In the Year 2525

Bernardo Bertolucci died November 26. He was a great filmmaker, but since this blog is about me, I'm going to make his death about me. There is something unwholesome about that, but I think Bertolucci would approve. Or at least give that little smirk he used from time to time.

Bertolucci is a character in my most recent book, Acting Like Adults. He does not run from town to town solving crimes or anything as stupid. He is a very minor character. One of the protagonists is an actor who gets a part in a feature film. As soon as I decided that the fictional film would be a biography of French writer/anarchist Émile Armand, I knew that Bertolucci had to be the director. I could have just as easily created a fictional director, but this seemed like a project he might enjoy, and his reputation works in my favor. Had I created a fictional character, it would have been based on Bertolucci anyway.

Legally, you can portray a real person in your work of fiction as long as it is not libelous. Bertolucci is described in this book as a great filmmaker, so I doubt anyone would call that libel. Realistically, he was never going to know about it anyway. The only possible trouble I might have faced was in my description of his home. A recent interview with him described the interior and it was surprisingly easy to find his address. In the one in a billion chance he read the book, he might not have appreciated my attention to detail.

My only real concern was his health. He was 76, recovering from spinal surgery and confined to a wheelchair when I started writing the book. He also had cancer, but that disease is a wild card in everyone's deck. If he had died while I was writing, I would have changed him into a fictional character.

Hugh Hefner died in September 2017, long after I finished the first draft. He is not a character in the book, but two of the characters do some work related to his magazine and there is a brief mention of someone making a film about his life. Like Bertolucci, he is very much alive when this story takes place. I was kind of hoping that someone would make a movie about him just after this book came out. That has yet to happen.

They were alive when I wrote the book, as were Jerry Lewis, Jeanne Moreau, Glenne Headly, Martin Landau and Rose Marie. There was a time when I considered having the story take place in the recent past. Had I done that, it might be easier to understand that so many dead people are supposed to be alive.

In the book, one of the actor characters gets a part in a new HBO series about the Civil War called Secession. Other than what would have to be a ridiculous budget, the fictional series in the story sounds like something the real HBO would love to do. There is plenty of room for excessive violence, action and nudity. As far as American wars go, the Civil War is one of the most popular.

More than a year after I created the fictional series, HBO released a real series called Succession. It has nothing to do with the Civil War, but the title similarities put it in the predictions category. I'm no Jules Verne, but this book saw the future more than anything else I have ever written. Of course, the real HBO series was probably in development before I started writing about the fictional series, but along with the rest of the general public, I had no way of knowing about that. And their title might have changed more than a few times. Even when it was announced, I never heard about it. Most HBO shows never make it to HBO Asia. I don't think we get this one, but we have the one about the detective in 1960s Singapore that they probably don't show in America.

But my biggest unintentional prediction in Acting Like Adults is Harvey Weinstein. The lead antagonist is a respected and successful movie producer who does very bad things in private. Everything we know about Weinstein's crimes became public knowledge long after I finished the first draft. Looking at it now, anyone would assume that my fictional character is based on him. But I knew nothing about all the horrible things he did while I was writing the story. I even mentioned him by name, positively, in a previous book, Harmony On Spring Hill. One of the fictional characters in that book is described as “the Harvey Weinstein of Israel”. It was meant as a description of that character's success. Today, it sounds like I'm saying something very different that I never intended.

My fictional Weinstein character might sound like the real Weinstein in hindsight, but I actually based him on Lou Pearlman, the successful record producer who did very bad things in private. I'm not even subtle about it. The character's name is Jay Pearlman. Lou Pearlman's full name was Louis Jay Pearlman. The real Lou Pearlman was from Queens and used his cousin, Art Garfunkel, to break into record producing. The fictional Jay Pearlman is from New York and uses his family connections to break into movies. But Weinstein and his crimes are more famous, so anyone who reads this book will make the obvious assumptions. Five hundred years from now, when children are forced to read this book in school as the last surviving example of literature from the Ancient American Empire, it will be a given that the Jay Pearlman character was based on the real life monster who inspired the Winestine Laws. Those poor children will never know the truth.

Obviously, I'm joking about one of my books being read in 500 years. The only thing they will have from today is Fifty Shades of Grey and The Great Kardashian Twitters.