Whatever the deepest issues that led her to run away four days prior to her April 30 wedding - triggering a massive, expensive, nationwide search - 32-year-old Jennifer Wilbanks apparently will put that distress behind her with the proceeds from the movie rights she sold for her story.

Increasingly, that's becoming the "American way" - like it or not. An unfortunate incident, albeit self-induced, becomes movie fodder, and movie watchers are sucked into the drama, no matter how shallow the story and no matter how the story has been "enhanced" for watchers' interest and viewing pleasure.

Hopefully, Wilbanks will be able to live happily ever after the movie reaches either TV or big screens, or both. It certainly was uncharacteristic for someone her age to run away from a wedding ceremony that was to have 600 guests and 28 attendants.

Wilbanks took a bus to Las Vegas and then Albuquerque, N.M., and claimed she was abducted and sexually assaulted, but later recanted, saying she fled because of unspecified personal issues. Instead of settling in to married life, Wilbanks was in court earlier this month pleading no contest to making a false statement to authorities.

"It's disturbing to me on a personal basis that she's willing to profit from this, but there's nothing I can do about it legally," said Gwinnett County, Ga., District Attorney Danny Porter, who pursued charges against Wilbanks. But ReganMedia, a New York multimedia company, which, like Wilbanks, hopes to make money from the production, doesn't consider it disturbing at all.

Judith Regan, company president, described Wilbanks' story as an "unexpected and compelling story of love and forgiveness that has certainly taught me a thing or two."

Too bad that explanation ignores the thousands of positive, more-compelling, real-life stories of love and forgiveness that happen every day and that project maturity rather than something much less.