In 2006, an excruciating Oprah Winfrey Show segment saw writer James Frey admit that his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was fabricated. Pieces had been an unorthodox selection for Oprah’s Book Club, the greatest commercial boon a pre-BookTok publication could receive. But popularity invites scrutiny, and investigations by The Smoking Gun, among other publications, found more holes than a Swiss cheese factory. As one of many damning examples, Frey’s claim of a combative, drug-fueled confrontation with police officers that led to an 87-day jail sentence was really a polite interaction regarding minor offenses. Who could have guessed?
This interview, unfolding as it had during the waning days of broadcast television’s monolithic cultural status, was a Big Deal. Maureen Dowd called it a “huge relief” to see Oprah stress the importance of truth in the wake of a scandal-riddled election. Frey lost his agent and his book deal, his publisher had to offer refunds, and both parties navigated lawsuits. Other memoirs caught in the wake were slapped with disclaimers or canceled. Even South Park mocked Frey when Towelie confessed his own fabrications to Oprah’s papercraft counterpart. With his reputation in tatters, Frey’s next move was obvious. He needed to crank out a cash-grabbing young adult sci-fi franchise.
I Am Number Four, written under the tryhard pseudonym Pittacus Lore, hit bookstores in 2010 and promptly climbed sales charts. Reviews were mixed, but this was the height of YA’s cultural conquest, and lukewarm thoughts in Kirkus weren’t about to slow the juggernaut. The movie rights had already been sold pre-publication, and when I Am Number Four, the cinematic experience, hit theatres 15 years ago today, it represented the cynical nadir of the YA boom.
John Smith (Alex Pettyfer), aka Four, is secretly an alien from the planet Lorien, which has been conquered by the nefarious Mogadorians. He and eight other gifted Loric, dubbed the Garde, are hiding out on Earth, where the “Mogs” are on their tail (although, for reasons the movie doesn’t bother to explain, the Garde can only be killed in numeric order). We open with Three’s demise and John accidentally exposing his superpowers, so he and his guardian (a slumming Timothy Olyphant) must flee to an Ohio safehouse. Naturally, despite looking old enough to rent a car, John enrolls at the local high school, where he promptly makes a quirky friend, antagonizes the local bully, and falls for an attractive, sensitive girl. It’s all very, ahem, paint-by-numbers.
I Am Number Four enjoyed a decent box-office performance, but a sequel failed to materialize and the book series slowly lost steam until it petered out in 2019. Its old fan forums are ghost towns now, and the legacy, or lack thereof, of the larger Lorien Legacies franchise can best be illustrated by fanfiction.net. It claims host to just 686 Lorien stories, while even the ill-fated Divergent franchise sports over 8,400.
John flexes his vague powers.
That makes the movie feel like a relic today. We buy silly phrases like Quarter Quell and Wingardium Leviosa because of what the associated franchises have accomplished, but without the cultural cachet success brings, dour talk about “Legacies” falls flat. Everything feels too calculated; our bad boy hero is introduced flipping a Ski-Doo. Kevin Durand provides a bit of dark levity as the sinister but jocular Mog commander, but there’s just not enough here to make Four feel like a heartfelt story rather than a bunch of TVTropes pages stapled together.
The story behind I Am Number Four is more interesting than the plot, not that that represents a high bar. But as studio executives and some of our less-creative creatives speculate about churning out “content” with generative AI, it’s worth looking back at how the movie that gave us the flirtatious line “The Big Dipper… that’s my favourite… do you know that one?” came to be.
Frey actually co-wrote I Am Number Four with MFA student Jobie Hughes under the auspices of Frey’s Full Fathom Five, a company founded with the goal of churning out Twilight-esque YA hits. Even ignominious frauds deserve to have their bills paid, but in 2011, Suzanne Mozes reported that Frey was essentially running a fiction sweatshop.
Just a couple of kids who are definitely still in high school.
Authors were offered just $250 for finishing a novel draft; while there was talk of profit sharing, industry insiders expressed serious concerns over the many onerous restrictions in the company’s contracts. It’s unclear how many of Full Fathom Five’s planned books actually came to fruition (Frey claims 240, including 40 bestsellers, but we know what his word is worth), and Hughes left the now-dead company and sued Frey not long after the two had a lengthy screaming match.
Frey comes across like a preening hypocrite in Mozes’ telling, a man who talks about what a controversial, boundary-pushing genius he is before trying to grind out high-concept sludge for pure profit (maybe Mozes is exaggerating him, but if so, you have to appreciate the irony). The latter, at least, was mission accomplished. But as HBO remakes Harry Potter for television and another Hunger Games prequel starring absurdly-named teenagers shuffles towards theaters, the Lorien Legacies are unlikely to be included in our current wave of YA nostalgia. There’s just nothing to be nostalgic about.
The attitude that gave us I Am Number Four, however, is everywhere. In a softball Vanity Fair interview, Frey admitted to using ChatGPT to answer research questions for a 2025 novel, which suggests that his new book sports at least one comical factual error. That he’s unwilling to even do his own research is a fitting coda. A few years from now, we may very well be awash with AI-powered movies made by people who can’t be bothered to tell their own stories, or even criminally underpay a desperate writer for one. But 15 years from now, if we’re still writing about them at all, it will only be in the context of what a soulless waste of time it all was.
