LEXINGTON, Ky. — At the end of the 1962 film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," Jimmy Stewart's Sen. Ransom Stoddard sets the record straight on an incident from years before by admitting it was not he but his friend, played by John Wayne, who gunned down the baddest bandit in the wild Western town.

A reporter then stuns Ransom by telling him there will be no story because "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Though that's not a philosophy of most journalists today, it is a phrase invoked by numerous screenwriters asked about how they approach writing screenplays based on actual events.

But what if the legend makes you look bad?

That's what has the Big Blue Nation worried with "Glory Road" now in theaters nationwide.

The Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film recounts the historic 1966 NCAA men's basketball championship game in which a Texas Western team with five black starters defeated Adolph Rupp's all-white University of Kentucky squad. The game is viewed as a watershed moment in college basketball, opening the door for blacks throughout the country.

Fears are that the movie will stamp in celluloid the impression that Rupp, played in the movie by Jon Voight, and the Kentucky faithful were racists. It's a controversial assessment of the legendary coach that has endured for decades.

Whether or not Rupp was a racist, screenwriters say, painting Kentucky as a sort of symbol of the racism the Texas Western team faced is a tempting place for a writer to go.

In the movie, Rupp and the Kentucky players never utter a racial epithet or take any other overtly racist actions. Rupp and his team are essentially the regal, elite basketball Goliath that Texas Western's team of Davids must slay. But there are some moments that could be interpreted as making Rupp and Kentucky symbolic of the racism of the time.

Though filmmakers have dramatic license, and the movie poster bears the reminder "Based on the True Story," screenwriter James White — who wrote the 2004 Ray Charles biopic, "Ray" — says there is an obligation to stick fairly close to actual events, especially if the story is from recent history.

But White, a native of Mount Sterling, Ky., says screenwriters do need to create moments, "composite characters" to help convey major themes of a story that in real life often played out over years but are compressed in a two-hour movie.

To write a biopic, White says, he and other screenwriters generally do a tremendous amount of reading and interviewing so that even invented scenes and characters convey the essence of the truth.

"Glory Road" takes some major liberties with the Don Haskins-Texas Western story. To start with, the film portrays the 1965-66 championship season as Haskins' first at Texas Western. He was actually hired in 1961. The movie depicts Haskins making a conscious decision to play only the blacks on his team in the championship game to make a statement on race. The former coach has said in several recent interviews, however, that he was just fielding his best players and that he didn't comprehend the significance of that victory until several years later.

Rupp's family members have told the Lexington Herald-Leader they were not consulted for the movie, though Pat Riley, the celebrated NBA coach who was on Rupp's 1966 squad, was a consultant and appears in a reel of comments during the movie's closing credits.

It's not new that people portrayed in movies are often upset by that representation.

"People always want you to tell their life's story, until you show them what they look like," White says. White, who is black, says that in 1966, institutional racism was alive and well in Kentucky.

Brad Riddell, a University of Kentucky graduate and screenwriter for the new DVD hit "American Pie: Band Camp," says he has some concerns about how UK will be portrayed, but says that Kentucky fans should realize that that was nearly 40 years ago and things are very different today.

"We have great African-American players and a great African-American coach in Tubby Smith," Riddell says.