Reality bites: making stuff up for fun and profit.(CULTURE WATCH II)

TRUE story: I'm in my local Peet's Coffee shop, early in the morning, buying a cup of coffee. The line is long. After about ten minutes, I get to the front, and I'm about to give my order when a nice-looking girl swoops in front of me, smiles quickly, says, "Sorry, I was waiting over there by the mugs and stuff," orders her latte, and moves off. It was early and she was pretty, so I let it go, but I was pretty steamed. Moments later, as we were getting into our cars--we had coincidentally parked side-by-side--she shrugged and said, "I'm sorry for cutting the line! But I'm late for an audition--some crappy sitcom. Thanks for understanding!" And with that, she zoomed off in her bottle green VW Bug.

About 30 minutes later, she was in my office, auditioning for my new show.

The trouble is, I'm not sure where the story goes from here, because I actually just made it up. I know I started this by writing "True Story," but the truth is-- and this is the real truth here, not the "True Story" truth--people tend to enjoy a story more when they think it's true. They don't judge it as harshly as they might when you say, "Hey, I'm working on the beginning of a romantic-comedy script: What do you think of this set-up?" Say that, and then suddenly everybody becomes a studio executive: Don't like the coffee shop; don't believe the parking situation; hard to buy into the relationship. Pass.

Which is why, for almost ten years, I've begun every network pitch and studio meeting by saying something along the lines of, "You know, this really happened to a friend of mine ... seriously, true story ..." And then I proceed to tell them what is essentially a lie. Something I made up. Something I'm not sure is really good or interesting or saleable or makes any sense, but I've protected myself against any negative reaction to the material, to the product of my imagination. Don't like the story? That's okay. It's just something that happened to a friend of mine. Think it's contrived, or silly, or uninteresting? Maybe. But it's, you know, true, so ... it's not like I'm a bad writer or anything. It's just ... a boring story that happened to a friend of mine. Forget it.

So I have a lot of sympathy for author James Frey, whose terrible book, A Million Little Pieces, is under fire. It turns out that though billed as a "memoir," the book is true only under my definition of the word "true"--i.e., not very true at all. His claim to have been in prison for three months turns out to be a highly embroidered version of a few hours in a small Ohio police station. His claims to bad-boy escapades and petty crimes all sort of fizzle away under a few follow-up questions. The book was an "Oprah's Book Club" pick, which means instant sales. A Million Little Pieces has been on the bestseller lists for weeks, earning its author what we can only assume is a million little dollars--so the revelation that it's mostly not true, that the story of a messed-up, self-destructive tough guy wrestling with heroin addiction was really just part of a long "True story" pitch, has forced everyone associated with the book--its author, its publisher, and, most important, Oprah herself--to grapple with a difficult question: If a guy writes a bad book--and trust me, A Million Little Pieces is really bad, a Lifetime Original Movie-level sack of blah--but the bad book is true and uplifting, does that make it a good book? Put it this way: If it somehow turned ...