But Dole asserts that no amount of "contextualizing" or disclaimers -- including a brief postscript to the trial that Gertten recently added to the end of his movie -- would be sufficient to offset what the company contends are the gross factual distortions that were put forward by the plaintiffs in court.
"It's a phony, fraudulent story that was made up in one of the worst frauds that I've ever seen in a court in 25 years of practice," Edelman said. "Our position is, even if the filmmaker didn't know this at the outset, he knows it now and the film should not be screened. It needs to be entirely rewritten to reflect the facts."
Edelman said he had not yet seen the film because neither Gertten nor the festival had agreed to show it to him. The filmmaker and festival organizers said they had invited Dole representatives to attend Saturday night's screening.
"We've invited them in various ways, and if something's not accurate [about the film] they ought to tell us," said Michael Donaldson, a lawyer representing the festival and its parent organization, Film Independent.
On May 8, Dole sent letters to the festival's major sponsors, including The Times, denouncing what Dole called the "false and defamatory accusations" made by the film. The company asked the sponsors for "your assistance in preventing the Festival's complicity in this travesty," but did not elaborate in its letter as to what this might mean.
"We're not asking any judge to prevent this film from being shown," Edelman said. "We're just saying, 'Hey, you got the facts wrong, grossly wrong. And it's unfair to Dole to show this film.' "
Gertten believes that his movie, which essentially ends in the fall of 2007, has a valid story to tell, even as that story continues to evolve. "I have to tell the story as I saw it, and that's what I do, and that story ends at that moment," he said.
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reed.johnson@latimes.com
