YOU SHOULD WRITE A BOOK, THEY SHOULD MAKE A MOVIE

Lawyers are often key players in life stories that seem designed for a Hollywood thriller or TV movie.

The district attorney in San Francisco's Golden Dragon Massacre, named after the restaurant and the five murders and eleven woundings, where a warring gang tried to assassinate its rival in Chinatown certainly thought so.  To avoid having to give up discovery to the defense, me (I had the young man regarded as the leader, who did not go to the shooting, but one his brothers stole the shooters' car and the other brother drove, did) the DA put some interesting documents into file storage that he deemed "personal."  Naturally when we found out he was writing a book, we put the DA on the witness stand and he was forced to cough up his treasures.  I'm still waiting for his book.

Books and movies were written about the Golden Dragon, but none was nearly as interesting or exciting as anything I experienced in representing the young man through two changes of venue because of all the bad publicity, in three counties, and two trials.  In a case I was told I'd lose in half-an-hour, I spent two years of my life in constant litigation through two jury trials in Santa Barbara.  I'd hung the jury in the Golden Dragon case.

In the amply publicized Foxglove case where a beautiful young Gypsy woman was indicted for conspiring to befriend and marry really old men in order to try to inherit their money, and then of hastening the day the money falls by murdering them, with heart medicine (police dug up four bodies, I got the case dismissed after she spent two years in jail), I was often told that the story ought to be made into a movie.  "Or an opera," I'd reply, because this was the movie that never ended and had more dramatic turns than Don Giovanni.

Suppose I'd wanted to tell the stories with an eye to the book market or Hollywood, what would I have to think about, legally?  Would I need my client's permission?  What about attorney-client privilege?  Whose story would I be telling?  My client's?  Or mine?  Can I use my client's image in telling my story?

The article below, reprinted from Law.com, discusses what it is that you're actually selling when you try to sell your story as a lawyer representing a client to Hollywood.

Someday I'm going to have to figure out how Hollywood takes a case that took years to fight, where a court appearance just to continue the case took half-a-day, and crammed the whole story into two hours.  This is the art, I suppose, and the reason why they combine and invent characters.  Finally they have to run a disclaimer "Based on a true story..."

I have trouble watching crime programs on TV because the drama of real life is so much better.

In a crime movie featuring a more-or-less celebrated San Francisco defense lawyer and one of his big cases, the depiction of the district attorney as man of evil resulted in the threat of a suit for libel, so the locale was switched to a distant city and the facts were changed, which killed the movie for me.  Try setting "Gone With the Wind" in Alaska and see what you get.

An experienced writer friend, also an attorney, who wanted to write up one of my cases, advised that in telling a story no one really cares how close you stick to the facts.  The only thing that counts is to tell a really gripping story.

The really gripping lawyer story, made into a movie, that I've most admired is "Breaker Morant," about three Australian soldiers accused of murdering prisoners during the Boer War in South Africa.  A young Australian soldier is appointed the day before the trial to defend the soldiers in a command-influenced court martial.  The British high command transfers defense witnesses to other parts of the Empire to conceal the truth of the "I-was-only-following-orders" defense. 

Later when I represented a young police officer in a trial for his job before the police brass when he was accused of using excessive force by his field training officer in a case where her own position and credibility was at stake, I knew just how the lawyer in Breaker Morant must've felt.  The result was similar, I might add.

The S.F. Recorder article, by Kellie Schmitt, appears below: