Like much of the film, his other son was nothing but an invention. Gaines only had one son, who did serve in Vietnam but returned home alive and well. One of his two sons leaves to join the Civil Rights movement while the other is killed in Vietnam. Later, Cecil’s wife (Oprah Winfrey in the film) is shown struggling with alcoholism and guilt over an affair. The real life Gaines never complained about any hardship during his youth in Virginia as a plantation houseboy, while the film shows his mother becoming catatonic after being raped by her employer and Georgia plantation owner, shortly before his father is murdered, leaving the fictional Gaines orphaned. The weepy Oscar-baiting film is packed wall to wall with big-names and melodrama, but how much of the melodrama is grounded in reality? Not much.
Like Forrest Gump, Lee Daniels’ The Butler takes inventory of historical events through the eyes of a single man - the real-life Cecil Gaines, portrayed by Forrest Whitaker, who served as a White House butler for 34 years beneath eight presidents. We’ve listed six of the most egregious offenders below.
In order to tell a more compelling story, screenwriters and directors embellish and outright fabricate major events while under the guise of the questionable “based on a true story” label. Every year sees a fresh crop of Hollywood films tentatively based on true stories, most of them vying for the attention of the Academy Awards, but few of us realize how many liberties some of these films take.
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