How many people come to Hollywood in order to write a novel? I’ve been working as a journalist for nearly 20 years, but just before Christmas I sold a proposal for a novel set in Los Angeles to a British publisher, so here I am. In the Roaring ‘20s, serious writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald came to Hollywood in the hope of becoming well-paid hacks. I’m a fairly well-paid hack who’s come to Hollywood in the hope of becoming a serious writer.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I’d like to be taken seriously as a writer, but my main priority is to make a shitload of money. I literally had to remortgage my house in London in order to move out here. And I’m only planning to stay for three months. It wouldn’t have been so expensive if it weren’t for the fact that I’m married with a 9-month-old daughter. My wife insisted that I rent a house with a pool and a spare bedroom so her parents can come and stay. She wasn’t joking, either. They arrive on May 6.
Naturally, as soon as I got here, I sent the proposal to my closest Hollywood contact: a British producer named Barry Isaacson. Was he interested in acquiring the rights? He politely declined, pointing out that I might have more luck if Matt Damon and Ben Affleck weren’t the central characters.
At the risk of having my ideas stolen—a rite of passage out here, I understand—perhaps I should explain what the novel is about. It’s set in the near future in the midst of America’s Second Great Depression. (I know, I know. That old chestnut. But wait—it gets better.) The unemployment rate is soaring, inflation is through the roof, and the public has turned on the celebrity class after a series of Marie Antoinette-like excesses. A right-wing demagogue is swept to power and starts rounding up A-list movie stars and interning them in concentration camps. Their only hope of salvation lies with the Wrangler, a Scarlet Pimpernel figure who rescues celebrities in peril. The title—it’s obvious, but I couldn’t resist it—is Starmageddon.
For a host of reasons, I think the book will only work if the movie-star characters are real, but my producer friend has counseled against this. Barry’s big break occurred in 1987 when he was working as a story analyst at Universal and discovered a script called Shoeless Joe in the slush pile. It was an adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s novel of the same name, and one of Barry’s main responsibilities, as he steered it through the development process, was making sure the studio wasn’t exposed to a lawsuit by J.D. Salinger. As Kinsella’s fans will know, Salinger is one of the main characters in the book, and Kinsella’s publishers had already heard from his lawyers. Luckily for the Universal Studios legal department, Barry did a pretty good job. When Shoeless Joe made it onto the screen in 1989—by which time it had been renamed Field of Dreams—the Salinger character had been transformed into a retired African-American software engineer.
Should I follow Barry’s advice and fictionalize all the characters in my novel? I’ve already discussed the legal issues with a lawyer who works for my publisher, and he told me that provided nothing I write about the movie stars in question is libelous, they won’t have any grounds for suing me. I assumed the same would be true of America. Indeed, given the existence of the First Amendment, I hoped my position would be even stronger. However, after I spoke to Barry, I began to have my doubts. Clearly, I was going to have to do something that British journalists only stoop to as an absolute last resort: some elementary reporting.
As luck would have it, the play Matt & Ben has just opened in L.A., so I thought I’d start by going to see that. For those who don’t know, this is the off-Broadway hit in which two young Dartmouth graduates—Brenda Withers and Mindy Kaling—mercilessly send up Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Not only that, but in one scene, the woman playing Damon disappears and then reappears as J.D. Salinger!
After a thoroughly enjoyable 60 minutes on Friday evening, I buttonholed the actresses backstage—they also wrote the play—and asked them if they’d received any threatening letters. Only one, according to Withers, and that was from the Rogers and Hammerstein estate, which asked to be paid a monthly royalty of $25 for their inclusion of a line from The Sound of Music. They did talk to a lawyer when the play was first produced but were told that the chances of either Damon or Affleck suing them were very slight since it would make them look so silly. After this, they were so confident they wouldn’t be sued, they actually faked some “cease and desist” letters and stuck them on the Web site they’d created to publicize the play.
That was reassuring but not exactly conclusive. It sounded like Damon and Affleck could have sued (not to mention J.D. Salinger) and simply decided not to. But on what grounds? I spent yesterday surfing the Web, and I think I’ve found the answer. In 1995 Johnny and Edgar Winters brought a lawsuit against D.C. Comics for including them as a pair of cartoon villains in a science fiction series. The Winters brothers claimed that the unauthorized use of their likenesses violated their “publicity rights,” a cluster of laws dating back to the beginning of the 20th century that were designed to protect celebrities from being exploited by the manufacturers of baseball cards and the like. However, the issue of whether publicity rights can be extended to cover works of fiction is highly contentious. The Winters brothers’ suit was initially thrown out by a Los Angeles trial judge, then resurrected by a state appeals court. Eventually, the California Supreme Court decided that artists and publishers have the constitutional right to produce works that include real people provided they’ve been creatively transformed.
So it looks as though I’m safe. If Matt Damon and Ben Affleck don’t like the way they’re portrayed in my novel, that’s their hard cheese. Of course, this is entirely hypothetical since I haven’t sent the proposal to any American publishers yet and, even when I do, there’s no guarantee that it will be sold. Come to think of it, if Damon or Affleck did threaten me with a lawsuit, that would probably help my chances. Oh dear. I better stop worrying about this and just get on with writing the bloody thing.
