The hit Robin Williams dramedy Patch Adams, released in 1998, was a huge box-office success, grossing more than $200 million globally on a $90 million budget. But while the makers of the film had a lot to celebrate, there was one person who wasn’t celebrating with them, and that was the real Hunter “Patch” Adams, the doctor Williams’s character was based upon.
Although Adams once said that Williams was the only actor he wanted to play him, he didn’t have the highest opinion of the movie itself. In fact, Roger Ebert later claimed that Adams told him personally how much he hated it:
Patch Adams’ birthday. I met him at the CWA in Boulder. The first thing he said was, “I hate that movie.” http://bit.ly/jI5jPc
— Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) May 28, 2011
So Adams got his top choice to play the role, but what went wrong? Well, one of his big gripes was that the film simplified his work and made him come across as nothing more than a funny doctor. Adams agreed to sell the rights to his story in the hopes that it would help him raise enough money to build a hospital, but he didn’t get much out of the deal at all.
The movie also failed to raise awareness of what he was doing at the time, which included being on the road 300 days a year, giving up to 11 lectures a day, and visiting the sick in countries across the world.
The Real Patch Adams Hated the Robin Williams Movie About His Life
“We put up fake, meaningless heroes to completely divert intelligence from our population. So, our kind of work, if anything, is denigrated,” Adams once told New Renaissance magazine. He went on to say that after the film was released, there weren’t any positive articles written about him or his work.
“There were dumb, stupid, meaningless things,” Adams continued, “it made my children cry. They actually thought that they didn’t know the person they were reading about.”
In addition to all that, Adams publicly criticized Williams for not donating any money to his hospital, despite having made $21 million for playing him on-screen. However, Adams clarified over the years that he didn’t dislike Williams. Following Williams’s death in 2014, Adams wrote a piece for Time magazine, praising Williams for his kindness and generosity.
“I’m enormously grateful for his wonderful performance of my early life, which has allowed the Gesundheit Institute to continue and expand our work,” Adams said in closing. “Thank you for all you’ve given this world Robin, thank you my friend.”
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