POP CULTURE: Unreal

For stung filmmakers, there’s fiction and then there’s fiction

Greg Beato

Back when everybody thought the writer known as JT Leroy was a genuine former teen prostitute, the recipient of physical and emotional abuse so extreme it had left him fragile, suicidal, and incredibly attractive to celebrities, a production company called Antidote Films purchased the movie rights to his first novel, Sarah.


But now that it's been established that the damaged literary boy toy was in fact the invention of Laura Albert, a married, middle-aged mom, Antidote wants its money back. In mid-August, it filed a lawsuit against the hoaxster, her manager, and her publisher; it's seeking a refund of the $45,000 it paid for Sarah, plus an additional $60,000 it's spent getting the book ready for its big-screen close-up.


Certainly Antidote, along with many others, was the victim of Albert's deception. In countless interviews, in fax and e-mail exchanges and rare public appearances—in which Albert enlisted the help of her husband's younger half-sister to pose as Leroy—Albert simply invented a person that did not exist. But Antidote never purchased the rights to anyone's specific identity. Instead, it bought the rights to a work of fiction, a made-up story. And despite the revelation that the author of Sarah is not who she pretended to be, not one word of the book itself has changed. It didn't buy a fake Picasso; it bought a genuine Leroy.


Nonetheless, in the complaint it filed against Albert, Antidote claims that Sarah is now "discredited and a joke in the eyes of many." Maybe, but what this statement conveniently overlooks is that Sarah was actually a joke on the day it was published, too, a highly stylized novel that's played for laughs and titillation as much as it is for pathos. Posing as Leroy in interviews, Albert told tales of "his" teen hustler past, but Sarah could never be mistaken as an accurate, journalistic account of those experiences. The world it depicts is aggressively fanciful: Its primary setting is a West Virginia diner where macho truckers feast on crème fraiche strudel while working up an appetite for the cross-dressing boys for sale in the parking lot. The whores are blessed with magical powers, the pimps are brutal but tender-hearted rogues and, all in all, the whole thing boasts more baroque artifice than Flavor Flav's 24-karat dentures. Only if Antidote's producers never actually read the novel could they possibly have mistaken it for a true story.


Of course, the phenomenon of JT Leroy extended beyond the books that bore his name. For an emotionally wary recluse, he was a remarkably adept networker who knew exactly how to exploit his marks' goodwill and vanity. Saving JT became one of Hollywood's favorite boutique philanthropies: His backstory was nearly as horrible as that of a clubbed baby seal, and he was way more fun to party with than a tree trunk that had been clear-cut from the Amazonian rain forest. Thus, there were always stars willing to accessorize his book readings and other public events.


Tapping into all of that must have seemed like an excellent deal. For a mere $45,000, Antidote Films would be getting a ready-made publicity campaign for Sarah's cinematic debut, a gaggle of celebrity supporters who might be willing to appear in the movie for scale, and, oh yeah, a darkly comic tale about a magical tween hooker Disneyland.


Now, alas, only the tale remains. Except that maybe that's not the case and Antidote is forsaking this project too quickly. Thanks to the controversy surrounding Albert's elaborate charade, a celluloid version of Sarah would still get its fair share of media coverage. And the altruistic aspect of the project has only deepened. After all, if it was somehow morally uplifting to help commoditize Leroy's imagined abuse, imagine how good it must feel to learn that no 12-year-old prostitutes were actually harmed in the making of Sarah.

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