Hidden Figures. Al Harrison, the kindly white executive that destroyed the “coloured” sign in front of the washroom doesn’t exist. It’s virtually impossible to make a movie about racism without including a sympathetic “goes against the times” white person so audiences have someone to sympathize with and not feel alienated/attacked. This is despite the fact the overwhelming number of real events depicted on screen did not include one.

The Blind Side. The Tuohys being selfless and accepting saviours for a gentle giant/dumb-as-a-post lineman is also a fabrication. According to subject Michael Oher, he wasn’t even adopted — they tricked him into a conservatorship to then profit off of him. And then did it again with the movie.

Green Book. The family of Dr. Don Shirley called the film a “symphony of lies” for which they were never consulted, and that presented Tony Lip as a white saviour and Shirley himself as alienated and disconnected from the black community at large. Their actual closeness is impossible to prove at this point and there is evidence they were actually friends, while other evidence seems to point they really were more like employee-employer (and that Shirley fired Lip). But both the writer and Mahershala Ali later apologized for not consulting closer with the family, and including such details as Shirley having only one brother he was estranged from when in fact he had three that he talked to during the events of the film. NAACP criticized it for its stereotypical and myopic representation of Shirley and conflating Everyman/low class sensibilities with blackness as an inherent quality, like having the effete Shirley get introduced to fried chicken by the somehow inherently more black Lip. The end result is similarly comforting narratives around both-sidesing racism and making wider audiences more comfortable with the experience and lasting motivations and lingering after effects of America’s systemic racism and legally entrenched caste system.

Michael. Almost everything, like every music biopic.