12. Author: The JT LeRoy Story

12. AUTHOR: THE JT LEROY STORY

Director: Jeff Feuerzeig

Release date: November 2, 2016

One of the stranger pop-culture stories in recent times was that of Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy, a 16-year-old transgender drug addict prostitute author that took the literary world – and Hollywood – by storm in the late ’90s. In one of literature’s most fascinating modern scandals, JT LeRoy, darling of the film and literature universe, turned out to be a fake, a persona created by American writer Laura Albert.

This was no simple nom de plume. Albert pretended to be a 16-year-old over the phone, convincing a psychologist, numerous editors, publishers, journalists and major celebrities, and then followed the ruse to the next logical step – engaging her young sister-in-law to pretend to be JT LeRoy at public appearances. Albert herself became “Speedy” a mysterious British woman who was JT’s manager and confidant.

Needless to say, there was much egg on numerous important faces when the truth was eventually exposed. In Author, Albert gives a candid and (seemingly) honest account of how the JT LeRoy hoax snowballed and evolved, and invites us into the childhood events that may have led to her bizarre controversy. This is a warts-and-all insight into this stranger-than-fiction tale and is full of actual phone conversations with major celebrities that Albert recorded and archived. Feuerzeig does a fine job of depicting this odd chain of events and presents Albert as both an endearing and duplicitous eccentric.