Interesting discussion, thanks to all readers.

I neglected to mention Elizabeth Cohen of the Binghamton daily paper, the Press and News-Bulletin, who wrote the first piece about Marla and serves as the conscience of the film, challenging Bar-Lev at several points about what he is doing and whether it might be better to walk away. Of course, she can't help herself either; she wrote another article this week (about the movie and her role in it).

Secondly, I think it's very interesting to ask -- as several of you have -- how the art would have been received if it had been presented from the beginning as a collaboration between Mark and Marla Olmstead. The funny thing here is that the postmodernist art establishment, exactly the institution that Marla's success supposedly "exposes," in some people's eyes, might have been open to that. Collaboration is very big these days, and the whole idea of a solitary artist producing great work more or less ex nihilo is sort of a relic of the past.

On the other hand, would the mainstream media have been interested, along with the kinds of middle-American collectors who saw Marla as embodying some kind of pure and innocent spirituality and drove up her prices to ludicrous levels? I doubt it. (It's important to understand that it *wasn't* the New York gallery world that embraced Marla, but an entirely different demographic.)

In any case, *if* the story is that Mark "helped" Marla extensively, as seems plausible, it isn't that fact that got the family into this predicament. It's their insistence on a somewhat old-fashioned mythology of what an artist is and how s/he works.

I don't know where the first poster developed that peculiar theory about Repo Man and Jonathan Wacks (one of its producers), but as far as I can tell it is totally baseless.

Alex Cox has consistently credited Wacks and his producing partner Peter McCarthy for hiring him and encouraging him to write & direct the film. (The trio knew each other at UCLA.) Given that Wacks and McCarthy are the credited producers, and never became uninvolved with the film, I'm not sure who supposedly "bought them out" or when and why that would have happened. It's not like Alex Cox was some big-name established director or something.

Wacks & McCarthy appear alongside Cox in the making-of featurette attached to the 2006 Repo Man DVD, exchanging many friendly anecdotes. There is some water under the bridge with these guys, but no evident bad blood. In fact, they cheerfully discuss the fact that one of the producers (I forget which) had to rewrite the last scene to Universal's specifications, which kind of flies in the face of some elaborate and pointless conspiracy re authorship.

BTW, Jonathan Wacks went on to direct several films (incl Powwow Highway in 1989) and various TV episodes (21 Jump Street!), so that part of the story doesn't hold up either. Given a lack of evidence to support any part of this story, I declare hokum.