334: This Week: Dahmer, First Man, At Eternity’s Gate

July 22nd, 1991. Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Our first story this week comes from a Netflix series with a simple and yet so confusing name. Some people call it Monster. Others call it Dahmer. Officially, it’s titled, “DAHMER – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”

We’re starting today at the beginning of the first episode, just past the opening scene, about five minutes in.

We’re on a dimly lit street, the night obscured by the glow of distant streetlights, casting a somber mood over the scene. In the foreground, taped to one of the light poles is a weathered and tattered missing person flyer.

The flyer features a faded, grainy photo of a young man named Oliver Lacy. Above his photo, bold letters urgently ask, “MISSING PERSON – Have you seen me?” The wear and tear on the flyer suggest it has been there for some time, battling the elements and a desperate search.

As we hit play on the show, the camera pans up slightly to reveal another “Missing” paper on the same pole. There’s no cut as the camera shifts focus to behind the telephone pole and we can see a man walking along the sidewalk. In red neon is a sign that says, “Club 219.”

The man, who we can see is a white man with blond hair and wearing glasses, slowly walks inside.

Once inside the club, we can hear the sound of music. The man walks to the bar and asks a couple other guys already there if he can buy them a drink. The two Black guys at the bar mock the man in glasses when he orders two PBRs for them. PBRs? Must be a real player, one of the guys laughs.

The man in glasses doesn’t reply, but he slowly takes a drink from his glass. We can see a cigarette is in his hand.

One of the guys speaks to the man in glasses again. “You bought me a drink before, you know that right?”

The man seems to be in a bit of a daze as he replies, “Have I?”

One of the two Black guys at the bar points out that there aren’t a lot of white queens in there with blond hair. The white guy in glasses doesn’t say anything, just takes another drink.

Then, a third Black guy walks to the bar from where he was in the restroom. He says that the guy in glasses bought him a drink last week, too. But he didn’t even make a move, did he? He sits down at the bar as he says this, taking a drink from the pint glass. The man in glasses slurs his words as he orders one more for the new arrival at the bar.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the TV series Dahmer

That’s a pretty good depiction of what really happened at Club 219 in Milwaukee, on July 22^nd, 1991. The obvious exception, here, is that we don’t know the exact things that were said in the conversation between Dahmer and the other man.

We know this because the third man that we see sitting down at the bar after Dahmer had already ordered two beers was named Tracy Edwards. But just getting beers at a bar isn’t enough to shock the world. What we see happen in the series next back at Dahmer’s apartment is. While there, we see Dahmer try to kill him, but Edwards manages to get away.

All that is accurate.

It’s also true that Edwards flagged down some cops who took him back to Dahmer’s apartment to try and get the key for the handcuffs Edwards had on his wrist. While looking for the key, the cops found photographs of dismembered bodies. Looking closer at the photos, they recognized the background in the photos as the apartment they were standing in.

And so, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and taken to the police station while they searched his apartment—it was a gruesome scene filled with body parts, including evidence of Dahmer eating them leading to his nickname “The Milwaukee Cannibal.”

And just like we see happen in the series, Detective Patrick Kennedy led the interrogation to discover the true story of Dahmer’s crimes. They found more body parts in Dahmer’s apartment, so Dahmer knew he was caught. He confessed right away, and it was up to Kennedy to unravel the evil.

If you want to see the event that happened this week in history, we started our segment at about five minutes into the first episode of the Netflix series Dahmer.

Oh, and the brief piece of paper for a missing person named Oliver Lacy on the telephone pole that we mentioned is also accurate. Well, I don’t know if the paper looked exactly like the one we see in the series, but Oliver Lacy really was one of Dahmer’s victims.

And Club 219 that we see in the first episode really was a gay bar in Milwaukee that Dahmer frequented and lure people back to his apartment where he’d kill them.

That first episode goes on to recount more things that happened this week in history that led up to Jeffrey Dahmer’s confession, but do you remember how I mentioned it was Detective Patrick Kennedy who led the interrogation? Well, he was the one to talk to Dahmer as he explained his actions…but, unfortunately, Detective Kennedy is no longer with us.

So, I had a chat with Robyn Maharaj, who the co-author of Detective Kennedy’s memoir Grilling Dahmer: The Interrogation of the Milwaukee Cannibal. You can hear that at https://www.basedonatruestorypodcast.com/217

Apollo 11 Minisode Series Update

Did you listen to Based on a True Story last week?

Our next event will make a lot more sense if you listened, but I didn’t mean to call you out if you didn’t listen haha! Let’s just do a quick catchup in case you didn’t hear it, so you know what’s going on today. Basically, last week was the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission starting. Well, this week is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission’s completion.

The Apollo 11 launch was historical background for the big climax at the end of the movie Men in Black 3, while we see the mission come to an end in the movie First Man—which technically shows the launch, too, but it was a much bigger part of Men in Black 3, and since I knew we were talking about First Man anyway that’s why I brought the MIB into this series haha!

So, last week we heard about Men in Black 3’s version of the Apollo 11 launch at the exact same time as it launched in history: July 16^th, 1969, at 9:32 AM Eastern (EDT), and it ran for 195 hours, 18 minutes, and 35 seconds, until on July 24^th, 1969, at 12:50 PM Eastern Time, 9:50 AM Pacific.

And I’m guessing you can figure out where I’m going with this.

That’s right, we’ll learn about the end of Apollo 11’s mission from the movie First Man at the end of Apollo 11’s actual mission at 12:50 PM Eastern Time, 9:50 AM Pacific. Except, obviously, in 2024 instead of 1969, so not the actual mission, but as close as we can get now!

So, look for that coming out Wednesday.

But, we’re not done with Apollo 11 today, because I thought it’d be fun to check in on what the Apollo astronauts are doing right now. Of course, I don’t know when you’re listening to this, so I’ll have to go off my side’s day and time: July 22^nd, at 6:00 AM Eastern, 3:00 AM Pacific. So, that is about 140 hours, 28 minutes from GET, or Ground Elapsed Time, since Apollo 11’s launch which means right now back in 1969, Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong are probably sleeping right now.

After doing a controlled burn for about three minutes this morning from 135:23:42.28 to 135:26:13.69 GET—in layman’s time zones, that’s 12:55 AM until 12:58 AM EDT early this morning, after which they were about to enter a period of radio silence as they rested in anticipation of the next phase of the mission: Returning to Earth.

While they’re sleeping, let’s do what I’m sure a lot of people were doing on this day in 1969, and recapping the amazing success of the mission’s key event as it was shown in the 2018 movie First Man.

Because, the whole point of Apollo 11 was to put a man on the moon…and, that’s exactly what they did a couple days ago on July 20^th. But, we learned about the launch last week, so we didn’t get to cover the landing itself. So, let’s catch up a bit with Apollo 11’s mission as it was shown in the movies.

We’ll start at about an hour and 50 minutes into First Man, and you’ll know you found the right spot when you see the text on screen telling us it’s “Mission Day Four” with the numbers 76:43:37. The numbers are, of course, the mission clock, or Ground Elapsed Time, that I talked about earlier.

So, 76 hours, 43 minutes, and 37 seconds since launch or, in other words, July 19^th, 1969, at 2:15:37 PM EDT.

For a bit of historical context, the movie doesn’t show us here…speaking of, did you find the spot in the movie with “Mission Day Four”? Let’s and hit play on the movie as I continue. There we go, it’s playing as the camera focuses on a circular window in the center of the frame. It looks like a ship’s porthole, but knowing the movie and topic, this must be a window on the Apollo 11 spacecraft.

Back to some extra context, so this scene starts at almost 77 hours on the mission clock, and just before 76 hours on the mission clock, the lunar orbit insertion cutoff had just taken place after almost six minutes of engine burn in preparation for their Moon landing.

At 77:13:00, the first time humans ever saw an unusual light while in space. Officially logged as a “lunar transient event”, or LTE, it happened near a region of the moon known as the Aristarchus region and, of course, has been talked about by Ufologists and conspiracy theorists for the decades since.

Okay, with that context, the movie is still playing so let’s go back to that. I’m at the point where Corey Stoll’s version of Buzz Aldrin comes up to Ryan Gosling’s Neil Armstrong while he’s holding the papers. When the camera angle shifts, we can see the papers look almost like a folded map of the moon’s surface. Maybe Neil is trying to figure out where the Aristarchus region is for that weird light sighting that just happened.

In the movie’s timeline, though, he’s probably focusing on the upcoming landing—which, okay, maybe he was doing that in the true story at this time, too. Haha!

Now, all three astronauts are looking out the windows as the scene fades to black for a brief moment before fading back up. Other than Aldrin and Armstrong, the third astronaut is Michael Collins. He’s played by Lukas Haas in the movie. Together with the three astronauts, we’re looking out one of the windows to see the gray of the moon on the other side.

The movie dramatizes a lot of the lead into the moon simply because we don’t have actual footage of most of that. I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to be one of the three astronauts looking out the window, but as we’re watching them look out the window in the movie it had to be breathtaking.

Except you can’t just enjoy the view, because there’s a lot of work to do.

In the movie, we can see the astronauts moving from the windows to another area. Well, not all the astronauts, it looks like just two of them: Armstrong and Aldrin. We can hear radio communications that refer to where they are now as the LM, or Lunar Module.

Lukas Haas’ version of Michael Collins stays behind in the Command Module.

Ryan Gosling’s version of Neil Armstrong looks at the map again. It’s pinned up against the LM ‘s wall. The radio beeps on, letting him know continuous burn time is limited to 910 seconds. Then, confirmation that Apollo 11 is “go” for undocking. Armstrong looks so determined as he’s looking out the window at the moon beyond.

It’s time.

What follows next in the movie is a montage of shots showing what it must’ve looked like for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to navigate to the moon in the LM.

And the movie’s sequence is well done. It’s also the kind of sequence in a movie that’s impossible to compare to the true story because we just don’t know all those little details. Purely from a visual perspective, though, I think the filmmakers did a great job bringing all of us as close as is humanly possible to bringing what it must’ve looked like to our TV screens.

After a few tense moments in the movie that leaves us wondering each time an alarm goes off if it’s something that’ll be a disaster, finally, the camera cuts to a scene from the moon. The rocky landscape is all gray, making the camera view of the moon a monotone image against the inky black of a starless space beyond.

With triumphant music playing, the movie cuts between the astronauts in the LM as it shakes and rattles on the descent and a view from the calm, surface of the moon.

It’s another chance for us to remember this is a movie—because this is the first time in human history that humans have landed on the moon. Did they have a camera person on the surface of the moon to capture it? Of course not!

But, it looks cool!

The big tension in this part of the movie, apart from just the difficulty of landing the LM on the moon, is the burn time. Remember earlier the movie mentioned a continuous burn time of 910 seconds? Well, during the landing, the movie keeps shifting back to the fuel gauge, which conveniently is a digital display in percentages. So, the two-digit fuel indicator that started at the max of 99% full is now at only 08%. 05%. 04%.

94 seconds to landing, and 104 seconds to a mandatory abort without enough fuel to get home.

16 seconds to landing. Inside, it’s still shaky and rough. Armstrong is still focused, looking out the window as he navigates the craft.

03% fuel. 02% fuel.

Outside the window, we can see a large crater, deep enough to not see the bottom because of the shadows inside. A camera angle from outside and if you look closely, it looks like a little dust getting kicked up. They have to be close!

Then, in the same angle, we can see the LM’s shadow start to show up on the moon. It gets bigger.

Then…stops.

They landed on the moon!

It’s a dark, desolate place.

“We copy, you’re down, Eagle,” a voice chirps over the radio.

Aldrin has a huge grin on his face when he looks at Armstrong, who replies, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

From the radio, “Roger, Tranquility. We copy on the ground.”

Aldrin congratulates Armstrong on a smooth touchdown, then the two astronauts prepare for the next step—or should I say, the first step? Haha!

A few seconds movie-time later, and both astronauts have their outdoor space suits on. They pry open the door to reveal: Silence. The movie has absolutely no sound as it shows us the vacuum of space outside the lunar module door. As commander, Neil Armstrong steps out of the door first.

As he carefully walks down the ladder, the movie shifts between its own recreation of the event and the very grainy, but very real footage from 1969. You’ve probably seen that, but I’ll include a link in the show notes in case you haven’t.

For a moment, the movie continues with the silence. The only noise is the sound of Armstrong breathing in the suit, making him sound like Darth Vader. The movie shows memories of Neil back on Earth with a little girl.

Then, almost as quickly as Neil Armstrong became the only human to walk on the surface of the moon, he became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon, because we see Buzz Aldrin in his suit with Armstrong. It looks like they’re going around gathering moon rocks and things.

We don’t get a lot of that, though, because the movie focuses more on Neil Armstrong. Makes sense, the movie is focused on his life. And here, in a silence and achromatic scene on the moon, Neil has memories of home.

Scenes of Ryan Gosling’s version of Neil Armstrong with who we can assume is his family. A woman; his wife. The little girl from a moment ago, presumably his daughter. She looks maybe 2 or 3 in the movie, if I had to guess. He’s carrying her along a ridge by the river.

She’s sleeping soundly on his shoulder; it’s just the scene of a loving father spending time with his daughter, and here along a ridge by one of the moon’s craters that is what’s on Neil Armstrong’s mind. Daddy’s little girl.

Aldrin isn’t anywhere to be seen in the movie. It’s just Neil, alone with his memories. The movie shifts to a closeup of Neil’s face and even though it’s covered by his space suit’s helmet, the sun visor is up so we can see there are tears in his eyes.

We can see something in his left hand. It’s small compared to the bulky gloves of his suit. Now, as Neil Armstrong turns his hand, the shadows adjust so we can see what it is: A small bracelet. It looks just like the kind of bracelet a two or three-year-old little girl might make for her dad.

And there, in the silence of space, with thoughts of his daughter, Ryan Gosling’s version of Neil Armstrong slowly drops the bracelet, which disappears into the darkness of the huge crater in front of him. After another moment just looking down in silence, we can see even more tears in his eyes briefly before he puts down the sun visor to shield his face from view.

Then, camera cuts to a side view as Armstrong turns around and walks off frame.

The next angle in the movie is the same we saw from just outside the LM as it landed. Now, it’s blasting off from surface of the moon.

It’s time to go home.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie First Man

Let’s kick off our fact-checking of the movie by looking at something the movie doesn’t really talk about, but it’s something that came to mind as I was watching the sequence I just described, so maybe you thought of it, too.

If you saw the movie Apollo 13, which we covered way back on episode #15 of Based on a True Story, you’ll remember they leave the Command Module, or CM, to go to the Lunar Module, or LM, which they then take to the surface of the moon. Similar concept here on Apollo 11 although it never hurts to remember the events from 1995’s movie Apollo 13 actually happened after the events in today’s movie from 2018 about Apollo 11. So, it’s a newer movie about an older event, which explains why the astronauts in the movie never mention the disaster that happened on the real Apollo 13.

Okay, with that said, probably the biggest inaccuracy from this event in the movie really boils down to something movies change a lot: The timeline.

So, we just talked about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin going into the LM for their final descent to the moon, leaving the Command Module pilot Michael Collins behind in the, well, Command Module.

In the movie, that happens at an hour, 50 minutes, and 49 seconds.

In the true story, that was at 095:20:00 GET, or 8:52 AM on July 20^th.

So, think of that as a baseline—our own little Range Zero, so to speak, haha!

Back in the movie, it takes a minute and a half for them to get into the LM, undock it, and begin their descent.

In the true story, that took four hours and 52 minutes.

But even though the movie is compressing the timeline, the filmmakers still seemed to go to the effort of being as accurate as possible…to give an example of that, remember when the movie cuts to a camera angle outside the LM as it gets closer to the surface, and we can start seeing the dust kicking up?

In the movie, that happens six minutes and 50 seconds later, and even though dust might sound insignificant, I’m pointing it out because in the true story, NASA seemed to think it was significant enough to log: “1^st evidence of surface dust disturbed by descent engine” which really happened 2 hours, 32 minutes, and 15 seconds later.

But, I’m nitpicking.

Overall, the movie segment we talked about is 18 minutes of screen time that is showing what took 29 hours, 42 minutes.

Speaking of time, something else the movie First Man got right is that the LM in Apollo 11 had a continuous burn time of 910 seconds for LM’s descent to the moon. Those 910 seconds worth of fuel converts to about 15 minutes and 10 seconds, which means each percentage of fuel the movie shows ticking down on the digital display is about 9.1 seconds of engine thrust—assuming of course the LM was actually at 100% of that 910-seconds worth of fuel instead of 99% like the maximum amount the two-digit movie shows.

They only added enough fuel to fulfill the mission, so that meant Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin had to be extremely focused, a lot like we see Ryan Gosling’s version of him doing in the movie. And it is true that Armstrong decided to take the LM into manual mode on the way down, he did that because the automated targeting system was pre-programmed for an ellipse-shaped section NASA had decided to land. When they got close, Armstrong noticed what he described later as a, “football-field sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks for about one or two crater diameters around it.”

On top of that, no one had ever landed on the moon before—so, we simply didn’t know the same things we do know about the moon’s gravity.

Thinking fast, he shifted to manual to avoid any potential collisions.

Which, by the way, that’s not what the alarms are we see in the movie. We can clearly hear them say it’s a 1201 alarm, which technically wasn’t what we’d think of when we hear the term “alarm” on a computer today.

The 1201 alarm on Apollo 11 was what they referred to as an “executive overflow.” In other words, the computer was hitting the limits on how much it could process. Think of it like the hourglass on Windows or the beachball on Mac. The computer is frozen and you need to wait. Which probably isn’t something you want to do while you’re just seconds away from crashing into the moon…

That’s why they didn’t really seem too concerned about turning it off in the movie.

It also makes me so glad they don’t have a sound like that when it happens to my computer even today!

And now it makes sense why Neil Armstrong might have made the decision to switch from automatic to manual controls, if the computer is basically freezing while he’s barreling toward the surface of the moon.

That brings us to probably two of the most popular sayings to come out of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The first of those happens right after Armstrong and Aldrin touched down to the surface.

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

The reason why that was the first thing he said after landing wasn’t to wax poetic or anything like that. It’s simply that the LM was named Eagle, kind of like the Command Module was named Columbia.

As a little bit of trivia, yes, that’s named after the bald eagle because that’s America’s national bird and by extension something used a lot for the mission’s branding. If you look for pictures of the Apollo 11 patch online, it has a bald eagle on it.

So, it makes sense why the ranking officer, who was the Commander Neil Armstrong, confirm to the command center that the LM has landed.

Oh, and the name Tranquility Base? Most people didn’t know that name until the moment he said it. You see, it was Armstrong and Aldrin who came up with the name for wherever they landed. As we just learned, they didn’t land in the exact place they originally calculated. But, that’s how that name came about.

If my memory serves correctly, I think it was A Man on the Moon, the book from Andrew Chaikin, that mentioned the two astronauts told the Charles Duke, the CAPCOM, or Capsule Communicator, back at Mission Control, so he wouldn’t be surprised when they said it over the radio.

But probably the most popular line from the Apollo 11 mission comes after Neil Armstrong opens the LM’s door and, after stepping off the ladder, says:

“That’s one small step for man…one giant leap for mankind.”

In the true story, Neil Armstrong says he came up with that after landing and before he stepped outside. Or maybe he came up with it beforehand, because apparently his brother Dean Armstrong claimed to have seen the speech before the flight which suggests it was prepared ahead of time.

Either way would make sense because something we don’t see in the movie is that in-between that time, the TV transmission started to broadcast the first step live to the world. So, he knew it would be an important step…and surely I can’t be the only person who knows there’s something important coming up and I’m thinking about what I’ll say in that moment for a long period of time before it?

Oh, and another fun bit of trivia, in 1999, at an anniversary gathering for the mission, Armstrong claimed what he actually said was, “That’s one small step for ‘a’ man. It’s just that people didn’t hear it.”

Can you hear it?

Let me play it again.

“That’s one small step for man…one giant leap for mankind.”

Did you hear the “a”? Armstrong admitted he couldn’t hear it in the recording, but he thought he said it. So, a test was done in 2006 and computers found he did say the “a” but the transmission quality made it hard to hear.

So, after all that time and effort we got to what you and I figured out just now!

Back to the last part of our event today, when we see Ryan Gosling’s version of Neil Armstrong dropping something on the moon.

Ironically, that brings us full circle because if the timeline doesn’t count as being the most inaccurate thing about this segment of the movie, then it’d be that last scene with the bracelet.

Of course, I was bawling my eyes out as the movie beautifully ties together something from earlier in the movie. We didn’t talk about it this week because it’s not from this week in history, but the movie shows Neil’s daughter, Karen, passing away as a child.

And that really did happen. In June of 1961, at the age of one, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. The Armstrongs tried everything for their daughter, and Neil was known to keep detailed notes on her treatments from doctors as he researched the best for his daughter. Karen quickly lost the ability to walk, talk, and Neil coped with the pain by throwing himself into work. Then, in January of 1962, Karen Anne Armstrong passed away at the age of two. As a father myself, I don’t know how any father can cope with that…what Neil did, was throw himself even further into his work.

And while I’m speculating here, but again, as a father, I feel safe in saying she’ll never leave his mind. Because she shouldn’t.

Was Karen on Neil’s mind when he finally managed to achieve the lifelong dream of becoming the first human in history to walk on the moon? I don’t know. But I’d be shocked if that wasn’t the case.

Does that mean Neil Armstrong dropped Karen’s bracelet on the moon to honor her memory? I’d like to think if I were in the same situation I would do the exact same thing.

But, we don’t really know if he did that back in 1969.

There has been a lot of speculation around this, it’s definitely not something the filmmakers made up for the movie. They just leaned into it for that scene, and I think it’s a perfect way to incorporate creative license into a movie.

What did Neil Armstrong have to say about the speculation?

Well, unlike the “one small step for ‘a’ man” quote that Armstrong was happy to talk about publicly, Neil hasn’t publicly confirmed anything about the bracelet.

And so, while there may be a bit of the filmmaker’s speculation thrown into way the movie ends, maybe I can throw a bit of my own speculation into the way I’ll wrap up this segment…because, if we take the facts we know from the true story and try to fill in whether or not the bracelet thing is a fact or fiction, what do we have?

Neil Armstrong basically had two missions:

1. Become the first human to walk on the moon
2. Find a cure for his daughter’s cancer

Doing two things no one in human history has ever done before.

So, I’m just guessing those two projects he ate, slept, breathed them. Even after Karen passed, as anyone who has dealt with guilt knows, that doesn’t mean you stop thinking about your lost loved ones. And maybe, just maybe, even though Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, and everyone else at NASA, and around the world, shared in Neil Armstrong’s mission to walk on the moon…maybe Neil kept that other mission to himself.

Maybe at the completion of the mission he’d spent his life working toward, maybe Neil decided that’s the perfect time to complete his own, personal mission. To finally tell Karen goodbye, and return home for a new chapter.

It’s just a grieving father finally finding some peace, because sometimes the public doesn’t need to know. And sometimes that makes it impossible you and I to know every little detail. Because sometimes you can’t always know everything about the true story, you just have to believe that the truth is out there…

And I don’t know about you, but I’m okay with that.

For now, I’m happy to think that for Neil Armstrong, not one, but both of his life’s missions were accomplished this week in history.

July 27th, 1890. Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

Our next movie is 2018’s At Eternity’s Gate, and we’re starting about an hour and 34 minutes to see how it shows us the depiction of Vincent van Gogh being shot this week in history.

The movie fades up from black to show us a man’s hand clutching his belly. Small amounts of red blood are seeping through his fingers. Behind the man, we can see a blurry mix of trees with different shades of greens and yellows set against a light blue sky.

As the camera pans up, we can see this is Willem Dafoe’s character, Vincent van Gogh. He’s walking through the woods with a serious look on his face.

As he walks, we can hear his voiceover explaining what’s going on. He says he has a pain in his stomach. He was dressed like Buffalo Bill.

Then, the camera cuts to the scene he was describing. Willem Dafoe’s character is sitting now. All around him are deep, lush greens. There’s a grey building on either side of the camera’s frame with the green grass in the middle where he’s sitting almost like a natural courtyard. The buildings look like they might’ve been homes at one point, but they’re covered in a huge amount of ivy—which simultaneously makes the buildings look abandoned and unkept while also adding even more greenery to the scene, as if nature is reclaiming the buildings.

Sitting in the foreground is Willem Dafoe’s character, and he’s facing the scene in front of us with an easel and canvas. He’s painting it.

Two boys come running from the direction of one of the buildings. One of them calls to him.

They’re wearing hats, jackets, and as the camera cuts closer to one of the boys we can see he also has a holster with a pistol in it. That must be why we heard him say he was dressed like Buffalo Bill just a moment ago.

Wait…does that mean?

Just as we start to figure out the connection to the boy wearing a gun in his holster and the earlier visuals of the man clutching his stomach with the blood, back in the movie, we can see the boy pulling the pistol out and cocking it. He doesn’t point it directly at Willem Dafoe’s character, but there’s no sound anymore as the two boys struggle with the man…they all fall to the ground.

Just a few seconds later, the two boys get up off the man. The gun is casually being handled as if it were a toy gun.

Then, we see Willem Dafoe’s character walking in the woods again.

A split-second cut back to the struggle and then…a gunshot.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie At Eternity’s Gate

Leading into our fact-check of the event from At Eternity’s Gate, I just wanted to clarify that technically Van Gogh didn’t die this week in history…he was shot on July 27^th, but didn’t succumb to his wounds until two days later—July 29^th, so next Monday.

And the way the movie depicts this event happening is…well, we don’t know if it’s entirely true. You see, the exact nature of how Van Gogh died is something that has been debated among historians ever since it happened.

Tell you what, let’s throw in a little clip from episode #193 of Based on a True Story here because in that episode I had a chat with Steven Naifeh, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography called Van Gogh: The Life.

Oh, and you’ll hear Steven mention Schnabel—he’s talking about Julian Schnabel, the director of At Eternity’s Gate who also co-wrote the film. So, here is what Steven had to say about how well the movie At Eternity’s Gate did in showing the scene we’re talking about today.

So, in a nutshell, it sounds like what we saw in the movie was probably based on the bestselling book called Van Gogh: The Life from co-authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh, who you just heard from. And that’s why Steven referred to it as “our” book in the clip you just heard.

Which makes sense why Willem Dafoe would read the definitive book on Van Gogh to prepare for portraying Van Gogh in the movie.

So, if you’re in the mood for some art history this week, you’ll find a link in the show notes to find At Eternity’s Gate, and while you’re in the show notes—check out the rest of my interview with Steven Naifeh about the true story behind the movie.

Let’s move onto our next segment now, where we learn about historical figures from the movies that were born this week in history.

On July 24th, 1897, Amelia Mary Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas. She was world famous as a record-setting aviator, including becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe you’ve seen recent news just this year about finding her long-lost plane…well, she’s also famous for disappearing in an attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in 1937. You can see her story on screen in the 2009 movie simply called Amelia where she’s played by Hilary Swank.

On July 26th, 1875, Carl Gustav Jung was born in Switzerland. He was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist who is perhaps best known as the founder of analytical psychology, or as a collaborator of Sigmund Freud. Jung was played by Michael Fassbender in the 2011 film called A Dangerous Mind.

On July 27th, 1940, Bugs Bunny made his first appearance in a Warner Bros. animation called Wild Hare. He was created by animators Tex Avery and Bob Givens, and that’s about as close to a birthday as you can get for a cartoon character, so let’s move onto our segment about ‘based on a true story’ movies released this week in history.

Two years ago today, on July 22^nd, 2022, a movie called Shamshera released.

Since Shamshera is not a box office blockbuster here in the United States where I’m at,  I’m going to go out on a limb and say there’s a good chance you haven’t seen it yet—hence why it’s an option to think about this week!

So, I won’t give too many spoilers here, but in a nutshell, it’s a movie about the Khameran tribe during the late 1800s when the British ruled India. Shamshera is the main character’s name, and throughout the movie he goes from a Khameran tribesman facing discrimination from the Kaza people who, in turn, have the backing of the British.

This leads to fighting between the Khameran and the British authorities in power, so Shamshera rebels against British oppression by leading the Khameran people out from under their shadow.

So, how much of Shamshera is based on a true story?

It’s one of those movies that has fictional characters in a fictional story set during a historical time period.

In other words, the backdrop of British rule in India in the mid-to-late 1800s was true. Shamshera was not a real person, though, and the Khameran tribe was completely fictional. Their enemies, the people of Kaza, were kind of real? Not really in the way the movie portrays them at all, but a “Kaza” is a jurisdiction in the Ottoman Empire.

Even today, there are kazas in regions like Israel and Palestine…but it’s not like it was an ancient empire who sided with the British against the Khameran tribe like we see in the movie.

But, if you’re feeling like a historical action film, hop in the show notes to find where you can watch Shamshera or any of the movies from this week in history