It would be a relief to inform you that the controversial and imaginary fate of one of the main characters was changed or reconstituted in some way. It would be a thrill to tell you that the couple’s vision somehow incorporated the lies Frey told into their own artistic interpretation of the novel. Frey’s work had touched people who had struggled with addiction, however, and that’s clearly one of the reasons Sam Taylor-Johnson and Aaron Taylor-Johnson collaborated on a new adaptation that debuted at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival on Monday night.
#Million little pieces tv
Warner Bros., which had acquired the film rights, scuttled the picture and the book was left as the butt of jokes in movies and TV shows for the next few years.
The author returned to face Oprah’s wrath in a public whipping that became one of the pop culture moments of 2006. After an investigation by The Smoking Gun was released three months later it turned out much of it was not. Winfrey, too, came around, revealing in 2011 that, after years of meditation, she felt she had initially been too hard on Frey in 2006 and sought his forgiveness.TORONTO – Do you remember James Frey’s 2003 novel “A Million Little Pieces”? The best-selling memoir that turned out not to actually be one? When pressed about it on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2005, Frey claimed his 2003 novel was a factual account of his life as an addict and time in rehab. And A Million Little Pieces continued to sell, only with an apologetic author’s note tacked onto the front and book stores recategorising it as fiction.
Outside of an opening quote from Mark Twain that reads “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened”, nothing untoward is even hinted at.
It is a well-made and well-acted drama, brought to the screen by artist and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson and her actor husband Aaron, who plays Frey, but curiously excludes everything about the book’s post-publication journey. Thirteen years after that infamous Oprah interview, broadcast months after she had effusively praised Frey’s book and turned it into a phenomenon via her book blub, A Million Little Pieces has been adapted into a film. The most captivating element of its existence is the noise that surrounds it – the accusations that it was largely faked, despite being marketed as a memoir, the literary-world war of words over its editing, and the piercing, terrifying glare of Oprah Winfrey, who elegantly destroyed Frey on live television over his apparent betrayal. It is also the least fascinating thing about A Million Little Pieces. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is a sprawling and manic novel about addiction, survival and redemption.