It's easy to see why Johnson's story was movie material. She's a former Navy journalist and Marine Corps officer who took an English teaching job with at-risk students from East Palo Alto. Unless you're a skydiving cop who polices the air for free-falling criminals, you can't have a more movie-worthy biography. But that was still not enough for jaded Hollywood screenwriters.

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Take one memorable anecdote, for instance. After one of Johnson's students was shot in the leg by a gang member, he called her in the middle of the night to tell her that the rest of the gang was waiting for him outside. So Johnson got into her Fiat Spider ...

dave_7 / Wiki Commons

Another awesome detail cut from the movie.

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... drove to his house, picked him up, and then took him to the basement apartment she rented on Skyline Boulevard outside San Francisco, because she "knew they'd never be able to drive one of those huge gangster cars up there." She literally hid one of her students from murderous gang members in her own home for a few days until they were able to sneak him out of the country like some kind of teenage Edward Snowden. But apparently this wasn't engaging enough, so in the movie version, they just had the guy killed off-screen. But not before they tried to make it oh-so-much worse.