I have yet to see the film "Running With Scissors," if only because I figured I could wait to see "The Royal Tenenbaums II" when I had a lazy day off. I have a lot of those now, but, as it seems, no time to watch this admittedly cute-seeming apparent mix of Harold and Maude and a Wes Anderson film. So, Harold and Maude meets Harold and Maude...
So the gent who wrote the original book from whence the recent film came was recently sued by his family. The book is called a memoir, though the names in the book are changed from the real people. They sued for defamation, invasion of privacy and emotional distress. Remember the days when emotional distress was there for you to grow as a person? I know I don't, I just assumed they must have existed at some point.
It's just curious that would you would outright admit that any caricature is based on you. Unless you paid this gentleman at a county fair to write a novel based on your worst traits and then sell it at Barnes & Noble, it would be fairly insane to do that. But his family has done it and managed to sue for a few loose concepts. Luckily, the settlement simply calls for the word "memoir" to be omitted from part of the book's intro, the word "book" there instead. And we all know how much the real-life introduction informs our take of an entire, lengthy work of fiction. Well done, family.
My favorite part of the CNN article I gleaned this all from is a quote from the family which tickles my semantic funny bone: "We have always maintained that the book is fictionalized and defamatory..." Isn't fictionalized what makes it not defamatory? Could be wrong. But I'm not.
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