Discussion
He argued audiences would recognize him in the fictional assassin, in part because he’d publicly cashed in on his infamy, penning a braggy memoir about killing Rasputin.
He wasn’t wrong: The New York Times, in its review, noted that Chegodieff was “really intended to represent [Yusupov].”
But having copped to being a murderer, Yusupov couldn’t build much of a libel case. Instead, he alleged that Rasputin and the Empress in fact defamed his wife.
An MGM researcher had pointed out this factual discrepancy to the studio during production and warned that the Yusupovs could sue; the studio fired her.
Irina Yusupov sued the studio, and the jury found in her favor, awarding her £25,000, or about $125,000. MGM had to take the film out of circulation for decades and purge the offending scene for all time.
What proved to be MGM’s undoing was its lack of deniability. Unwisely, they’d prefaced the film with this: “This concerns the destruction of an empire … A few of the characters are still alive, the rest met death by violence.” From that, audiences could logically infer that the Yusupovs, being the only relevant characters still alive, were represented as the Chegodieffs.
A justice in the case told MGM that the studio might have stood a better chance had they incorporated a disclaimer stating the exact opposite: that the film was not intended as an accurate portrayal of real people or events.
Apparently overcautious in the wake of the landmark lawsuit, the film industry slapped that wording on everything. For decades, films disclaimed absolutely any relationship to reality, even when it was patently untrue.
EOF
@HopelessDemigod
Now do Fargo (1996):
“THIS IS A TRUE STORY. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.”
(It's not, and it didn't).
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