A TIME TO SUE

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Who can predict which works of art will provoke what sorts of desperate acts? Mark David Chapman was clutching The Catcher in the Rye when he murdered John Lennon. Three years ago, a movie called The Program gave several teenagers the notion that it might be worth their while to lie down in the middle of a busy highway. But if you're a bored, unbalanced person in need of inspiration, Oliver Stone's 1994 film Natural Born Killers--in which Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis go on a murder spree and win fame for their efforts--may be a natural-born trigger.

Or so says best-selling author John Grisham, who has seized on the movie as an opportunity to take up arms in the culture wars and possibly break new legal ground in the process. In a celebrity catfight detailed in July's Vanity Fair, Grisham has suggested that Stone should be held responsible under product-liability law for any violence caused by Natural Born Killers--whose critics claim helped inspire several copycat murders. (Indeed, the film has become such a hot potato that one of its producers, Jane Hamsher, confirms that Warner Bros., the studio that produced it, has quietly relinquished its rights to the even more brutal "director's cut" video version.)

Grisham had a personal reason for concocting this novel legal theory. In March 1995, William Savage, an acquaintance of Grisham's, was gunned down at the cotton gin where he worked, out-side Hernando, Mississippi; the next day, convenience-store clerk Patsy Byers was shot and paralyzed in nearby Ponchatoula, Louisiana. Benjamin Darras, 18, and Sarah Edmondson, 19, have been accused of both crimes. Edmondson told authorities that before the shootings, she and Darras took LSD and watched Natural Born Killers, which they had seen countless times.

This angered Grisham, who took to the pages of the Oxford American, a magazine he publishes, to excoriate the filmmaker. "He's an artist and he can't be bothered with the effects of what he produces," Grisham wrote. But just let Stone lose a million-dollar product-liability lawsuit, "and the party will be over."

A representative for Stone calls the charges "ridiculously bizarre," and in a reply published in L.A. Weekly, Stone mused about the tenuous causal links between art and reality: "Has your lawyer-husband been unfaithful? Why, then, slap a summons on John Grisham, since, after all, he wrote The Firm." While acknowledging the film had an "impact" on viewers, the director suggests that Grisham might better focus his anger on "gun-toting crazies."

Still, Stone may yet have to face a Louisiana jury. Attorney Joseph Simpson, who represents clerk Patsy Byers, has named Stone and Warner Bros. in a civil suit filed before Grisham's statements. But other experts feel confident that Stone's First Amendment rights will prevail. Besides, says Vincent Blasi, a professor at Columbia Law School, "this idea of legal liability could come back to haunt authors like John Grisham. Censorship, like revolution, often devours its own children."