Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, Robin Williams
As The Blind Side's Michael Oher is well aware, having a film made about your life is not always an easy ride.
But he's not the only one to have major reservations about a silver screen adaptation of his life.
Medic Patch Adams apparently hated the Robin Williams' adaptation of his life and claimed it's 'dummified' viewers.
If you’ve not watched the 1998 classic, it’s fairly heart-warming stuff.
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Actor Robin Williams plays the titular doctor Patch Adams, who at the beginning of the film is struggling with his mental health.
Confined to a psychiatric ward due to his depression, he finds that it’s the patients and not the professionals who cure him.
He then sets out on the long journey to become a doctor and open his own clinic, with plenty of pitfalls along the way.
While most people would argue it’s pretty inspiring, the real-life Patch Adam wasn’t impressed with how he was depicted on the silver screen.
In fact, he reportedly told film critic Roger Ebert: “I hate that movie.” (Ouch!)
Given that the film skips over some pretty major milestones in his life and changes some key details about the real life murder of his male best friend, who in the film is made into a female love interest.
Following the film’s release, he even suggested that the film helped to ‘dumb’ audiences down.
When approached by fans, he uses the interaction as a teaching moment and reportedly carries business cards with 50 books of recommended reading.
He told New Renaissance magazine: “When someone comes up and asks me for an autograph I give them a little lecture on pop culture and how it’s dummified our population, and its consequences.” (Charming!)
He added of the film: "After the movie, there wasn't a single positive article about our work or me. There were dumb, stupid, meaningless things...it made my children cry.
"They actually thought that they didn't know the person they were reading about. I knew the movie would do this. I would become a funny doctor. Imagine how shallow that is relative to who I am."
The miffed medic isn’t the only one who hated their Hollywood story, with Michael Oher recently suing the Tuohy family over The Blind Side.
Originally released in 2009, the sports biopic chronicles the NFL star’s troubled teenage years showing how he struggled with homelessness before being taken in by the wealthy family.
Though the film made millions at the box office, the American football star claimed that the adoption plot wasn’t accurate.
Fourteen years on, Oher launched a suit claiming that the story was 'concocted by the family to enrich themselves at his expense'.
Though the Touhy family have hit back at the claims, they have since said they plan to end their 19-year-long conservatorship of Oher.
It seems when it comes to Hollywood, fact is actually often stranger than fiction.
