But the film, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson ( Fifty Shades of Grey) from a screenplay she wrote with her husband and lead actor, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, doesn’t do anything interesting with the book’s history beyond gesture to it with an opening quote - “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened” - that’s misattributed to Mark Twain. Dealing with source material that probably wouldn’t have made as big a splash if it hadn’t been positioned as a real, raw story poses some interesting dilemmas when it comes to adaptation. According to Waithe, Frey introduced himself to her at a party, and pitched the idea as one “he couldn’t write himself because he’s white.” She ran with it, building out the plot and writing the script herself, but giving him a story credit.Īnd now a big-screen version of the book that made Frey famous, then infamous, is out in theaters, well over a decade after the furor surrounding it died down. Then this fall, Frey, of all people, was revealed to have come up with the concept for Queen & Slim, Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s take on Bonnie and Clyde as seen through a lens of racialized police violence. He started a company in 2010 with the manifest goal of churning out books that could be developed into adaptations like I Am Number Four, which starred Alex Pettyfer as a hunky alien, Frey’s predicted next big YA thing after wizards and vampires. In the years since the author was exposed as having fictionalized swaths of his supposedly true best seller A Million Little Pieces, he’s been kicking around the edges of Hollywood.
This awards season’s strangest bit player has been disgraced memoirist James Frey. Aaron Taylor-Johnson as James Frey in A Million Little Pieces.
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