It's a growing irony of today's Hollywood that, the more its filmmakers have come to rely on fact-based stories for their source material, the more inventive they've tended to become with the facts. These days, when we see that fateful kicker, "Based on a true story," experience tells us it's wise to be more than a little suspicious.

Indeed, a kind of ritual has arisen in which a film will appear, gain media attention and critical credibility on the strength of its "true" story, and then spend weeks being cut down by people charging that the real story -- be it "Alexander," "Erin Brockovich" or "A Beautiful Mind" -- just didn't happen that way at all.

A recent case in point -- and one that strikes close to home -- is the box-office hit, "Glory Road," which chronicles the saga of the mostly black Texas Western University 1966 NCAA-champion basketball team, which a title card tells us is "based on the true story of the team that changed everything."

The story is basically the impossible dream of coach Don Haskins (Josh Lucas), who went against the grain of his white, Southern college to recruit a full squad of black players from around the country and then took them to the top -- a feat the film contends is a major milestone in the civil rights movement.

In the middle of the film, there's a devastating sequence of events that begins when one of the traveling Texas Western Miners is brutally assaulted in the restroom of a Southern restaurant by "crackers," beaten bloody and then shoved head-first into a toilet in which we have just seen a man urinating.

Frightened by the incident, their confidence shaken, the Miners shortly thereafter find, in an even more shocking scene, their motel rooms trashed, their personal belongings violated and the slogans "Niggers Die" and "Coons Go Home" scrawled all over the walls in what looks like either red paint or blood.

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From here, the battered team takes a long, solemn bus ride to Seattle for its next game. When they arrive, the mood is so grim that Haskins' assistant wants to give up. But Haskins can't, because it's become a moral crusade for him. "Just THINK of how these boys have been degraded and humiliated just because they're black."

Cut to the Seattle University game, where the fans are booing just like all the rest of the rednecks we have seen. And as a consequence of this abuse -- the restaurant, the motel, the Seattle U fans -- the Miners lose the game: the only loss of their magical season. It's the low point from which they will rise to a thrilling climax.

Now, there are several things wrong with this scenario. First, neither the restaurant nor the motel scenes actually happened to the Texas Miners. This was divulged to me by the film's producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, when I interviewed him a month before the film was released. Those incidents were made up, he said, "for dramatic purposes."

Second, the racist reaction of the Seattle U fans is a fantasy. When I questioned the scene in my review of the film, a number of readers wrote to confirm my suspicion. "I was at the game," one writes. "I was 12 years old at the time. ... It was a great game but there was no racial booing toward Texas that I remember."

Another writes: "I am black. I was 16 when I listened to that game on the radio, and I don't remember hearing any racially motivated booing, or any comment on such a response. I'm certain it never happened. Seattle-style racism, even 40 years ago, was much too genial and covert to have accommodated such a public display of rudeness."

Still another writes, "I was in that crowd and was actually called by the folks making the movie. They wanted to know about the SU fight song (wasn't one), pep band and the like. When I could not provide much in the way of info or salacious details, they rang off. ... If we booed loudly, it was -- as always -- (at) the refs."

Moreover, the '66 Seattle University Chieftains were hardly the lily-white foe the movie depicts. As former player Mike Acres testifies in a recent issue of the Seattle University newspaper ("Racism? What Racism"), they were "a predominately black team. Four of our six top players were black."

So just about the only thing that seems to be true about this dramatic sequence of events -- the scenes that give "Glory Road" its visceral power and bond the audience with its protagonists and gives them credibility as civil rights heroes -- is the fact that the Miners played Seattle U and lost by two points.

Now, Bruckheimer and his screenwriters might argue, "OK, we made up a few things. But racism is ugly and those kinds of things did happen, if not to the Miners, to other teams." And they might even argue that, "Look, if we portrayed the all-black Miners playing a team with four black starters, we wouldn't have a movie."

They might further argue that they are part of a grand Hollywood tradition. Some of the greatest movies of all time -- including such best-picture Oscar winners as "The Last Emperor" and "Out of Africa" -- are true stories brimming with inaccuracies, many of them major. How come I'm not whining about those movies?

I don't have a good answer for this. Where do we draw the line in how much artistic license to accept in a "true" story? What's the difference between fudging the facts and a fraud? It's not clear -- though, obviously, it's easier to look the other way when we feel the work achieves some larger metaphoric truth or entertainment high.

This is particularly true if the story is historical, and has developed its own mythology, such as "Bonnie and Clyde." The truth is that Clyde Barrow was not motivated by sexual impotence and the script is a travesty of the real case, but it's otherwise a near-perfect movie that eerily caught the zeitgeist of the '60s.

It also can be true of a more recent story, like "The Insider." It too is full of contrived scenes, yet we don't care because its depiction of a clash between television journalism and corporate America is so striking and insightful -- and so much more than the sum of its parts -- that the film is an instant classic.

But this is a subjective thing. And one can understand the bitterness of both the relatives of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and the employees of CBS News -- including Mike Wallace -- who were not happy to find themselves dramatized in a movie that, to say the least, did not jibe with their memory of the events.

When "Lawrence of Arabia" was the sensation of 1962, journalist Lowell Thomas, unflatteringly portrayed in the epic, appeared on Jack Paar's TV show in a state of high agitation. He cried, "None of that happened. Lawrence was not like that at all." And Paar said, "Yes, Lowell, but don't you see? It's a GREAT movie."

Writing in USA Today last month, Seattle radio host and film critic Michael Medved went after "Munich" and Steven Spielberg for grossly distorting history to make a "utopian liberal" comment and for putting words in Golda Meir's mouth that she never uttered in real life just to serve the theme of the movie.

Both Thomas and Medved have a point. In the first case, a biopic that fabricates almost every scene has made a noted journalist look like a charlatan, and in the other a movie invents scenes with cherished historical characters to make its own downbeat point about Israel's policy of retaliation against terrorism.

And yet, I don't object to either film because I feel the first is a shattering cinematic masterpiece, and the second is a pretty good thriller that looks at what I think is a hard and unpopular truth about the unending cycle of violence in the Middle East. In both cases, for me, the end justified the means.

On the other hand, I have no trouble being offended by a movie that makes up race-baiting incidents and portrays Seattle as a hotbed of Selma-style racism in 1966. So, like so many things in life, I suppose it just depends on your point of view. When the movie untruth slaps you in the face, it's not artistic license: It's a lie.