Episodes

On October 11th, 1994, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced their Nobel prize winners. Three brilliant scientists jointly won the coveted award. They were Professor John C. Harsanyi from the University of California, Berkley, Dr. John F. Nash from Princeton University and Professor Dr. Reinhard Selten, from the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany. Less than a month later, on November 13th, 1994, a writer for The New York Times wrote a great article called The Lost Years of a Nobel La...

With the Christmas season upon us, I wanted to cover a film that'd help represent the Christmas spirit. In 2005, French filmmaker Christian Carion released his second full-length feature film. Joyeux Noël, which translated to English means Merry Christmas, was released in France on November 9th, 2005, and only ended up making about $3.5 million at the box office. That's significantly less than the $22 million it cost to make. The film wasn't released in the United States until June of 2006, wh...

Tom McCarthy started his acting career with a short movie in 1989 called Roast Suckling. Although that's probably not something most have seen, he's one of those actors that you'd recognize when you see him. Probably because he's been in a lot of movies and TV shows you've seen. He played a background character in Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts' 1997 thriller Conspiracy Theory. In 2000, Tom has a recurring role on Boston Public as the character Kevin Riley. After more background character roles ...

There are few movies that stand near the top of the all-time list for income. One of those movies is The Sound of Music. With a budget of about $8 million when it was produced in the 1960s, it was one of the bigger budget films when it was made. That $8 million is about $62 million in today's United States dollars. When it was released in 1965, it raked in over 35 times that amount, about $286 million on its way to an impressive five Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture in 1966...

Between 2004 and 2016, Paul Greengrass directed a total of six movies. Four of those have Matt Damon in them. Three of them are about the fictitious Jason Bourne character. Two of them are based on a true story. Today, we're going to be looking at one of those movies. In an effort to make 2013's Captain Phillips as authentic as possible, Paul Greengrass kept two groups of actors separate. One group had Tom Hanks playing the man the movie is named after, Captain Rich Phillips. In the other grou...

With the Thanksgiving season upon us, I thought it'd be a great opportunity to travel back in time to the days of Colonial America. Then I realized there's not really a lot of movies about the actual Thanksgiving story. So I decided to go with something that, although not about the Thanksgiving story itself, could transport us back to those days. And it's also a great opportunity to do something we haven't tackled yet on the podcast, a Disney animation. In the mid-1990s, the animation team at D...

Nechama Tec was born in Lublin, Poland in 1931. When she was eight years old, her life would forever change as Nazis invaded her hometown. As a Polish Jew, she survived the Holocaust thanks to Polish Catholics who hid her from the Nazis. Over forty years later, in the 1980s, Nechama started doing research on the events that she had lived through. Her book, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland was published in 1986. It was while Nechama was researchin...

The latest in the line of collaborations between actor Leonardo DiCaprio and director Martin Scorsese is 2013's The Wolf of Wall Street. It received positive reviews, and also held the honor of topping the most-pirated films list of 2014. That's according to copyright tracking firm Excipio, which puts out a list of the most pirated films each year. Their report indicated The Wolf of Wall Street was the most-pirated in 2014 with over 30 million illegal downloads. But that didn't stop The Wolf of...

Happy Halloween! I wanted to do something special this week. I thought it'd be fun to cover the true story behind something scary. But after starting to look for some movies to fit the bill, I quickly realized most of the scary movies that claim to be based on a true story also require a belief in something extraordinary—something supernatural. Some stories are simply strange, and we don't know the truth. The only thing we do know is what those who lived through the events claim. With that in m...

Few can debate the huge impact Steve Jobs had on the world. So it's no wonder that after Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, there was in influx of news and media surrounding the life of the outspoken Apple co-founder and CEO. If you listened to episode on The Social Network, you'll already know how Aaron Sorkin dropped the true story for a good story. So how did he do for his movie about Apple's famous CEO and co-founder? Let's find out as we compare Hollywood with history for 2015's Steve Jobs. ...

You've probably heard of the song Amazing Grace. It's one of those Christian hymns that just about everyone has heard, or at least heard of, at some point. It was first published in 1779 by John Newton. While you may think the named after John's song is about John's life, it's not. Instead it's about a man who was perhaps the first to be influenced by John's moving life story and the song. It's about a man who was perhaps the single most influential man in the abolishment of slavery in Britain....

In a retelling of one of the greatest moments in U.S. Coast Guard's history, The Finest Hours is a feel-good movie of true heroism. When sitting down to write the film, screenwriters Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson had the chance to do something not everyone does: interview the actual people who lived the story. Since they had the chance to talk to the survivors, does that mean the story was historically accurate? Let's find out as we learn about the true story of The Finest Hours. Did you enjoy ...

Elizabeth Short's murder was considered to be the crime of the century. And it's a mystery that many are still fascinated by, decades later. So when Brian De Palma directed a 2006 movie of the same name, many moviegoers wanted to see a true crime story of The Black Dahlia. They were sorely disappointed. Let's dive into the real story of The Black Dahlia and find out just how accurate the movie was. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/ad3b4776-6d5d-4602-9a24-d...

The movie Deepwater Horizon comes out on this Friday. So again we're going to take some time to look ahead at a movie. Before you go see the movie in theaters, let's take a few minutes to learn what happened before, during, and after the disaster so you'll know just how accurate Hollywood was during its retelling. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/ca08a419-7062-466f-8cc1-0e26faae9865 Find the transcript and full show notes: https://links.boatspodcast.com/19 ...

Despite having an all-star cast and being based on a true story, most of the characters in the film didn't actually exist. Instead, Hollywood opted to merge together multiple people into a single character to help push the story forward while not having to deal with an ensemble cast in the hundreds. As I'm sure you can guess, this also forced them to change the story around from the way things really happened. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/711a0d24-bbfb...

Even though Argo starts off with text that says it's based on a true story, the movie was actually based primarily on two sources: a book by Tony Mendez, the CIA agent Ben Affleck plays, and a 2007 article on Wired by Joshuah Bearman. So how much of Argo is true? And how much of it was fictionalized for the film? Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/f6ae86e0-8a64-45d0-a2b3-c4931c3512cc Find the transcript and full show notes: https://links.boatspodcast.com/17 ...

Pawn Sacrifice tells the story of one of the greatest chess players of all time—Bobby Fischer. How do you make the game of chess into an interesting story? With Bobby Fischer's life, you don't need to stretch it too far. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/c9febc84-e115-42ec-aecb-c9313316ef43 Find the transcript and full show notes: https://links.boatspodcast.com/16 Support our sponsors: https://links.boatspodcast.com/advertisers Remove the ads by supporting t...

Ron Howard and Tom Hanks teamed up for their second of now four movies the duo have worked on together in 1995 with Apollo 13. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/79646d4b-573a-4e00-8213-783f2e402dd7 Find the transcript and full show notes: https://links.boatspodcast.com/15 Support our sponsors: https://links.boatspodcast.com/advertisers Remove the ads by supporting the show: https://links.boatspodcast.com/support Leave a voicemail: https://links.boatspodcast....

Lili Isle Elvenes, better known as Lili Elbe, was one of the first known recipients of a gender reassignment surgery. In 2015, her life was brought to the forefront of many people's minds when Alicia Vikander won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the film. Despite the film's success at the Academy Awards, there was a fair share of inaccuracies in the story on the big screen. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/b49c2cef-4d2e-45ca-8239-c91257753244 Find th...

The Social Network tells the story behind one of the world's most popular websites, Facebook. It's got everything that makes for a great story--there's greed, corruption, lawsuits and Justin Timberlake. But how true is the depiction of the site's early days? Let's find out. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/4e34d776-989a-493f-85e3-8123225ddec3 Find the transcript and full show notes: https://links.boatspodcast.com/13 Support our sponsors: https://links.boats...

Anthropoid hits theaters on Friday. It's the story of how the Czechoslovakian government, forced into exile after the Germans occupied their homeland in 1938, tried to fight back and take down Reinhard Heydrich at the height of World War II. Learn the true story before you see the movie. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/352afdb3-6d6f-4e8c-9cd8-5d96d6406b22 Find the transcript and full show notes: https://links.boatspodcast.com/12 Support our sponsors: https...

Will Smith would say Ali was the film he was most proud of as an actor. And it tells a very important story of a true legend: Muhammad Ali. Although it wasn't a box office success by the numbers, Will Smith and Jon Voight would go on to be nominated for their own Academy Awards for the film for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/29246d58-9f5c-440b-ba87-27e1c2aec77a Find the transcript and full show notes: h...

Pain & Gain is the first comedy we've covered here on the show. It was also the first comedy for Michael Bay since another Miami-based story, Bad Boys II in 2003. Another first for Pain & Gain is that, unlike the Transformer series, it is Michael Bay's first movie with a shred of truth. But the real story is anything but a comedy. Did you enjoy this episode? Leave a comment: https://galas.fm/episode/cbc78b1c-aebd-4c30-8c40-097fdcd7081f Find the transcript and full show notes: https://links.boa...

In 2007, director David Fincher helmed the movie simply entitled, Zodiac, which tells the thrilling story of a rash of killings in the 1960s and 70s. Despite the film's failure at the box office, the subject is one that seems to pique the public's interest whenever it's mentioned. In fact, it was just a few months ago during this year's presidential race in the United States when an internet meme led to a conspiracy that Republican Senator Ted Cruz was compared to an infamous serial killer kno...