This is the real-life story of Sarah Edmondson and Ben Darras. Darras is in prison for life in Mississippi for killing William Savage, the cotton-gin manager, on March 7, 1995. Edmondson is serving a 35-year sentence in Louisiana for armed robbery and attempted murder the next day. The woman she shot, Patsy Byers, died of cancer in 1997. Now Byers’s family is suing Warner Bros., which released the film, and director Stone, hoping to recover millions of dollars in damages. The lawsuit is an extreme long shot: no artist, author or movie company has ever been held liable in the United States for inciting murder. But after the Littleton, Colo., shootings, when people are looking for someone to blame for violence in society, the lawsuit is a potential public-relations disaster for Hollywood.
Just how embarrassing became clearer last week. Lawyers for both sides gathered in tiny Amite, La., to work out how far the Byers camp can go in probing Stone’s intentions when he made “Natural Born Killers.” Warner Bros. agreed to turn over outtakes and rough cuts of the film, among other things–but is refusing to hand over Stone’s psychological and medical records. Stone will also be deposed by Byers’s attorneys. “We have nothing to hide,” a Warner Bros. source says, but studio executives cringe at the thought of what the notoriously unpredictable Stone might say. The plaintiffs have already seized on a remark by Stone to The New York Times in 1996, when he released a video of his “director’s cut” of “Natural Born Killers,” an even gorier version than Warner Bros. permitted to appear in theaters in 1994. Stone insisted the movie was a satire of America’s glorification of violence. But he added, “The most pacifistic people in the world said they came out of this movie and wanted to kill somebody.”
Stone enjoys considerable protection under the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. The Byers family’s lawyers must show that Stone intended to incite violence, and that the movie led to imminent lawlessness. Byers’s lawyer Joe Simpson admits he’s got a “rough row to hoe.” Sarah Edmondson, now deeply remorseful, is cooperating with the lawyers for the woman she shot. But she stops short of putting all or most of the blame on the movie. She had a history of psychological and drug problems. She declined to speak to NEWSWEEK, but three years ago a Vanity Fair reporter asked if “Natural Born Killers” made Edmondson and her boyfriend embark on a deadly road trip like the one depicted in the film. The movie, she answered, “has its influence but it is not as great as I would like to make it be… And I wish I could say that it did. I wish I could point the finger at Hollywood completely. But that’s not so, that’s not honest.” Before the shooting spree, the couple also watched Disney’s “Fantasia.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers are hoping that a sympathetic local jury will want to punish Hollywood anyway. A Warner Bros. source says the studio will never settle out of court, for fear of inspiring more lawsuits or inviting censorship. The judge eventually may decide to throw the case out. But if it goes to trial, Byers’s lawyers should have no trouble painting a lurid picture of the making of “Natural Born Killers.” They can start with the eye-opening memoir written by one of the film’s young producers, Jane Hamsher. In “Killer Instinct,” Hamsher reveals that Warner Bros. agreed to make the movie against its own better judgment because it was reluctant to upset Stone, who was regarded as an “A list” director. Stone, she writes, was tired of making high-minded movies like “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Platoon.” “Everyone expects me to be the guy with the message,” she quotes Stone as saying. “I just want to do something that’s completely nihilistic.” (Stone also declined to speak to NEWSWEEK.)
To find the right location for the movie, Hamsher writes, Stone and his crew embarked on scouting trips that would sometimes end in drunken, drugged-out bacchanalias. On a drive through the New Mexico desert, Stone’s van, at least some of whose passengers were tripping on psychedelic mushrooms, was followed by a police cruiser. “Oliver’s paranoia flipped out,” Hamsher writes. " ‘You’re going too slow!’ he screamed. ‘He [the police] knows we’ve got drugs in the van’." Stone used the close shave as inspiration for a scene in the movie. “It was weird to watch them reenact the alternating paranoia and hysteria of our own previous experience as the camera rolled,” Hamsher writes. “Where did the reality stop and the movie take over?”
Warner Bros. was exceedingly nervous about the film until a series of real-life events, including the Menendez and Simpson murders, convinced the studio heads that Stone’s movie was “relevant.” But then came several grisly copycat murders apparently influenced by the movie, including the Darras-Edmondson shooting spree. Wary once more, the studio refused to release Stone’s director’s cut on video. Stone has vigorously disputed Hamsher’s characterizations. “I never lost control of that movie,” he said when the book first appeared.
Hollywood does not really fear that Congress is going to try to regulate the movie business or force a stricter ratings system. Last week prominent Americans led by Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and retired Gen. Colin Powell asked the industry to voluntarily reduce the amount of violent and sexual material available to kids. But the studio executives hate publicity about their moral values. “The rest of the country thinks Hollywood is a bunch of rich liberals in Gucci loafers. And we are,” says a former studio executive turned producer. “Drawing attention to us never does any good.” Drawing attention to make-believe is the business of Hollywood. What the plaintiffs hope to show in their lawsuit is that the line between reality and fantasy was lost on Sarah Edmondson and Ben Darras as they dropped acid, watched “Natural Born Killers” one more time and pocketed Daddy’s .38 revolver–before they hit the road, looking for blood.
