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An African American BW, Sophia Stewart, is fighting the giant media machine. She says Warner Brothers stole concepts from her script, The Third Eye, in order to plagerize and create the Matrix and the Terminator movie.
That these concepts should come possibly from a BW is not surprising. Also, if that is the case, then that explains why part 2 of Matrix was such a flop -nobody to copy from; and why it was all mostly about sex orgies - folks who lack imagination resort to this.
May justice prevail.
6 comments:
Wow! I was just having a conversation with someone about Black folk and the movie industry. I really hope that she's able to find justice, if they really did steal her ideas. And yeah, Matrix 2 was terrible! lol
If I had the know how, I wish I could fight the media with her.
I'd like to know the facts of the case before making a judgment, but I should note that many, many writers have claimed to have been plagiarized by Hollywood filmmakers. These accusations rarely go anywhere, for one simple reason: ideas are not copyrightable. It is perfectly legal to steal plot ideas. If it weren't, the vast majority of Hollywood movies ever made would be subject to lawsuits. Only something tangible, such as lifting actual text from one work to another, can be successfully sued over.
One example of such a failed lawsuit was Faye Kellerman, who alleged that the makers of the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love had ripped off the premise of her 1989 novel The Quality of Mercy.
Another one was M. Night Shyamalan's 2004 movie The Village, accused of taking its plot uncredited from a children's book by Margaret Peterson Haddix called Running Out of Time. I actually read the book and saw the Shyamalan film, and frankly, I don't see a huge resemblance. There are minute similarities in the underlying premise (which in Haddix's book are introduced in the first chapter, and in Shyamalan's film are presented as a surprise ending in the last 10 minutes), but it's the sort of plot device that's been used in one form or another many times before.
George Lucas has always admitted proudly that he based much of the plot of the original Star Wars on Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. He even considered casting the movie's star, Toshiro Mifune, as Obi-Wan Kenobi. As far as I know, Lucas never got permission, but no one's ever sued him over it. In fact, many of the early films of Lucas and Spielberg very closely imitate older movies. For example, compare Yoda's death scene in Return of the Jedi with the High Lama's death scene in the 1937 version of Lost Horizon. It's almost a shot-for-shot imitation.
Sci-fi buffs have always known that The Matrix was heavily derivative of sci-fi works from decades earlier, particularly the novels and short stories of Philip K. Dick. There's nothing particularly original about the idea of an artificially created world run by robots to keep humans in submission: it's essentially just a modern update of the old "brain in a vat" conundrum from classical philosophy, and The Matrix wasn't even the first science fiction movie to deal with the idea. Just a year before it came out, Dark City explored a very similar premise.
K,
There is a part of me that yearns for the underdog. But I ought to keep it in check.
But at the same time the Matrix wasn't just about the 'brain in vat' idea. It was deep.
But just the same, you are right. The legality of it all needs to be understood.
Miriam, thanks for the info on Sophia Stewart.
It was an answer to a prayer, or, rather, to a subject I've been probing for a time.
Domino,
You're welcome!
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