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RV That are we to make of John Grisham? Up until last year, no one seemed more successful at integrating the roles of lawyer and novelist. Since 1991, at least one new best-selling novel appeared each year-The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill-that spawned yet another blockbuster movie focusing on some sensational aspect of the judicial system. Then, apparently forgetting his own artistic affiliation with Hollywood, Grisham launched his own crusade against director Oliver Stone. What began in the spring of 1996 as a literary critique of Stone's 1995 film Natural Born Killers had escalated by June into an all-out, real-life legal battle.
Grisham's essay "Unnatural Killers" appeared in a southern literary journal he co-- publishes, The Oxford American. The essay blamed Stone's film for the March 7, 1995, murder of a Mississippi cotton-gin manager named William Savage and for the shooting the following day of Patsy Byers in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, which left this part-time convenience store clerk paralyzed from the neck down. A teenage couple from Oklahoma was arrested for the crimes, and the girl, Sarah Edmondson, testified that she and her boyfriend, Benjamin Darras, had seen Natural Born Killers numerous times before driving off in the direction of Memphis with the vague notion of attending a Grateful Dead concert. Sarah reported that during the drive Ben couldn't stop thinking about Stone's film, and "spoke openly of killing people, randomly, just like Mickey spoke to Mallory" (3) before those two fictional lovers in Natural Born Killers began the killing spree that resulted in more than fifty deaths. Diverted from their Memphis destination, Ben and Sarah wandered into Hernando, Mississippi, where Ben allegedly shot and robbed Savage in his office.
Then, wrote Grisham, just as "Mickey encouraged Mallory to kill" (4), Ben urged Sarah to do the same. Grisham took Sarah's explanation for shooting Patsy Byers as further evidence of the influence of Stone's film (influence which Sarah herself has rejected):1 just as Mickey and Mallory were pursued by demons, Sarah "didn't see a thirty-five-year-old woman next to the cash register" when she pulled the trigger, but a "demon"(4).2
Clearly, Grisham was doing his own bit of demonizing.3 Alleging that the film was made "with the intent of glorifying random murder"...