5 Aaron Sorkin Movies That Lie About Real History

5 Being the Ricardos

In 1952, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Lucille Ball to determine if she was a member of the Communist Party. Mere paranoia didn’t spark this probe. Ball had previously signed an “affidavit of registration” going out her way to say she was a member of the party. 

Apparently, she just filled that out because her grandfather asked her to, and she didn’t really care about politics either way. The committee determined that she was no threat. But rumors went on circulating, threatening to turn people against I Love Lucy, and Desi Arnaz came out before the audience one night to allay their concerns. 

“Lucy has never been a communist,” he said. “Not now and never will be. I was kicked out of Cuba because of communism. We despise everything about it. On Saturday, the complete transcript of Lucy’s testimony will be released to the papers, and you can read it for yourself. Now I want you to meet my favorite wife, my favorite redhead. In fact, that’s the only thing red about her, and even that’s not legitimate.” 

That last part referred to how her red hair came out of a bottle, and it was a hell of a line. If you were to make a movie about these events, surely you’d include it. 

Being the Ricardos from 2021 covers these events, and when they have Desi Arnaz address the audience, they don’t have him say those lines. Instead, they have him get the FBI on the phone, to declare that Lucy has been cleared of all suspicion. Then the man on the other end identifies himself: It’s J. Edgar Hoover. The audience is thrilled and applauds. 

This didn’t happen in real life, so we have to assume Sorkin thought it improved on the real speech. It’s baffling why. The movie is about writers working on a comedy, so victory coming from a joke is the ideal way to wrap the story up. Compared to that, the audience siding with the Ricardos because they’re revealed to be personal friends with the head of the FBI is gross. 

That’s one way the script declares itself to be superior to anything Arnaz wrote. The other is that, repeatedly, the characters note that their own conversations are funnier than the dialogue they’re writing. Their conversations, in this case, are also scripted dialogue, scripted not by the characters writing I Love Lucy but by Aaron Sorkin. 

4 Steve Jobs

This 2015 biopic for Steve Jobs makes up a bunch of stuff, from inventing new problems for each of the three launch events that form the movie to declaring Jobs to be a billionaire (he’d only become a billionaire later, and through Pixar not Apple). But we’re here today to talk about the saccharine bows that tie up the ends of these movies, and with this one, it comes in the form of this image:

At the start of the movie, Jobs is denying that he’s the father of his five-year-old daughter Lisa. She comes in one day, he puts her in front of a Macintosh and she creates the above image. “It’s an abstract,” she says. Fourteen years later, relations are still somewhat rocky between them, with Jobs furious to learn that someone else at Apple paid for her college tuition, knowing he would not. But then, in the very last scene of the movie, he hands Lisa an old printout. It’s that abstract drawing she made, which he kept all those years, revealing she’s always had a place in his heart after all.

Now, did Steve Jobs really treasure a drawing Lisa made when she was a little girl, on a Mac? No. But did this bit of cinematic storytelling successfully portray the fondness Jobs held for his daughter all those years? Also no.

When Lisa was five, Jobs didn’t harbor some secret affection for her. But he did relent and let her into his life later, in a way different from what the movie gives us. You wouldn’t guess from the movie that Lisa had been living with Steve Jobs for four years before she went to college. She was living with him, his wife and his three other children, who also go unmentioned in the movie, and who seem to undermine the idea that he was spending all those years wishing he was a real father. 

This idea, that a tech billionaire is deeply lonely, is a compelling one, even when it’s not true. Steve Jobs isn’t the only movie to push it. 

3 The Social Network

The Social Network largely avoids the temptation to wrap everything up neatly and sentimentally. The framing device here is a legal deposition, and instead of this being the big confrontation, it ends with Mark Zuckerbrg’s lawyer saying, “You’ll settle. We’ll figure out the exact of the settlement off-screen, whatever.” Also, she says something to the tune of, “Everything previously portrayed in this movie is probably untrue,” is.

But then, the movie gives us one last final shot. After asking his lawyer out to dinner and getting turned down, Zuckerberg adds a friend on Facebook and repeatedly refreshes to see if she accepted the request. It’s Erica, the girl who broke up with him in 2003 and sent him on the path to creating Facebook.

Here, too, we can ask: Did Zuckerberg do this exact thing after his deposition? No — and if he did add that one friend that day, we would have no way of knowing that. But did this bit of cinematic storytelling successfully portray the real Zuckerberg’s regrets as a lonely rich dude who never formed a true relationship with a woman? Also no. 

The fictional Erica is inspired by an angry blog entry from Zuckerberg in 2003, where he wrote, “Jessica Alona is a bitch.” Just months later, he met fellow Harvard student Priscilla Chan. He dropped out but went on dating her. At the time of the deposition scene, the two of them had been dating for years. They’ve now been together for over 20 years and are married with three children.

It might sound very neat to say, “This is all the story of a sexually frustrated man,” but that’s not true. Zuckerberg also didn’t, as the movie depicts, create a predecessor to Facebook named Facemash purely to rate women because he was a misogynist. Facemash let student play “hot or not” with pics of female students and also with pics of male students. More male students, actually, simply because Harvard’s undergrad class was majority-male at the time.

You might say all this means The Social Network inaccurately portrayed Zuckerberg as a loser. Alternatively, you might say it means they inaccurately gave him a relatable motive. The script thinks Zuckerberg pining after Erica makes him sympathetic, but it turns out loneliness didn’t drive him. No, he had some other untold push behind his megalomania, and we won’t get to hear it till the next Zuckerberg biopic in 2032. 

2 Molly’s Game

In 2013, police arrested Los Angeles woman Molly Bloom in connection with running illegal poker games that many celebrities attended. A lot of our knowledge about her story comes from her memoir, and if the memoir was accurate, 2017’s Molly’s Game is as well because it sticks closely to the book. 

But for the final scene in the movie (as well as the first scene), the movie slips away from the world of poker and shows Molly suffering a major accident skiing. She had been a professional skier before, and the accident disrupted this career, which is how she ended up in poker. At the end of the movie, this reminder that she rose back up from a fall parallels how she rose up after being arrested.

But no accident like that ever happened. Bloom left skiing not because she fell but because she peaked and decided to go out on top. She got a medal in the Olympics and decided, “Well, that was pretty good. Can’t ask for more than that. Let’s move on to something else now.” 

We guess if the movie summarized her story as, “She succeeded, then she did some crimes, and she got off lightly for those,” that isn’t quite one of those “arcs” that screenwriters keep talking about. 

1 The Trial of the Chicago 7

In 1968, the U.S. charged eight men with conspiracy to riot at the Democratic National Convention. All of them ultimately were acquitted or won on appeal. The Trial of the Chicago 7 tells this story, and all the good parts of the movie do draw from real life. For example, the scene where the judge orders a Black Panther defendant muzzled in the court really did happen. Though, in real life, Bobby Seale managed to speak right through the gag, which we suppose could have made for an even more dramatic scene. 

The only part of the movie that will have you rolling your eyes comes in the very last shot. The judge gives one defendant the chance to plead for leniency, and instead, the guy starts reciting the names of soldiers killed in Vietnam. The entire courtroom erupts in cheers. 

Of course, we consider this a moment worthy of cheers, because soldiers dying is bad. But people were hardly universally on the side of Vietnam War protesters in 1968. The opposition to these protesters was kind of the entire point of this trial.

In real life, one of the defendants did recite the names of people who died in Vietnam during the trial. It was toward the start of the trial rather than at the end, so it wasn’t a triumphant climax. And the court didn’t erupt into applause. Partly, this may have been because the guy recited the names of dead Vietnamese soldiers along with those of dead Americans. 

We should have known this scene was fake. “And then everyone clapped”? Dammit, that’s the most obvious giveaway for a fake story, and Sorkin unleashed it on us again. 

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