned out of fear that it will lead young people to get out of control. Even for 1984, this was a ridiculous premise. Outlaw dancing? How do you do that? And who would be that stupid? It was a made-up story to serve as a plot device for a movie.

Only, it wasn’t.

The small town of Elmore in the US state of Oklahoma was heavily influenced by its religious leaders. At the end of the 19th century, the town pastors banned dancing as it was “the devil’s instrument”, and led to “alcohol consumption and young people being sexually aroused”. So, instead of the traditional end-of-the-year dance for high schools, the town held a banquet.

As is the case with teenagers though, banning something only made them want it more so in the 70s the town’s young people used to gather at a nearby mountain where they partied and got drunk unsupervised. A local rancher, recognising how ridiculous and outdated the ban was and that teenagers would get drunk regardless, campaigned to lift the ban and he aided the line from the movie ‘Let them dance’.

Cocaine Bear

The crazy story about a mountain bear that goes on a bloody, cocaine-fuelled murder spree is based on a true story. The film, of course, is a highly fictionalised version as the actual story is far more mundane.

In September 1985, former army paratrooper Andrew Carter Thornton flew a plane over Kentucky filled with smuggled cocaine. He planned to stuff the drugs into a duffel bag and jump off the plane to get the drugs to their destination. He died when his parachute failed and the drugs were never recovered. Two months after his death, a forest ranger found a huge black bear dead, near where Thornton presumably made his jump.

Around the animal were torn pieces of the duffel bag and scattered around were plastic bags containing cocaine. The medical examiner concluded that the bear died from ingesting too much cocaine. The story went viral and the bear was stuffed and put on display. Fun fact: it was given the name Pablo Escobear because of course it was.

Good Will Hunting

The movie that catapulted Matt Damon and Ben Affleck into stardom was born from an event in Damon’s life. The movie tells the story of a blue-collar Boston resident who works as a janitor for MIT. Besides knowing his way around a mop, he is also a mathematical genius. In one memorable scene, Damon’s character sees an equation written on a board by a professor as a challenge for his students. The equation is supposed to be unsolvable but Damon proves everyone wrong.

In the real world, Damon’s brother, an artist, visited MIT and drew on a wall what seemed to be a complex mathematical formula but was in reality non-sensical. The drawing fooled students and staff and it was months before anyone realised that it was nonsense and erased it. He told the story to his brother and thus one of the greatest movies ever was born!