The protagonists of the series based on real events rebel

It has been known that cinema is not a very rigorous history teacher since in 1915 David W. Griffith devoted the founding

to glorifying the Ku Klux Klan.

So neither could his putative daughter be television.

But if more or less exaggerated dramatic licenses and even gross errors have always been the norm in productions that adapt episodes taken from the history books, the current rise of series based on increasingly recent real events has triggered the number of conflicts between those responsible for them and the people they portray, often dissatisfied with the image that is given of them on the screen and concerned about the effects that the fiction they have inspired may have on their personal and professional careers.

The liberties that screenwriters take when dramatizing historical events have always had consequences.

In 2008, after the premiere of

the historian Jeremy Stern warned in an article dedicated to the factual errors of the HBO biographical miniseries about the second president of the United States that some of them had been incorporated into the entry on Adams in the Wikipedia.

Today, the consequences impact the lives of the real protagonists of the stories that the platforms serve us by chapters.

The discomfort of the British royal house with the portrait made of some of its members in

and with the numerous factual errors, pointed out by historians and journalists, that Peter Morgan's libretto accumulates.

An understandable discomfort in an institution for which the care of its image is key.

The secrecy of the monarchy combined with the success of the series have meant that for many Britons its plot has become something very similar to an official version.

To the point that at the end of 2020 the then Minister of Culture, Oliver Dowden, raised in an interview in the

that Netflix should warn that, despite being based on real events, the series is fiction.

The platform ignored it, although it does introduce a message on that line in other titles, such as

or

Of course, fleetingly, with small print and at the end of the final credits.

Frame of the scene of the grand finale, from Queen's Gambit.Netflix

Netflix took more seriously the lawsuit that the octogenarian chess player Nona Gaprindashvili put on it last year for

based on a fictional book but in which a character claims that she is Russian and that she never played against men, when she is Georgian and by the time the series takes place, he had already faced sixty of them.

Gaprindashvili claimed five million dollars after, according to her lawyer, the platform refused to offer her an apology and to modify the episode in question.

Two weeks ago the parties reported an out-of-court agreement that closed the dispute and whose content was not made public.

Olivia de Havilland was less lucky.

In 2017, at the age of 101, she sued those responsible for

for how she was portrayed, alleging that the FX channel series gave her a bad image and violated her right to privacy, by showing her calling her own sister, Joan Fontaine, a “bitch” (whore).

The Superior Court of Los Angeles agreed with her in the first instance, but finally the decision was reversed and the lawsuit was dismissed by the court of appeals for the second district of California, which concluded that the First Amendment of the Constitution prevailed against the actress's claims. Constitution.

“In these expressive works, whether the person portrayed is a world-renowned movie star—a 'living legend'—or a person no one knows, she or he doesn't own the story.

Nor does it have the legal right to control, dictate, approve, disapprove, or veto the creator's portrayal of real people."

The First Amendment, which protects freedom of expression, is certainly a deterrent when it comes to resorting to the courts in the United States. Mike Tyson is very angry with

the biopic in eight chapters (available since last week on Disney +) that has dedicated Hulu, but there is no evidence that it has taken any legal steps.

In August, he reacted to the premiere with a tantrum on the networks.

On Twitter he wrote: “Hulu stole my story.

They are Goliath and I am David.

Heads will roll."

And on Instagram he described the platform as “the

of the slave trade” and added: “I do not support your story about my life.

It's not 1822. It's 2022. My life story has been stolen and I haven't been paid.

To Hulu execs I'm just a nigga they can sell at auction."

Nor to those responsible for the docuseries

They didn't like the dramatized version of the same story they told, that of Michael Peterson, the writer convicted of killing his wife who has always claimed that she died in an accident when she fell down the stairs at home.

The director of the documentary, the Oscar winner Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, gave all his material to Antonio Campos, creator of the HBO series starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette, which is why he is credited as co-executive producer of the same, but he has charged against the series because he understands that it questions his professionalism.

The production recounts the sentimental relationship between Peterson and the editor of the documentary, Sophie Brunet, which began after its premiere and the conviction of the writer —with whom she had already corresponded—, and which lasted 13 years.

Colin Firth and Toni Collette in an image from the HBO series 'The Staircase'.

The case of

reflects in a bloody way the dichotomy between documentaries and dramatized recreations of real events, two modalities in vogue and that often serve to tell the same story with even divergent results.

Brunet and De Lestrade's protests about the falsehoods that Campos' series contains and that undermine his professional prestige are linked to the arguments with which Kareem Abdul-Jabbar amended the page a few months ago to

the HBO series about the 1980s Lakers that the legendary center described as "deliberately dishonest" in an article on his blog.

In the text, Abdul-Jabbar specifies that he neither requires fictions based on real events that everything they tell be factual — "Sometimes, writers must take dramatic license to convey a deeper truth" — nor does it affect him personally. the image that can be given of him —”I don't get mad if someone wants to portray me basically as a Terminator T-800.

(…) I have fought leukemia, heart surgery, cancer, fire and racism;

a negative portrayal of me on a television show has no effect on me”—but warns that it can affect others.

That never happened, she says, and also that image of being "verbally abusive" with minors can persuade someone to collaborate with his foundation, dedicated to promoting educational programs for children from disadvantaged neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

own versions

In the absence of options in court, the alternative for the aggrieved may consist, if they have enough pull, in promoting a production themselves, often in the form of a documentary, that sticks to their version of the facts, something that is increasingly frequent, from

to

The premiere of

without going any further, coincided last spring with that of

the Apple Tv+ docuseries in which it is Magic himself who takes the lead when telling his story, and in which the thorniest aspects of his biography are dispatched with disarming lightness.

In addition, the same Hulu that Tyson rants about has already started broadcasting

, direct response in the form of a documentary and promoted by the Lakers themselves to the HBO series, with the testimony of Magic, Kareem and many other critical protagonists with it.

And Pamela Anderson, apparently dissatisfied with the account being made of her stolen sex tape episode on Pam & Tommy — also on Hulu — is preparing a documentary for Netflix in which she will tell her side of the story. her.

Quncy Isaiah (Magic Johnson), in a moment of the HBO Max series 'Victory Time'.

In Spain, if the details of someone's private life "had become public for different reasons, they could be incorporated into a series or book," explains lawyer Diana Garrido, from the Garrido y Doñaque law firm, whose areas of specialization include law to honor

Article 20 of the Constitution, which regulates freedom of expression, establishes within its limits the right "to honor, privacy, one's own image and the protection of youth and childhood."

Garrido points out that there are Supreme Court rulings that "justify the use of more creative data or data in a more dramatic way to liven up the story, without sticking exclusively to the facts, as long as they do not contain defamatory elements or clearly insulting components", but clarifies that, if licenses are taken, “the most prudent thing would be to add a

[message] warning that there are facts that have been dramatized, mixing reality and fiction”.

Isabel Pantoja could not avoid the premiere, a decade ago, of

a three-part

of the singer with which Telecinco obtained large audiences, but in 2018 she won the judicial pulse of Mediaset, which she had denounced for illegitimate interference with the right to privacy and one's own image, when a court in Alcobendas prohibited the commercialization and re-broadcasting of the series and sentenced the chain to compensate it with 10,000 euros.

Since that encounter, the artist has also tried to promote, so far without success, a dramatic film or a documentary that offers her own version of her biography.

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