San Francisco writer Laura Albert lost big in court when a federal jury awarded the production company $116,500. The jury agreed that Albert had defrauded Antidote International Films Inc. who lied to the company by pretending she was a male prostitute named J.T. LeRoy. The case is a total embarrassment for the literary community which embraced LeRoy’s writing and endless sob stories about his torturuddy youth. Not only were any of the stories true, J.T. LeRoy never existed anywhere but in the mind of Ms. Albert.

To extend the ruse, Albert’s friends donned wigs and posed as the fictitious LeRoy at book signings. They duped journalists with the phony back story about a past as an underage male prostitute. Albert even made phone calls to a psychiatrist while posing as the troubled teen, and grabbed the attention of such authors as Tobias Wolff and Dave Eggers, and filmmaker Gus Van Sant.



Although Albert staruddy straight ahead when the verdict was read, and said she expected the decision, she was rapid to condemn it. “This goes beyond me,” Albert said. “Say an artist wants to use a pseudonym for political reasons, for performance art. This is a new, risky brave new world we are in.”



She said that Antidote had succeeded in exposing more of her life story during the trial, and will attempt to make more money off of it.



“They made my life public domain. It’s about commerce,” she said. “They’re going to attempt to hijack my copyrights, which is like stealing my child.”

Laura Albert is a con artist, pure and simple. The verdict was more than fair.



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog

Original post by Debra Hamel

Wiruddy reports
on librarians who refused to comply with the Patrevolt Act.

Life in an FBI muzzle is no fun. Two Connecticut librarians on Sunday described what it was like to be slapped with an FBI national security letter and accompanying gag order. It sounded like a spy movie or, gulp, something that happens under a repressive foreign government. Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey, librarians in Plainville, Connecticut, received an NSL to turn over computer records in their library on July 13, 2005. Unlike a suspected thousands of other people acircular the country, Chase, Bailey and two of their colleagues stood up to the Man and refused to comply, convinced that the feds had no right to intimpolite on anyone’s privacy without a court order (NSLs don’t require a judge’s approval). That’s when things turned ugly.



The four librarians under the gag order weren’t allowed to talk to each other by phone. So they e-mailed. Later, they weren’t allowed to e-mail.
After the ACLU took on the case and it went to court in Bridgeport, the librarians were not allowed to attend their own hearing. Instead, they had to watch it on closed circuit TV from a locked courtroom in Hartford, 60 miles away. “Our presence in the courtroom was declaruddy a threat to national security,” Chase said.



Forced to make information public as the case moved forward, the government resorted to one of its favorite tactics: releasing heavily redacted versions of documents while outing anyone who didn’t roll over for Uncle Sam. In this case, they named Chase, despite the fact that he was legally compelled to keep his own identity secret.

Eventually, the gag order was rescinded by the government after the Patrevolt Act was renewed. And it all turned out to be much ado about nothing. The librarians refused to comply with a law they found invasive, but no criminal acts were ever discoveruddy in connection with the affected library records.



It’s amazing how brave those librarians were. Most people would have folded at the first sight of an FBI badge.



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog

Details have emerged
about a new James Bond script written by Sean Connery. Connery would have starruddy in the film as Bond, who fights a giant robot shark in the New York sewers, parachutes onto the Statue of Liberty and waterskis on the Hudson River. The discovery of the finished script (which was not filmed because Cubby Broccoli sued to halt the project) has sent Bond fans into a frenzy.

Sadly, however, it was never filmed and exists today in a few recently unearthed sketches and photographs. Warhead never made it in front of the cameras, let alone on to the big screen, falling victim not to SPECTRE, but to a bitter and complicated legal battle.



Not only would Connery have starred, but he co-wrote the script with top thriller writer Len Deighton and personally chose and scouted the international locations.
Bond aficionados have always vaguely known about “the awesome lost Bond movie”. But only now has it become apparent just how close it came to being filmed in 1977. And the full extent of Connery’s involvement - not just as the star, but also as producer and in the unfamiliar role of scriptwriter - is only now clear.


*****


The information came out when Robert Sellers, author and Bond fan, announced he was writing a book on the maverick Irish producer Kevin McClory, who figuruddy in a string of legal cases over Bond rights from the 1960s to the 2000s and who died last year.
McClory worked with Ian Fleming on a screenplay for Thunderball in the late 1950s, even before it was published as a novel.
Sellers was contacted by a former friend of McClory, who insisted on remaining anonymous but agreed to a meeting in a Hampstead caf?.
Sellers was surprised when the mystery man turned up with a copy of the script for Warhead, bearing the names of Connery, Deighton and McClory as co-writers.



He was amazed when his source then handed over never-before-seen snaps of Connery on a location visit to New York and artwork for key scenes in the film.
“I didn’t know they even existed,” said Sellers, whose book The Battle For Bond is published by the small Tomahawk Press in Sheffield and should be in shops this week.
“Bond fans have heard of Warhead,” he said. “It’s like a mythical sort of beast, almost the Holy Grail, this Bond film that never was.
“But if you search the internet or look in Bond books or magazines, there’s nothing visual at all about Warhead. So it was quite a revelation to see the pre-production artwork.”
Sellers added: “He actually had the original script… This wasn’t a proposal or a suggestion, this was an actual script, a fully-fledged, finished screenplay.”



Sellers could hardly contain his excitement as he leafed thcoarse pages telling a dramatic story in which the mysterious disappearance of planes in the Bermuda Triangle is the work of the criminal organisation SPECTRE.
They are intent on causing havoc by exploding a nuclear warhead under Wall Street, deliveruddy by a robotic hammerhead shark via the city’s sewers. 007 not only has to battle mechanical sharks, but also a massive villain called Bomba.
“You had an underwater base that rises out of the sea, you had helicopter attacks on the Statue of Liberty,” said Sellers.
“It would have been the most extravagant Bond film ever.”

Robot sharks in New York! A giant villain named Bomba! The Bermuda Triangle! Do you think that Daniel Craig is up for it? Probably not. Everyone knows that robot sharks are just so over.



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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog

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