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Jeff Feuerzeig on creating a character
Author: The JT LeRoy Story writer-director discusses truth and fiction
Laura Albert (right) gazes upon her brilliant creation, wunderkind author JT LeRoy
Matthew Lickona: When the scandal breaks about author Laura Albert having created the author JT LeRoy, you give us several phone messages from Laura’s answering machine, urging her to get a huge book deal right away, to mine good publicity out of the bad publicity. But she didn’t take that advice. Instead, she went silent for ten years, and then let you make a film about her.
Jeff Feuerzeig: I can tell you what I know about how I came to make the film. A journalist friend of mine, Paul Cullum, who writes for LA Weekly, knew that there’s nothing I love more than a great “truth is stranger than fiction” story. He said that I ought to check out the JT LeRoy saga, which, when the scandal broke, was being labeled “the biggest literary hoax of all time.” It generated a massive amount of ink. I read it all, and I just had this feeling that there was more to the story, perhaps much more. There was one voice glaringly missing, and that was the voice of the author of the fiction — both on and off the page. So I reached out to Laura. I sent her my film The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which deals vividly with the intersection of madness and creativity — which I came to learn played a role in this wild story. The film spoke to her, resonated with her, and she decided she would share her story with me. I came to learn that other documentarians as well as Hollywood had approached her, and she’d said no to everyone.
ML: Why did she say yes to you?
JF: She complimented the artistry of my filmmaking, how I handled difficult subject matter like Daniel Johnston’s mental illness and his art. It was because of that — because of my craft. So I made this subjective film, with her telling her story, because I thought to myself, “Wow, if I could hear the person who wrote these books, who played this role of JT LeRoy on the phone and then was out there in public as JT’s British handler Speedie, that would be some film.” She was free to share anything and everything she wanted to share, and I found her to be very forthcoming.
ML: When you say the film is subjective, you mean that it’s mostly shaped by its subject?
JF: The agreement going in was the same as I had with Daniel Johnston: I have final cut, and my subject cannot change a frame. I am the documentarian, and she is the subject. But it’s immersive and subjective. It’s not that different from films I admire like The Kid Stays in the Picture, which is narrated by its subject Robert Evans, or the film Tyson by James Toback, which is all told by Mike Tyson. Errol Morris set a precedent for films like that with The Fog of War and The Unknown Known. I love that style of nonfiction filmmaking. It’s a choice: my biggest influence has always been the New Journalism of the ’60s and ’70s. When Tom Wolfe wrote about it in his article “The Birth of the New Journalism,” that, for me, was like the invention of fire. All the people he anthologized — Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, Terry Southern — they were all heroes of mine. They made nonfiction reading more literary. I’ve been trying to do that with my films.
ML: But you do include a few other voices besides Albert’s.
JF: They were a necessity, and I’m happy that they were happy to share their stories. They were people in the first act of the film; the therapist Dr. Owen, the transgressive author Dennis Cooper, the literary agent Ira Silverberg, the editor of the books she wrote. They were there before Savannah Knoop started being the body of JT LeRoy out in public, when the boy JT LeRoy was just a voice on the phone. Without their perspective, there was no way to tell the story.
Movie
Author: The JT LeRoy Story ***
The title of writer-director Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary is, fittingly, more than a little misleading. Its real subject isn’t the literary wunderkind behind the tellingly titled <em>The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things</em>; nor is it the celebrity culture that rushed to acclaim his fervid, fetid stories of youthful misery. Instead, its real subject is the real author: Laura Albert, a sad and unconfident writer who decided she needed an avatar to express her talents, and so created the titular, gender-fluid, AIDS-afflicted child of a truck-stop hooker, eventually recruiting her sister-in-law to play the role in public. And what a public: the bestselling, barely legal writer hobnobbed and canoodled with rock stars, film directors, and fashion designers, all under the watchful eye of her British manager Speedie (another Albert creation, this one played by Albert herself). And while Feuerzeig makes good visual and narrative use of the world’s adulation and outrage over LeRoy and his eventual outing, all those fireworks are exploded solely to illuminate Albert: a woman who was once so wounded that even her fictions proved too painful to present as her own, now making her peace with herself and her (meticulously recorded) past.
ML: Speaking of voices on the phone, you include an astonishing number of recorded phone conversations — Albert hearing from friends, family, celebrities, artistic collaborators...
JF: It’s a coincidence, but Daniel Johnston was an incredible self-documenter. His early notebooks, audio recordings, Super 8 home movies, a wealth of archival material that creates an immersive experience. I couldn’t have known when I reached out to Laura that she was also a massive self-documenter. She gave me her archive, and it was even larger than Daniel’s. It included all her childhood notebooks, recordings from when she’s 15 years old in the group home, those amazing Super 8 home movies that you see, hundreds and hundreds of photos...
Here's something you might be interested in.
Jeff Feuerzeig on creating a character
Author: The JT LeRoy Story writer-director discusses truth and fiction
Jeff Feuerzeig on creating a character
Author: The JT LeRoy Story writer-director discusses truth and fiction
Laura Albert (right) gazes upon her brilliant creation, wunderkind author JT LeRoy
Matthew Lickona: When the scandal breaks about author Laura Albert having created the author JT LeRoy, you give us several phone messages from Laura’s answering machine, urging her to get a huge book deal right away, to mine good publicity out of the bad publicity. But she didn’t take that advice. Instead, she went silent for ten years, and then let you make a film about her.
Jeff Feuerzeig: I can tell you what I know about how I came to make the film. A journalist friend of mine, Paul Cullum, who writes for LA Weekly, knew that there’s nothing I love more than a great “truth is stranger than fiction” story. He said that I ought to check out the JT LeRoy saga, which, when the scandal broke, was being labeled “the biggest literary hoax of all time.” It generated a massive amount of ink. I read it all, and I just had this feeling that there was more to the story, perhaps much more. There was one voice glaringly missing, and that was the voice of the author of the fiction — both on and off the page. So I reached out to Laura. I sent her my film The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which deals vividly with the intersection of madness and creativity — which I came to learn played a role in this wild story. The film spoke to her, resonated with her, and she decided she would share her story with me. I came to learn that other documentarians as well as Hollywood had approached her, and she’d said no to everyone.
ML: Why did she say yes to you?
JF: She complimented the artistry of my filmmaking, how I handled difficult subject matter like Daniel Johnston’s mental illness and his art. It was because of that — because of my craft. So I made this subjective film, with her telling her story, because I thought to myself, “Wow, if I could hear the person who wrote these books, who played this role of JT LeRoy on the phone and then was out there in public as JT’s British handler Speedie, that would be some film.” She was free to share anything and everything she wanted to share, and I found her to be very forthcoming.
ML: When you say the film is subjective, you mean that it’s mostly shaped by its subject?
JF: The agreement going in was the same as I had with Daniel Johnston: I have final cut, and my subject cannot change a frame. I am the documentarian, and she is the subject. But it’s immersive and subjective. It’s not that different from films I admire like The Kid Stays in the Picture, which is narrated by its subject Robert Evans, or the film Tyson by James Toback, which is all told by Mike Tyson. Errol Morris set a precedent for films like that with The Fog of War and The Unknown Known. I love that style of nonfiction filmmaking. It’s a choice: my biggest influence has always been the New Journalism of the ’60s and ’70s. When Tom Wolfe wrote about it in his article “The Birth of the New Journalism,” that, for me, was like the invention of fire. All the people he anthologized — Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, Terry Southern — they were all heroes of mine. They made nonfiction reading more literary. I’ve been trying to do that with my films.
ML: But you do include a few other voices besides Albert’s.
JF: They were a necessity, and I’m happy that they were happy to share their stories. They were people in the first act of the film; the therapist Dr. Owen, the transgressive author Dennis Cooper, the literary agent Ira Silverberg, the editor of the books she wrote. They were there before Savannah Knoop started being the body of JT LeRoy out in public, when the boy JT LeRoy was just a voice on the phone. Without their perspective, there was no way to tell the story.
Movie
Author: The JT LeRoy Story ***
The title of writer-director Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary is, fittingly, more than a little misleading. Its real subject isn’t the literary wunderkind behind the tellingly titled <em>The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things</em>; nor is it the celebrity culture that rushed to acclaim his fervid, fetid stories of youthful misery. Instead, its real subject is the real author: Laura Albert, a sad and unconfident writer who decided she needed an avatar to express her talents, and so created the titular, gender-fluid, AIDS-afflicted child of a truck-stop hooker, eventually recruiting her sister-in-law to play the role in public. And what a public: the bestselling, barely legal writer hobnobbed and canoodled with rock stars, film directors, and fashion designers, all under the watchful eye of her British manager Speedie (another Albert creation, this one played by Albert herself). And while Feuerzeig makes good visual and narrative use of the world’s adulation and outrage over LeRoy and his eventual outing, all those fireworks are exploded solely to illuminate Albert: a woman who was once so wounded that even her fictions proved too painful to present as her own, now making her peace with herself and her (meticulously recorded) past.
ML: Speaking of voices on the phone, you include an astonishing number of recorded phone conversations — Albert hearing from friends, family, celebrities, artistic collaborators...
JF: It’s a coincidence, but Daniel Johnston was an incredible self-documenter. His early notebooks, audio recordings, Super 8 home movies, a wealth of archival material that creates an immersive experience. I couldn’t have known when I reached out to Laura that she was also a massive self-documenter. She gave me her archive, and it was even larger than Daniel’s. It included all her childhood notebooks, recordings from when she’s 15 years old in the group home, those amazing Super 8 home movies that you see, hundreds and hundreds of photos...
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