The short answer: Maybe, maybe not. The long answer, as unspooled in a Hollywood Reporter quote-finding expedition: Nobody, but nobody, who’s even been scheduled to take a meeting with James Frey wants to talk on the record, except for the guy who hired Frey to write a teen drama—he says “most of us in this town [have] been guilty of embellishing at one time or another.” Although one agent who provides an anonymous quote says he “can’t imagine that a star is going to want to do what in essence is a biopic of a guy whose biopic is incorrect,” a literary manager suggests it really doesn’t matter how much Frey made up: “Is it still a provocative and engaging and dramatic story? Well, I think it is, so I don’t know if it hurts him.”*
JT LeRoy’s film industry friends, by contrast, can’t wait to offer their opinions about how the unmasking will affect their movies. The producer of Sarah isn’t sure he even wants to go forward with pre-production, while the marketing guy for The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things is practically rubbing his hands in anticipation of the box office come March, when the latter film opens in New York and Los Angeles. And Gus Van Sant? Somebody might need to check his brownie mix:
“But is anyone who they say they are? Is (Sony Pictures chief) Amy Pascal really Amy Pascal? Am I really me? How do you know you’re talking to Gus Van Sant?”
*And, what the heck, it is “a provocative and engaging and dramatic story,” although I liked that story better when it was Permanent Midnight. And I liked the voice better when it was Henry Rollins’s, or was it Chuck Palahniuk’s?