Any self-respecting cinemagoer will know the phrase by heart: “The characters and events portrayed in this film are fictitious.” It’s cinema’s ritual boilerplate disclaimer. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental and unintentional.”
Lately, however, film-makers have been treating the fine print like a challenge. A clutch of recent releases has taken up a curious middle ground: not quite biography, not quite fiction, but something more slippery in between. Marty Supreme, for instance, spins 1950s table tennis wildcard Marty Reisman into Marty Mauser, borrowing Reisman’s forename and forehand while rewriting the rest. Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? mines the early career of standup comic John Bishop, only to rebrand him as New Yorker Alex Novak. And later this year The Prince, directed by Cameron Van Hoy and written by David Mamet, will refract aspects of Hunter Biden’s life through proxy Parker Scott.
