Who Owns a Love Story?

My wife and I recently finished watching Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the FX series streaming on Hulu and Disney+. We enjoyed it, but not just because it was good television. For us, it was also a trip back in time.

Back in that day, I subscribed to George magazine, and I followed John F. Kennedy Jr.'s career. I remember the coverage of his struggles to pass the New York bar exam. I watched as he tried to build something of his own rather than simply live off the most famous political name in America.

At the time, I was working in Democratic politics. Like a lot of people, I held out hope that eventually John would enter politics himself. Then came July 1999.

I remember the waiting. The uncertainty. And eventually the devastating realization that John, Carolyn and her sister Lauren Bessette were gone. So, watching Love Story more than 25 years later wasn't simply watching a dramatization of famous people. It was a window back into an era my wife and I remember vividly.

That may be part of what good historical drama does best. It doesn't just recreate history. It rekindles or recreates memory.

But whose memory?

That question kept nagging at me as we watched.  My wife had read Elizabeth Beller's 2024 biography, Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, which the series credits as inspiration. I hadn't read it and wasn’t familiar with it.

So naturally, the lawyer and filmmaker in me started wondering about the rights.

How did the producers get permission to tell this story? Did the Kennedys cooperate? Did the Bessette family? What about Daryl Hannah? Calvin Klein? Caroline Kennedy? The other living people portrayed in the series?

The answer is more complicated and more interesting than I expected because the filmmakers didn't get permission from the families. They didn't need it. And apparently, they didn't want it.

That distinction gets to the heart of something I think anyone interested in telling true stories needs to understand.

You don't own your life story in quite the way most people think you do.

You can own a telling. You can't own history.

The TV mini-series project that became Love Story began before Beller's book was published. FX announced Ryan Murphy's American Love Story anthology in 2021, with John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette as its first subject. Beller's biography wasn't published until 2024.

The finished series is described as being inspired by her book, but I’m not sure that is fully accurate. That chronology matters.  I expect they utilized material from the book, so they ended up optioning it.

The producers didn't need to buy a book to tell the basic story of John and Carolyn.

They were public figures. Their relationship had been covered extensively. There were books, interviews, photographs, magazine stories, television reports and decades of public information available about them. Historical facts aren't protected by copyright.

But Beller's telling of those facts is. Her writing. Her original expression. Her research. Her selection and organization of material. Copyright law protects the expression of a story in a tangible form. That's an important distinction.

A true story may be available to everyone, but a particular telling of that story isn't.

Then the screenwriters had to build a story.

This is where I became even more interested in Love Story. Creator and showrunner Connor Hines and his writing team reportedly spent 20 weeks immersed in research.

They read books and magazine articles. They watched documentaries and television appearances. They went through old issues of George. They tried to understand not simply what happened, but who these people were.

Hines has described the objective as trying to capture an "essence of truth." I keep coming back to that phrase because it describes one of the fundamental challenges of dramatizing real life.

Facts can tell you what happened. They rarely tell you everything you need to write a scene.

Consider one of the most famous incidents in John and Carolyn's relationship. Their very public argument in a New York park was photographed by paparazzi.

We know it happened. We can see where they stood. We can see their body language. We can see John grab Carolyn's arm. But we don't have a transcript.

So, what did they say?

That's where historical fact ends and dramatic storytelling begins. The writer must connect the dots. I understand that problem better than I used to as I've encountered a version of it while making Steak Guerrillas.

At one point, I had four members of the same family remembering the same event slightly differently. Nobody was lying. That's how memory works.

People remember different details. They interpret motivations differently. Years later, family stories become intertwined with the way those stories have been retold. Sometimes listening to others tell a story we lived through will shape how we remember it. Ironically, that is something that happened to JFK Jr. himself with respect to his father’s assassination that is explored somewhat in Love Story.

In our case with Steak Guerrillas, we were collaborating primarily with the oldest son, so we ultimately deferred to his account when we encountered a discrepancy. But I also knew there were elements of what happened that he couldn't personally know.

He was over 8,000 miles away when some of the events occurred, yet he was insistently telling us how many people were in a room, while those in the room gave us a different account.  So, what is "the truth"?

That's a much harder question than it sounds. And it helps me understand why Love Story's producers made a decision that surprised some. They deliberately didn't involve the families.

Producer Brad Simpson has explained that the production did not seek cooperation from either the Kennedy or Bessette families. The reasoning is fascinating.

Once you begin working closely with one family member, you risk becoming tethered to that person's version of events.

And what happens when another family member remembers things differently?

Whose truth wins?

I respect the filmmakers' decision more than I expected.

I believe deeply in collaboration when telling true stories. Much of what we're building at STORYSMART is based on finding better ways for storytellers and the people whose stories are being told to work together.

But collaboration can't mean surrendering editorial judgment.

A filmmaker's job isn't to produce the version of history that makes every participant comfortable. The job is to tell a good story, and when dealing with real people, to do so responsibly. Those two obligations can come into conflict.

"Essence of truth" gives you freedom. It also gives you responsibility.

This is where Love Story becomes especially interesting. Some scenes inevitably involve conversations no writer could possibly know. Private conversations between John and Carolyn. Arguments behind closed doors. Conversations with Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Interactions with Calvin Klein. Moments involving Daryl Hannah.

Writers reconstruct those moments from available evidence and then dramatize them. Sometimes they compress timelines. Sometimes they combine events. Sometimes they invent dialogue. That's what dramatic storytelling requires. The question isn't whether invention occurred. Of course it did. By the very nature of the medium, it is a “fictionalization” of a true story. It isn’t real. It’s acting. It’s storytelling.

The more interesting question is whether the invention remains faithful to that "essence of truth." And who gets to decide?

Daryl Hannah depiction offers a cautionary example. Hannah has publicly and forcefully objected to her portrayal in the series. Among other things, she disputed scenes depicting drug use and her behavior surrounding Jackie Kennedy Onassis's death and funeral.

Her concern goes beyond simply disliking the performance.

She argues that viewers see her real name attached to a character and assume what they are watching what actually happened. That's a legitimate concern.

Producer Brad Simpson has defended the series, pointing to the breadth of its research and saying the filmmakers tried to approach the characters with empathy. Both things can be true.

The filmmakers can sincerely believe they captured the essence of what happened and Daryl Hannah can sincerely believe they got her wrong. That's the uncomfortable territory true-story filmmakers enter every time we put words into the mouths of real people.

Calvin Klein presents another interesting example.

Carolyn's professional life at Calvin Klein occupies a significant portion of the series. And I'm glad it does. One of the things I appreciated most about the show was that Carolyn isn't portrayed simply as "JFK Jr.'s wife."

We see an ambitious young woman who was extraordinarily good at what she did. She starts near the bottom of the Calvin Klein organization and works her way into its inner circle.

Alessandro Nivola portrays Calvin Klein as a mentor, boss, friend and complicated presence in her life. Again, however, we are watching dramatized private conversations involving a living person.

We know Carolyn worked for Calvin Klein. We know she became important within the company. We know many things about that world from public reporting and people who were there. But the closer the camera gets to a private conversation, the farther the storyteller moves from independently verifiable fact.

That's where research, judgment and ethics become inseparable from craft.

Legally, American storytellers have considerable room.

There is no general requirement in the United States that a filmmaker acquire someone's "life rights" before portraying that person in a film or television series.

The First Amendment provides substantial protection for expressive works about real people and matters of public interest.

FX itself has been here before.

Olivia de Havilland sued over her portrayal in another Ryan Murphy series, Feud: Bette and Joan. A California appellate court rejected her claims, recognizing the First Amendment protection afforded filmmakers dramatizing real people and historical events.

That doesn't mean filmmakers can simply make up anything they want.

Living people may have potential claims involving defamation, false light, privacy or publicity rights depending on the circumstances and jurisdiction.

That's why sophisticated productions employ lawyers. It's also why serious filmmakers do their homework. But there's a difference between asking:

Can I legally tell this story?

and asking:

How should I tell this story?

I think the second question is harder.  That's the part of true-story storytelling that fascinates me.

There is a temptation to think there is one definitive version of every true story. Usually there isn't. There are facts. There is evidence. There are records. There are memories. There are perspectives. And then there are the spaces between them.

Those spaces are where storytellers work.

Our responsibility isn't to pretend those spaces don't exist. It's to navigate them intelligently. Research relentlessly. Separate what we know from what we believe.

Listen to people who were there without automatically accepting every recollection as fact. Understand that memory is imperfect. Recognize our own biases and then make choices.

Because ultimately, storytelling requires choices.

Maybe that's what "essence of truth" really means.

I still wrestle with the phrase. It can become a dangerous excuse. A filmmaker could use "emotional truth" or "essence of truth" to justify almost any invention that makes a story more entertaining. I don't think that's good enough. But I also don't believe the standard for a dramatic series can be that every line of dialogue must be documented.

If that were the standard, most historical dramas couldn't exist.

The challenge is finding the line between dramatic interpretation and factual distortion.

There isn't a simple formula for that, which is precisely why the ethics matter. The law gives us freedom. Ethics tells us what to do with it.

That's ultimately what stayed with me after watching Love Story.

I started out wondering who gave the filmmakers permission to tell John and Carolyn's story.

I ended up realizing that permission wasn't really the most interesting question.

The filmmakers had the legal ability to tell it. They acquired rights to a particular source. They conducted extensive independent research. They made judgments about conflicting accounts. And then they used the tools of drama to fill in what history couldn't tell them.

Some people believe they got parts of it wrong. That's almost inevitable.

I certainly can't tell you exactly what John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette said to one another behind closed doors. Neither can the writers or their families.

What a responsible storyteller can do is assemble the evidence, understand the people, acknowledge the uncertainty and try to create something that feels truthful without pretending imagination is fact.

That's a tremendous amount of freedom and an equally tremendous responsibility.

Maybe that's why my wife and I enjoyed Love Story as much as we did.

For nine episodes, John and Carolyn weren't frozen in the photographs I remembered from the 1990s. They were young again. George was new again. New York felt like that New York again.

And for those of us who remember waiting for news about a missing plane in July 1999, we knew exactly where the story was heading.

The ending couldn't be changed. Everything between the known facts could.



That's where the true storytelling lives.