DMovies - Your platform for thought-provoking cinema

Author: The JT LeRoy Story

Director - Jeff Feuerzeig - 2016

"Dirty gem"
The author who never was: meet the multiple aliases of author Laura Albert and her literary persona JT LeRoy. By the end of this documentary, you will be even more befuddled by her (or his?) real identity

JT LeRoy was one of most influential cultural icons of the US in the 1990s. He was supposedly friends with Madonna, Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, Shirley Manson, Liv Tyler and Gus Van Sant. His books detailed his life within a dysfunctional family: he was the son of a truck-stop prostitute in the South of the US. Their family landed in San Francisco streets in early 1990s. Except that he wasn’t a he. In fact, he wasn’t even real. LeRoy was an avatar for Laura Albert, who conned everyone, including swathes of artists and readers. Laura Albert is the real author behind the fabricated sensation JT LeRoy, at least apparently.

Dr. Terrence Owens, a therapist at the McAuley Adolescent helped to concoct JT Leroy’s early stories, unaware of his patient’s real identity. Maybe he was the only person capable of deciphering the personality of a writer who has never existed in the first place. Dr Owens has refused to discuss Mr LeRoy’s identity, citing patient confidentiality, but admitted in 1990 that most of their sessions were conducted over the telephone. Is Dr Owens too an invention?

Many authors routinely use aliases, but this was a literary hoax scandal. Writing as somebody else gave Laura the freedom to talk about her experiences with drugs and sexual abuse. The problem is that she was soon invited to book signings and talk, as a natural consequence of her commercial success. So she devised another strange solution.

In 2001, Laura Albert asked her sister-in-law Savannah Knoop to assume JT Leroy’s identity, now identified as a female. Savannah represented Laura not only in literature events, but also as the singer and songwriter of the band Thistle. Laura Albert was always around in the concerts of the band pretending to be someone else. Eventually her stories were accused of implausibility and she was unmasked.

The documentary sets Laura Albert as the main character. She is on stage explaining her choices and finding reasons to assume other identities – she also used the alias Jeremy Terminator. Other people involved in her stories do not appear in front of the cameras. Testimonies of Courtney Love, and Gus van Sant, who wanted to adapt to book ‘The Heart is Deceitful above All Things’ to the screen, were recorded instead via telephone.

Laura Albert described a supposed love affair between Savannah Italian actress and director Asia Argento, but this also comes across as highly suspicious. Is this also the byproduct of a fantasist’s highly creative mind?

The film was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival early this year. Probably Feuerzeig thought it would be a goldmine, following the success of the books ‘The Heart is Deceitful above All Things’ and ‘Sarah’. JT LeRoys’s story generated a lot of gossip in the media in the 1990s, suggesting the collapse of literature and the rise of celebrities. The news were the fantastic and luxurious lifestyle of an author, not the literary work itself.

Compared to William Burroughs and Jack Kerouak, who also had a marginalised lifestyle in the US, Laura Albert’s literature is very vanilla. Drugs were not used in order to enhance the creativity and spontaneity, as with the Beat poets. And free love was described as a sinful lifestyle, different to the non-judgmental and libertarian tone adopted by Burroughs and Kerouak.

In fact, Laura Albert has created so many stories and devised so many identities that she now raises one fundamental question. Is she too a concoction of someone else’s mind?

Author: The JT LeRoy Story is out in cinemas in the UK and other countries this Friday. Watch the film trailer below:

.



"Dirty gem"

By Maysa Monção - 27-07-2016

By Maysa Monção - 27-07-2016

Maysa Monção is a Brazilian writer, teacher, translator, editor and art performer who currently lives in London. She has a Masters Degree in Film Studies from Tor Vergata University in Rome, Italy, ...

DMovies Poll

Are the Oscars dirty enough for DMovies?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Most Read

Forget Friday the 13th, Paranormal Activity and the [Read More...]
Just a few years back, finding a film [Read More...]
A lot of British people would rather forget [Read More...]
Another year has gone by, and DMovies is [Read More...]
A small family of four lives in a [Read More...]
Pigs might fly. And so Brexit might happen. [Read More...]

Read More

Is 65 the new Jurassic Park?

 

Marina Hillquist - 28-03-2023

Marina Hillquist argues that the American sci-fi action thriller by the creators of A Quiet Place had the potential to unseat the monopoly of the Jurassic Park franchise, but it struggled to escape some familiar trappings [Read More...]

Riotsville USA

Sierra Pettengill
2023

Eoghan Lyng - 28-03-2023

American documentary conducts a probing investigation into one of the USA's most shameful moments in history, the Vietnam War, offering few answers but many damning insights - in cinemas on Friday, March 31st [Read More...]

Reclaiming Vincente Minnelli’s overlooked gem

 

Isy Santini - 25-03-2023

Not quite what it seems: Isy Santini takes a dirty look at Vincente Minnelli's Brigadoon and argues that the film - which most thought to be a musical - was in reality a horror piece! [Read More...]

Facebook Comment

Website Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *