Whose life is it anyway?

When people daydream about Hollywood filming their life, they often don't think beyond whether Julia Roberts or Tom Hanks will play the lead. The fairy tale doesn't usually end with them having little or no say in their own story - or without being paid.

But that is what's happened to everybody from an office-supply salesman to a disgraced journalist - to say nothing of victims of real-life tragedies that seem cinematic to the Hollywood suits.

This fall, for example, "Shattered Glass" will tell the story of a young reporter who fabricated articles in The New Republic. Stephen Glass declined to participate in the film, but because he is considered a public figure, his story could be told without buying rights, says filmmaker Billy Ray. Still, the ethics of the situation aren't lost on the first-time director.

"I don't celebrate the fact that this movie is going to cause Stephen Glass embarrassment, or it might cause his family pain.... [But] I thought it was a story worth telling," said Mr. Ray during a recent trip to Boston. "It's certainly something that you wrestle with when you go to make a movie like this," he elaborated by phone a few days later.

The practice of telling someone's story without their say has been going on as long as there have been biopics. But today's information age heightens the tension between the First Amendment rights of the entertainment industry and the desire of people to have a say in the way millions of viewers leave theaters thinking about them.

The media are often accomplices in creating this tension. An article gets written about someone in The New York Times or Vanity Fair, and then Hollywood buys the rights - not from the person, but from the news organization. Or Tinsel Town scribes simply take the ideas for themselves.

As long as the stories are based on available facts, and don't claim to be true when they've been altered, people's lives are fair game - particularly for those considered public figures. Sometimes, subjects lose their rights unwittingly - when they give too much information to the media, for example.

"If the person gives a lot of interviews ... there's less incentive for a producer to pay big bucks to buy inside information, because there may not be any inside information left," says Mark Litwak, an entertainment lawyer in Beverly Hills. Even so, he says, "No producer in his right mind will ever give creative control to the subject."

"Shattered Glass" shares the same title as the Vanity Fair article on which it is based - an article in which Glass declined to participate (attempts to reach him for this article were unsuccessful). Other recent movies have been similarly inspired by the media: "The Insider," about tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, was also based on a Vanity Fair article. "Rock Star," about a fan who becomes the lead singer for a heavy-metal band, started out as a New York Times piece. And next week's "Radio" - in which Cuba Gooding Jr. plays James Robert Kennedy, a mentally handicapped black man - began as a 1996 Sports Illustrated story.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3