Is the movie "21" based on true events?!
Question: It's based on true events, but remember that "based on true events" and "true" are not the same.
21 is based on a book by Ben Mezrich called Bringing Down the House. The book is based on some real card counters. But the book is already partly fictionalized, and then the movie doesn't follow the book exactly and changes even more things. It's kind of like the telephone game -- "based on true events" might be equivalent to the person at the beginning of the line saying "Tell Mary I love Jim" and the person at the end hearing "Tell Harry I love him."
Answers: It's based on true events, but remember that "based on true events" and "true" are not the same.
21 is based on a book by Ben Mezrich called Bringing Down the House. The book is based on some real card counters. But the book is already partly fictionalized, and then the movie doesn't follow the book exactly and changes even more things. It's kind of like the telephone game -- "based on true events" might be equivalent to the person at the beginning of the line saying "Tell Mary I love Jim" and the person at the end hearing "Tell Harry I love him."
Yes
The film was based on the novel Bringing Down the House. But due to the title relating to another film, they changed it to 21. The film is loosely based on the story of a 1990s incarnation of the MIT Blackjack Team.
Here are some factual inaccuracies:
The movie falsely claims that "biometric identification" is the only mitigation against card counting. In reality casinos today use continuous automatic shufflers which make the game memoryless and completely immune to any card counting technique. The movie also implies that the technique used resulted in continuous wins when in reality the technique could only create an approximately 1% bias in the card counter's favor.
Here are some casting controversies:
Mark Shanahan of The Boston Globe wrote "Willis, 38, who grew up in Mount Vernon, Ill., had never played blackjack when she joined the team in the early 1990s. Then a student at Harvard Law School, Willis and her boyfriend were both "math geeks." They were also friends with Jeff Ma, an MIT student who was one of the ringleaders of the school's clandestine blackjack club. "Jeff would occasionally have an expensive bottle of wine or champagne, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Then he told us about Vegas," Willis says. "I think it dawned on him that we could play blackjack and also give the team, which was mostly Asian and male, a little diversity."[8]
In September 2005, Kevin Der of The Tech wrote "During the talk, Mezrich mentioned the stereotypical Hollywood casting process — though most of the actual blackjack team was composed of Asian males, a studio executive involved in the casting process said that most of the film’s actors would be white, with perhaps an Asian female."
Also, in the film the team makes millions, however, in real life they made about $350,000.
In the end, he didn't get the scholarship.
yes it is based on true events
but the filmmakers did 'hollywood' it up some