À BRUTO

LISBON, Portugal -- A Nobel literature laureate said Friday that protests about a film version of his book Blindness are unfounded and misguided.

Portuguese author Jose Saramago dismissed a threat by a U.S. association of blind people to picket theaters showing the movie, describing it as ''a display of meanness based on nothing at all.''

''Stupidity doesn't choose between the blind and the non-blind,'' Saramago told Portuguese radio station TSF.

The Baltimore-based advocacy group the National Federation of the Blind has said it plans to protest the movie in at least 21 U.S. states after it opened Friday.

Marc Maurer, the group's president, said it ''portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie.''

Saramago was the first Portuguese-language winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he won in 1998.