Maybe it was a last minute attempt to derail The Hurt Locker’s chances of winning the Academy Award, but just days before the Oscars it was announced that the makers of the film were being sued by an Army Bomb Disposal Expert who claimed screenwriter Mark Boal had based the story on his life. He may or may not have a case but he does have a persuasive enough argument because Boal wrote a story about him in Playboy Magazine back in 2005. But how would Boal have come up with the real storyline if he hadn’t at least gotten first hand info from the expert? On the other hand, Quentin Tarantino based the title of his Inglorious Bastards on a 70’s action flick of the same name. Incidentally, that movie was a low budget “B” version of the hit movie The Dirty Dozen. My personal favorite this year, Crazy Heart, had Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges’ character based on so many real life country artists who turned to booze as they got older and their careers began to fade. And Avatar? Well that was a retelling of Dances With Wolves; placing the story on another planet where the natives are 9’ tall and blue – all, of course, in glorious 3-D! So when does “inspiration” for a movie actually turn into “plagiarism?”
That’s a hard question to answer and I guess it’s ultimately for the courts to work out when a lawsuit is filed, but the truth is everything has to start somewhere. I got the idea for his blog from reading the story of The Hurt Locker lawsuit, but I didn’t steal the story; I simply used it as a launching pad. I think the same thing could be said for someone like Quentin Tarantino in that his Bastards is really nothing like the 1978 version of Bastards, which as earlier noted, some considered a rip of The Dirty Dozen. However, the great film buff Tarantino has never been shy about his influences and even stated in an interview regarding Bastards that the idea of actually “killing” Hitler came from an obscure 1939 film. Furthermore, his heroine who is the double agent was based on a real German double agent who was also an actress. So regardless of where it originally came from, a great storyline is worth retelling again and again. The legendary Japanese film The Seven Samurai, was remade in the US as the hugely successful The Magnificent Seven and then remade as comedy The Three Amigos (this time obviously with only three “soldiers for hire”).
The most engaging storylines are built on powerful human emotions like love, hate, revenge, greed, sex and fear. The hero can hit the lowest of lows as long as there is redemption in the end. Based around these emotions, there are only so many ways to tell a great story, and to keep an audience’s attention, you have to first have the great story, then tell it in an intriguing way without actually getting so close to original that you end up in litigation. Think of it as an “unauthorized” sequel as it were, but as my mother used to tell me, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Therefore, successful directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese (Shutter Island) and Mel Brooks (High Anxiety – spoof and tribute rolled into one) willfully pay tribute to the masters like Alfred Hitchcock who inspired them to pursue filmmaking the first place, but most importantly, hopefully in their own unique way.
Coda: While working on this blog, I was reminded of a story I heard many years ago. It seems a talented screenwriter was really struggling with writer’s block and confessed to a friend one day, “Each night, I wake up from a deep sleep with the most fantastic idea for a movie, probably the basis for one of the most compelling stories I have ever come up with. But when I wake up, I can’t recall a thing!” His friend suggested that he place a pen and paper next to his bed and when he wakes up, he should write down the idea then in the morning he’ll have captured it. The writer did just that - scribbling the idea down and when he awoke in morning he was so excited to see the brilliant idea for a script - “Boy meets girl.”
