The making of 'The Soloist'

Steve Lopez on the possibility that the book and movie may be seen as exploiting Ayers...

“Well, this story presented many moral conflicts for me from the very beginning of the first column. We don’t often put the names in the newspaper of people who have a mental illness, and here I was asking Mr. Ayers if that was okay, and he said, ‘sure.’ But I had to ask myself, ‘Is he competent to make a decision?’ We decided that what we needed to ask ourselves maybe was, ‘why do we not put their names in the paper? What are we trying to hide? What has this culture and this society been trying to hide?’ We felt that this was a rare opportunity to tell a compelling human story that might approach the idea of stigma.”