Here's an interesting article. It ran in the March 29, St. Petersburg Times, on page D2. I'm transcribing it here because I couldn't find a link to it on the Times website.
Man sues "The Simpsons"; claims Bart hijacked his life
by Miguel Ortega Times Staff Writer
Daniel Birch, a 25-year-old resident of Rome, New York, may not look much like Bart Simpson, the trouble-making son on "The Simpsons," but he says he is the inspiration for the character. He's not happy about it -- in fact, he's suing Fox Entertainment for $14 million dollars, $1 million for each year the program has been broadcast.
The troubles for Birch began when the late art photographer Diane Arbus snapped his picture for a work entitled, "Child with Toy Hand Grenade." In a series of interviews given when "The Simpsons" launched in 1990, cartoonist Matt Groening claimed that Bart Simpson was based in part on this photograph, which shows a little boy in shorts standing in Central Park, holding a hand grenade and striking an almost freakish pose. Word of this eventually got around to Birch's hometown on Long Island, and he immediately became the butt of jokes.
"It was hell," Birch says. "People were always coming up to me and saying, 'What are you going to do this week, Bart?' or 'What's it like to be an underachiever?' It's like they expected me to be this whole other person." Eventually, he says, he slid into the very sort of bad-boy behavior that his cartoon doppelganger became known for.
Birch could be the victim of a Sudden Fame Syndrome, says Dr. Deirdre Bishop, a professor of abnormal psychology at the University of Connecticut. A recently discovered, and still highly debated, disorder, Sudden Fame Syndrome (SFS) afflicts ordinary people who suddenly achieve a measure of fame through no deliberate action of their own. "We first noticed the phenomenon in the 80s," says Bishop, "When late-night talk show hosts would train their cameras on ordinary people. [David] Letterman was notorious for doing this. When he was on NBC, he'd almost literally spy on a woman who was working in the building next door. Eventually, he started calling her on air, and even built a routine around her. She became a minor celebrity just because she happened to work late in her office one night."
Of course, fame in itself doesn't necessarily cause problems. Meg Parsant, the object of Letterman's attentions, apparently took things in stride. "It becomes an issue," according to Bishop, "when the subject can't deal with the attention in a positive manner." In Birch's case, the then-twelve-year-old boy found that he was unable to escape a reputation as a problem child -- a reputation that wasn't of his own making. "This sort of thing can be devastating, especially to an adolescent. He could very well wind up thinking, 'People are always expecting the worst from me; maybe that's what I should give them,'" Bishop said.
Indeed, Birch appears to have lived down to expectations. Originally a competent if not outstanding student, school records show his grade point average declining from 2.7 to a barely-passing 1.5. Trips to the principal's office became more frequent, too. He even began imitating some of Bart's stunts from the show. Thom Moore, one of Birch's childhood friends, remembers, "Once he ripped up some sod on the football field to spell out his name. He was pretty wild." [Well, that's close. Bart used herbicide in "Principal Charming (7F05)," if I recall -- bjr] Even a move upstate to Rome, an attempt to make a fresh start, didn't help. "By then, the pattern was pretty much established," Moore says. Birch eventually dropped out of school several months shy of graduation, and accumulated a police record for various petty offenses. Recently, he completed a GED program and is trying to get his life back on track. "I feel like I'm paying for a mistake I didn't even make," he says. "It's not really about the money. I just want them to admit they screwed up."
Fox Entertainment lawyers contend that the suit really is about the money. Speaking in a press statement, Chief counsel Dennis Wilson says, "We feel this whole thing is a transparent attempt by this young man to shift the responsibility for his actions from himself to the Fox Corporation. It is nothing more than a fishing expedition, and we fully expect the suit to be dismissed as frivolous before it even reaches trial." Other members of the psychiatric community agree with Fox. Joseph Asbury, a psychology professor at UCLA, dismisses the SFS diagnosis altogether. "There is no such thing described in the in any of the literature that I'm familiar with. If you ask me, it's just the syndrome-of-the-month psychobabble."
Even Matt Groening, perhaps surprisingly, sides with his corporate partners. "Bart was never really based on Arbus's photograph," the artist said in a telephone interview. "I was just playing with the interviewer. It was just this funky photograph of hers that stuck in my head. Bart is really more like every boy everywhere who has been let down by the adult system." Groening expressed sympathy for Birch, but thinks his troubles run deeper than an offhand remark he made in an interview.
The Arbus estate, which is not involved in the lawsuit, declined to comment.
[Three small photographs ran with the article: A copy of the Arbus photograph on the left, a "stock" picture of Bart in the center, holding a slingshot, and a Birch head shot (looking a bit scraggly, I might add) on the right. The caption reads, "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY? 'Child with Toy Grenade,' left, is said to have inspired the character of Bart Simpson, center. Dan Birch, right, was the subject of that long-ago photo, and says his life has been difficult since it was linked to the cartoon star." -- bjr]