In 1928 Los Angeles police returned a boy to Christine Collins, claiming he was her son, though she knew he was not. She fought the department and was committed to a psychiatric ward, while the case exposed the corruption and abuses in the city's police. The screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski spent a year studying about 6,000 pages of records and wrote the script in 11 days. He said about 95 percent of the dialogue and events came from the historical record, and he kept clippings in the script so the story was not seen as invented.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.