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The Most Compelling Real Life Stories Brought To Film

The Oscars and the hubbub of awards season now settling into memory and looking back on 2012, it was a very good year for glorious portraits of actual individuals in action. As we celebrate the success of Best Picture Argo (such an understatement!) and fellow nominees Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty, it seems a perfect time to take a look back at some of the other most compelling real life stories brought to film.

Sam Waterston and Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields

All the President’s Men

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Director: Alan J. Pakula

Politics is a dirty business (news flash). So when some scurrilous staffers burglarized and bugged the opposition’s war room during the 1972 presidential campaign, it seemed like unremarkable, if interesting, news to be covered for two Washington Post reporters.

Except that it wasn’t. It was the chilling dawning upon Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that something much more sinister slithered and lurked in dark parking garages and the mute mouths of the intimidated. Something more was whispered by an anonymous informant code name Deep Throat. Something found itself dragged into the light as the Watergate Scandal, and culminated in the unprecedented resignation of a United States president.

Here our compelling real life stories are moving from the natural and the systemic/military to the personal, where peril becomes based not on where you are, but on who you are. Specifically. As in, piss these people off and you could find yourself off.

But press on nonetheless, as did Woodward and Bernstein, and you change forever the course of history for hundreds, for thousands, even for millions. Let’s meet the Davids and their Goliaths…

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