Earlier this year, Searchlight Pictures (now owned by Disney) released a film called Flamin’ Hot, purporting to depict the invention of the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto and related line of products. It was directed by Eva Longoria and based on the memoir of the guy who said he invented them. Longoria and the studio did this knowing full well that Flamin’ Hot’s subject, Richard Montañez, hadn’t actually invented the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto—a detail exposed in a Los Angeles Times report all the way back in May 2021, when the film was just entering production.
Asked to explain how this news might affect the film, Longoria told the Times, “We never set out to tell the history of the Cheeto. We are telling Richard Montañez’s story and we’re telling his truth.”
Had you assumed Flamin’ Hot would be the only biopic released this year to commemorate a fraudulent or disputed achievement, you would be wrong. Friday marked the Netflix release of Nyad—starring Annette Bening as the marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, and Jodie Foster as her coach—celebrating the inspirational (true?) story of Nyad achieving, at the age of 60, “her lifelong dream”: a 110-mile open-ocean swim from Cuba to Florida.
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A recent Defector piece, meanwhile, quotes a Nyad critic calling her “the greatest con artist in the history of marathon swimming,” alongside multiple sources who question the veracity of the Cuba swim. (The outlet also cites the World Open Water Swimming Association, who refused to ratify the feat.) The piece goes deep into Nyad’s history of fabrications and controversies, and her troubling history of embellishing her own record while downplaying and omitting the accomplishments of her competitors and predecessors. (In one telling bit, Nyad called herself “the first woman to swim around Manhattan island” in a 2015 memoir, despite having previously identified women who had done it before her in a 1978 autobiography.)
Should any of this matter? Are you already bored with the idea that someone might care whether a movie is “true” or not?
In the sense that they celebrate the dubious (or even wholly fabricated) accomplishments of people most of us probably wouldn’t know otherwise, Flamin’ Hot and Nyad are outliers. Yet in the way they epitomize the biopic more as the culmination of a successful PR campaign than as an artistic achievement—never mind some semblance of a historical document—they’re squarely par for the course in the broader biopic ecosystem.
To put it in more blunt terms, things have been going this way for a while. Separating the story from the hype campaign has gotten so hard that it was probably inevitable that biopics would eventually celebrate not just a liar or two, but the lies themselves.
Arguably the most famous biographical picture of all time is Citizen Kane, which fictionalized its subject as “Charles Foster Kane” even though basically everyone knew that it was about William Randolph Hearst. While so many of the techniques that made Citizen Kane groundbreaking at the time are now so common as to be hack—the ornate timeline, the zooming in and out of vignettes, the recurring Rosebud MacGuffin that even director Orson Welles derided as “dollar-book Freud”—what stands out about the film still is the nuance of its lead character.
Pauline Kael called Kane (the character) “that mass of living contradictions.” She said of the movie: “Kane may be a study of egotism and a movie about money and love, but it isn’t just another movie about a rich man who isn’t loved; it’s a scandalously unauthorized, muckraking biography of a man who was still alive and—though past his peak influence—still powerful, so it conveyed shock and danger, and it drew its strength from its reverberations in the life of the period.”
Not every film has to or should be Citizen Kane, but a biopic whose subject did his best to bury the film about him (a story itself depicted in David Fincher’s biopic of Citizen Kane’s screenwriter, Mank) makes for an extreme contrast with so many of today’s biopics. Modern-day biopic filmmakers identify with their subjects so closely that they’re more likely to interpret questions of veracity almost as loyalty tests. We’re depicting this idea of truth. We’re telling his truth.
These defenses are telling, in that they seem to position the movie’s subject, rather than the filmgoing public, as the filmmaker’s ultimate client. And this seems more an outgrowth of unfortunate commercial realities than an artistic prerogative.
These days, biopics are far more likely to be produced with the full cooperation of their subjects, if not their literal creative and financial participation. For a trailer of a recent, not very good George Foreman biopic currently on Netflix, Foreman himself narrates. On King Richard, the critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning biopic of Richard Williams, his famous offspring, Venus and Serena, are listed among the film’s executive producers. Music biopics virtually always require the permission of the musician depicted, or their estate, since without permission to use their music, they’d end up having to use fictionalized soundalike versions (as wonderfully parodied in the “Jackie Jormp-Jomp” arc on 30 Rock, about Jenna’s unauthorized Janis Joplin biopic).
Presumably in keeping with this reality, the musician biopic has evolved from being merely formulaic, like Ray and Walk the Line (as parodied in Walk Hard), to borderline propagandist, like Straight Outta Compton (in which coproducer Ice Cube laughs at his own script for Friday) and Bohemian Rhapsody (which courted controversy for whitewashing Freddie Mercury’s sexuality, though that didn’t stop Rami Malek from winning an Oscar for it).
This cozy relationship between subject and filmmaker is now so commonplace as to be expected, even prized. One Love, the upcoming Bob Marley biopic, for instance, boasts that it was “produced in partnership with the Marley family” in the official synopsis, one clause ahead of the actor playing Bob. We’ve come so far from the idea that it might be good or exciting for a biography to rake muck or be unauthorized. It’s now more newsworthy when a biopic or series hasn’t been approved by its subject. How else to explain a headline like “How Pam & Tommy was made without Pamela Anderson’s involvement (or permission)”?
Access to the subject confers many obvious benefits, from the rights to music and sports footage to simply having the subject’s “blessing” and another famous person (and their platform) to help promote the film. Clearly, a close filmmaker-subject relationship is good for business. So much so that we’ve all but forgotten that it’s generally bad for art.
Nyad was directed by two acclaimed documentarians, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (the two previously worked together on the fantastic rock climbing doc Free Solo), making their narrative feature film debuts. The same is true for Cassandro, a biopic about famous “exótico” Saúl Armendáriz directed by Roger Ross Williams, now showing on Prime Video. Williams directed a documentary about Armendáriz released in 2016. Which is to say that these filmmakers’ rapport with their subjects, or their perceived ability to develop it based on previous projects, is not just coincidence. It’s an all-but-necessary precondition and probably a big reason they got the jobs in the first place.
The trouble is, a movie like Nyad isn’t Ray. There’s no “Georgia on My Mind” in it that moviegoers come in expecting to see, in the same way that Cassandro and Flamin’ Hot don’t have a “Ring of Fire” or a “Boyz-n-the-Hood.” Which raises the question of what, exactly, the benefit is of the filmmakers’ devotion to their subjects’ conceptions of themselves.
Above all, there’s a collective inability to abandon the pitch, even when reality drops a bigger story right into the filmmakers’ laps. Both Nyad and Flamin’ Hot were sold almost certainly based on the successful public speaking careers and accompanying memoirs of their subjects. Richard Montañez, thanks to his “invention,” as he told it, was living proof of the American dream. That makes for a great inspirational speech, but wouldn’t the truth—that he shrewdly told a lie that both Wall Street and Main Street wanted to believe, for their own self-flattering reasons—make for a better movie?
Instead, the filmmakers just carried on shooting the pitch that they’d sold. In this, the makers of Flamin’ Hot are far from alone. Michael Lewis, long considered our unofficial biographer laureate, received some of the harshest criticism of his career these past few weeks over the perceived sweetheart treatment he gave to Sam Bankman-Fried, the subject of Lewis’s latest book, Going Infinite. The public had known Lewis had been writing about Bankman-Fried for the past few years and that Lewis had even appeared chummily alongside SBF at a number of conferences before SBF’s crypto companies went bankrupt and he was thrown in jail (and then convicted of fraud this week).
If you believe the critics of his book, it seems Lewis’s greatest sin was, again, refusing to acknowledge the great story that had fallen into his lap—about SBF as a new kind of con man—in order to carry on telling the story that he’d pitched about SBF as an unlikely wunderkind.
With both Lewis and some of these movies, the stories tend to feel like extended advertisements on behalf of their subjects. The worst of them are unwilling to go beyond tried-and-true themes (hard work, faith, determination, etc.) and hold a fairly narrow conception of what constitutes “inspirational.”
These kinds of biopics seem to be classic examples of saying one thing and doing another. They sell a fraudulent idea of success while downplaying all the canny self-promotion, shrewd politicking, and cutthroat competitiveness that actually brought their subjects to a place of fame or success. They’re “inspirational” at the expense of being interesting, and worst of all, they don’t offer the kind of insights into the human condition they might have had they been produced at more of a remove from their subjects.
At a more basic level, it seems like Hollywood assumes that audiences want to see more movies about nice people behaving responsibly. At the risk of stating the obvious, movies about historical dead guys—Oppenheimer and Napoleon, say—aren’t bound by the same rules. They’re allowed to just exist without being referendums on the goodness of their subjects. We’ve known, at least since Citizen Kane, that subjects who lie, cheat, steal, and act ruthlessly, cravenly, and vainly are often more interesting, and more edifying.
Cinema just has a much greater capacity to encompass multitudes than the marketing behind it, which is why it’s so important to understand which one you’re doing. Maybe people like Richard Montañez and Diana Nyad are as much victims of advertising as they are beneficiaries, having had to squeeze themselves into prefab boxes to be regarded.
Maybe if we were all a little more willing to abandon the pitch and seek out the story, we’d be a little more empathetic toward our fellow humans in the process. For better or for worse, Montañez and Nyad did achieve something noteworthy—the successful lie or exaggeration itself—and understanding the compulsion behind it is fascinating in its own right. And in the end, isn’t understanding more about each other—the good, the bad, and everything in between—the whole point of telling stories?
Vince Mancini writes about entertainment, culture, food, and whatever is bugging him that day. You can find his writing at vincemancini.substack.com, and his podcasts at Patreon.com/Frotcast.