David Feldman's book, Reverse Mergers: Taking a Company
Public Without an IPO, now in its third printing, was published in 2006
by Bloomberg Press (available on http://www.amazon.com).
View David Feldman's reverse merger blog at www.reversemergerblog.com.
Joseph Smith and David Feldman are coauthors of PIPES:
Revised and Updated Edition - A Guide to Private Investments in Public Equity
(Bloomberg Press, 2005) available on http://www.amazon.com.
In the News
Eric
Weinstein mentioned in New York Times
article on June 15, 2007 about his recent
case about author Laura Albert, her
pseudonym JT LeRoy and movie rights.
Going
to Court Over Fiction by a Fictitious
Writer
by
ALAN FEUER
Cloaking
one's identity while writing -- to hide,
in other words, in order to reveal --
is an old literary tradition. Mary Ann
Evans used the gender-crossing pseudonym
George Eliot to publish "Adam Bede"
in 1859, when female authors still struggled
to be taken seriously. Charlotte Bronte
released "Jane Eyre" in 1847 under the
name Currer Bell.
What, then, of the complex case of JT
Leroy, the pseudonymous writer with
the titillating past, a supposed child
of a truck-stop prostitute who rocketed
to fame in 2000 with the publication
of "Sarah," a novel of poverty and sexual
abuse set among the grease-stained highway
rest stops of West Virginia?
Mr. Leroy seemed at first to be a hot
commodity in today's biography-obsessed
literary world, a gifted writer with
a grotesquely compelling story that
only enhanced the value of the work.
After years of celebrity that included
friendships with Winona Ryder and Madonna,
articles in The New York Times and Vanity
Fair, and many other gaudy trappings
of early 21st century fame, JT Leroy
was revealed to be the name not of a
writer -- in fact, not even of a person
-- but of the fictive alter ego of Laura
Albert, a mother and otherwise obscure
young novelist from Brooklyn Heights.
This intricate game of hide-and-seek
with its interlocking issues of identity,
fame, money and the healing power of
art has now leapt from the media to
what is arguably the culture's second
most obsessive arena: the courts. A
film production company has sued Ms.
Albert for fraud, saying that a contract
signed with JT Leroy to make a feature
film of "Sarah" should be null and void,
for the simple reason that JT Leroy
does not exist.
At its heart, the case revolves around
the contract, signed by Antidote International
Films Inc. (producer of, among other
movies, "Laurel Canyon" and "Thirteen")
and Ms. Alberts company, Underdogs
Inc., to option the film rights to "Sarah"
in 2003. Underdogs was paid $15,000
under the contract, which was renewed,
at the same rate of $15,000, for each
of the next two years. Antidote is suing
for its money back.
Along with tales of commerce, the jury
was treated yesterday to a bit of culture:
A lawyer for the defendant referred
in his opening remarks to the O. Henry
story "The Last Leaf" moments after
the plaintiff's lawyer played a recording
of Terry Gross interviewing someone
posing as JT Leroy on NPR's "Fresh Air."
The trial, in Federal District Court
in Manhattan, promises to be an Escher-like
convergence of the movies, literature
and journalism with references to sex
in truck stops thrown in and a documentary
filmmaker, considering a project on
the case, sitting quietly in back.
Gregory Curtner, a lawyer for Antidote,
opened the trial by painting a broad
picture of JT Leroy's supposed rise
from Appalachian misery to stardom.
The son of a truck-stop prostitute,
the jury learned, JT Leroy (according
to the stories concocted on his behalf)
would sit in parked cars or at a diner
while his mother turned tricks. He himself
eventually turned to prostitution and,
after finally picking up a pen to describe
his ordeal, tried to peddle his early
works to agents, publishers and the
like by sending faxes from gas station
bathrooms.
It was this hardscrabble "life" that
caught the attention of a director,
Steven Shainberg, who wanted to work
with Antidote and blend elements of
JT Leroys biography into the narrative
of "Sarah" in what Mr. Curtner called
a film about "how art could emerge from
a ruined childhood." The trouble was
there was no ruined childhood from which
art could actually emerge.
Or at least not one that belonged to
the imaginary JT Leroy. Ms. Alberts
lawyer, Eric Weinstein, began his own
remarks with the memorably understated
line, "Laura is a complicated person."
He said she was physically and sexually
abused as a child. He said she was institutionalized
in psychiatric wards and in a group
home as a ward of the state. He said
she was in therapy for 13 years with
a psychiatrist whom she spoke to by
telephone while posing as a teenage
boy named Jeremy, an embryonic version
of JT Leroy.
By the time the psychiatrist advised
her to write, the persona of the teenage
boy had become engrained as Ms. Albert's
alter ego, what Mr. Weinstein called
her "bridge to the world." Ms. Albert
herself, in conversations before the
trial, called JT "her respirator," an
unreal, though entirely necessary, entity
that allowed her to breathe.
As movie people say, the "inciting incident"
of the lawsuit came with the publication
in late 2005 of an article in New York
magazine that questioned JT Leroy's
identity. The Times followed with an
article in February that identified
Ms. Albert as the true author of "Sarah."
The producers at Antidote were stunned;
they were also worried that the commercial
prospects of their project might crumble.
As Mr. Curtner put it: "The whole autobiographical
back story aura that made this so attractive
was a sham."
Mr. Weinstein told the jury that
the contract with Antidote was for a
book, not a back story, and that the
film company could have made the movie
no matter who wrote the novel. He then
went on to suggest that the project
was in freefall (a bad screenplay) and
that Antidote had used the excuse of
disputed authorship as an escape hatch.
It was at this point that the sort of
lemonade-from-literary-lemons notion
that can exist only in Hollywood was
introduced. Mr. Weinstein said the director,
Mr. Shainberg, decided he would now
make a new film, something in the vein
of "Adaptation" or "Being John Malkovich,"
a "meta-film" that mixed the novel with
the lives of its real and purported
authors in a project touted in-house
as "Sarah Plus."
But that required obtaining the rights
to Ms. Alberts story -- a story of
such apparent darkness that she herself
had required a literary dopplegänger
to tell it.
She refused to grant the rights.
"And that," Mr. Weinstein said, "is
why we find ourselves here."
