The events in this movie are loosely based on a shooting that occurred in 1991 on the Iowa City campus of the University of Iowa. The shooter, 28-year-old physicist Gang Lu, had recently received his PhD from the university's Physics and Astronomy Department, but believed that his failure to win a dissertation prize had kept him from getting a job as a professor. On November 1, 1991, he attended a departmental meeting, and shortly after the meeting started he shot three of his former professors and the winner of the prize he had wanted. He then walked to a different campus building and shot an administrator whom he felt had ignored his grievances, as well as a student employee in the grievance office. Gang Lu then committed suicide by shooting himself. All of the shooting victims died from their wounds except for the student employee, who was paralyzed from the neck down. She later died from inflammatory breast cancer, brought on by the condition of her paralyzation.
