Notify subject of my story

I would ask... what is the point of telling a true story if you have to change what actually happened?

Obviously lots of people do that... that recent flick "Open Water" took the basic premise of a true unsolved mystery and fictionilised it. They ended up doing rather well. It's still fiction, though.

Her story has clearly moved you in some way; so much so that it is worth documenting on film. Would that personal touch still be there, if you re-wrote the story to be different enough from what really took place?

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On the other hand, since this woman has already published it in a book... you would need to find out who actually has the right to hand out permissions, should you decide to try that route. It may be the publisher, with the author having no say. Or the publisher (or author) may have optioned the rights already. Or the book rights may have returned to the author, if they were taken at some point.

Lots of fun things

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Just some thoughts, anyway.

I think Steve is right, it's not just a legal thing, but morally if you are going to fictionalise an event from this woman's life you should really get her permission.

The other reason that approaching her, maybe a good thing, is that in personal communication with her, she may give you other facets and angles to the story that didn't emerge in her written version.

If she gives you an absolute no, look at what it is in the story that attracted you and then trawl the library of your local paper looking for a similar story.

You can take the basic premise of what happened to her, if theres a moral to the story, keep that, but show it all TOTALLY different.

Say the moral of your story is don't steal. In real life the true story you read was "14 year old shoplifts, gets caught by police, fights police, gets killed"

You can take that, change the setting (time/date/place) change the characters, so that it could read "Cybernetic hacker steals information, starts getting counter-hacked by federal agents, refuses to boot down/log off, the agents kill his connection while he's still jacked in, dies."

Those are drastically different, yet, similar. But ofcourse, if this true story cant be done like that..then it cant be done


But overall, i would try to contact her, If someone wanted to make a movie out of something i did, i'd let em. Wouldn't you? She might be the same way.