Larry Doyle read yesterday’s item criticizing the judgment against Laura Albert and wrote in to offer a differing perspective. “Your assumption is that what is being bought is the ‘work,'” he says of my argument that Antidote International Films bought the rights to a novel and that’s what they got. “This has long not been the case in Hollywood, where what is being bought is the both the work and all the value that surrounds the work —the buzz surrounding the work, the author/screenwriter (e.g., a Stephen King novel), the reality underlying the work (e.g., The Devil Wears Prada), and even the interest in that work by an actor or director. The work itself is often beside the point, and not what the company is paying for.” Doyle adds that he sees this approach more and more in the publishing world. “The work itself is not what is being purchased so much as some ancilliary marketing element,” he elaborates, “like the reputation of the author or, in the case of first-time authors, their backstory.” (Even Doyle’s own background in television and humor writing, he concedes, informs the publication of his new novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper to some degree.)
Doyle invokes Marisha Pessl as an example: “If she was not that pretty young woman but some 50-year-old romance author, would the publisher have been in its rights to demand the advance back?” he asks rhetorically. “Morally, no, perhaps, but, sadly, her appearance and biography had a part in what they were willing to pay her, based on their estimation on what that appearance and biography could get them in terms of attention and media coverage.” (No matter how strenuously they might deny thinking in those terms, as Holly Peterson‘s publishers did when PW head Sara Nelson dared to suggest Peterson’s media connections might have clinched her book deal.) Doyle also mentioned a book that has more immediate resonance with Albert’s situation: Forrest Carter‘s The Education of Little Tree.
Now, clearly, nobody’s suggesting that Albert’s a homophobe pretending to be a transgendered young man the way Carter was a white supremacist who claimed to be a Native American. All I’m saying is that Little Tree raises interesting—and not easily answerable—questions about the appropriateness of blurring creative persona and public presentation, or the point at which such blurring becomes objectionable—and we won’t even get into the whole Nasdijj thing. The psychological aspects of “JT’s” emergence as Albert presents them further complicate the questions, especially when you start delving into contemporary philosophies on the fluidity of personality. But, admittedly, postmodernism and jury trials are not a winning combination…
DISCUSS: What do you think?