JT LeRoy
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“Agitating the Information”: Director Gus Van Sant on his Long-Take Columbine Drama, Elephant
The following interview was originally published in our Fall, 2003 print edition. When I first interviewed Gus Van Sant, he had just finished editing his feature Gerry and was preparing to launch it at the Sundance Film Festival. A radical left turn from the two studio films, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, that preceded it, Gerry mixed together movie stars (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck), the “long-take” style of such filmmakers as Béla Tarr and Chantal Akerman and a simple yet metaphorically rich scenario taken from the news headlines. Working without a formal script but with the remarkable director […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 5, 2018 -
SHE IS A PUNK ROCKER
Jack Boulware writes the first but certainly not the last profile of Laura Albert, the pen and voice behind the recently unmasked JT LeRoy. At the least, Boulware’s portrait should banish the term “40-year-old Brooklyn housewife” from articles about the literary hoax and hoaxer. The article traces Albert’s path from the NYC punk scene (she was interviewed for but not featured in Paul Rachman and Steven Blush’s American Hardcore) through her gigs as a cybererotica expert in San Francisco’s proto-dotcom days up through the success of “LeRoy” and his books.
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 8, 2006 -
IS AMY PASCAL REALLY AMY PASCAL?
I supposed I should take note of the whole JT Leroy thing. I’m referring, of course, to the recent piece by Warren St. John in the New York Times revealing that the shy, diminuitive figure with a floppy hat, black sunglasses, and a smear of red lipstick appearing in public as author JT Petty is actually a woman named Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Geoffrey Knoop, husband of Laura Albert. Albert is the 40-year-old Brooklyn woman who, in a New York magazine piece a few months ago, Steven Beachy asserted was the person behind JT Leroy’s fiction and rapidly […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 13, 2006 -
EVERYBODY’S TALKIN’…
… about the article by Stephen Beachy in this week’s New York which argues that author and sometime Filmmaker contributor J.T. Leroy is actually not a young former teen hustler turned novelist but rather a 39-year-old mother from Brooklyn. To see what Leroy himself might have to say about the piece, I clicked over to his site and found the photograph, at right, on his homepage with the caption “The J.T. Leroy’s hard at work on the next novel.” An admission of truth or an ironic riposte? You decide…
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 12, 2005
