![]() This film adaptation treats Frey's book simply as a story, not questioning or even acknowledging challenges to its truthfulness, but rendering it with poker-faced reverence. ![]() It wasn't even possible to locate a police mug shot of Frey, despite claims in the book that he'd been arrested for a variety of crimes, some of them outrageous. The publisher ended up recanting their description of Frey's book as a true story, and offered refunds to readers who felt deceived. It became an object of scandal in 2006 after The Smoking Gun website revealed that a lot of the dramatic and/or salacious details recounted in Frey's supposedly true story couldn't be corroborated, including a tragedy that had Rosebud-like significance to the main character. Frey's source book was originally published by Random House as a memoir in 2003 and championed by Oprah Winfrey on her televised book club. ![]() To be more precise, the movie's story felt too familiar in the way that timeworn showbiz cliches feel too familiar. I must've blocked the real-life details of writer James Frey's professional scandal out of my mind, because it wasn't until a half-hour into the movie version of his drug rehab book "A Million Little Pieces" that I started to question why, if this story was true, it felt fake. ![]()
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