By Rick Groen, Film Critic
Globe & Mail, Friday, April 2, 1993
All culture, and especially pop culture, tends to feed on itself. Up to a point, that's healthy, even innovative. A young musician swipes a lick from rhythm and blues, cops an attitude from James Dean and, presto, he's on his way to discovering rock 'n' roll. When T.S. Eliot coined (or perhaps re-coined) the catchy aphorism, "Good artists borrow and great artists steal," he was referring to the inventive potential inherent in artistic theft, and to the ability of the best artists to pilfer shamelessly and imaginatively, putting a unique new shine on age-old booty.
That's the ideal, of course. The reality is a bit less sublime. The artists who aren't great or even very good - and they're the majority in any discipline - are understandably no less inclined than the rest to engage in some "creative" thievery, but with predictably mundane results. When too many of them do so too often, when a culture begins to feed on itself exclusively, the healthy point is passed and things start looking anemically thin and awfully inbred.
We're seeing such danger signs in television these days, where much of the programming has gone from being merely imitative to being willfully incestuous. Even the best stuff bears these telltale marks. The Larry Sanders Show, for instance, is a hall-of-mirrors triumph, reflecting talk shows within talk shows within talk shows. And Seinfeld is a sitcom Kierkegaard would have loved -- it's less about being and nothingness than about being as nothingness; in that sense, it's the perfect metaphor for the television-watching experience.
Over on the big screen, matters haven't regressed quite that far. Or maybe the disguise is better. Certainly, we've been treated to several outright remakes in the past months -- Born Yesterday, Point of No Return, Sommersby, The Vanishing. But that's no more than business as usual in the film industry. Even setting aside such instant recipes for imitation as sequels and genre pictures, the movie biz, especially as practiced in Hollywood, has historically been quick to recycle its own product. Pick up a bio of those early moguls, a David O. Selznick or a Louis B. Mayer, and you'll learn how old the notion of "creative renewal" really is. The first talkies eagerly cribbed material from the silents, and producers routinely shuffled their contract players into and out of the same "vehicle."
Duplicatoin was rampant. Diligent conservationists, the studios would actually splice footage from an original film -- establishing shots and action sequences -- into the remake, which consisted largely of new close-ups of the different cast. Even some of the movies we now regard as classic, inimitable, one of a kind, were used goods when released. You wouldn't mess with Bogart's The Maltese Falcon, would you? Probably not, but Bogie's version was the third kick at the can -- the picture, had already been made twice before, each time forgettably.
That's the exception, of course. The Hollywood norm is to duplicate success by, well, duplicating successes. And the recent remakes typify two of the favoured paths to that cherished goal. Consider the example of Born Yesterday -- the category here is the straightforward remounting of a celebrated American film.
On the surface, it can be viewed as a defensible exercise, as legitimate as the millionth reinterpretation of Hamlet (especially since the 1950 Born Yesterday began life as a stage play). But in this case, as in so many others, the failure lies in the lack of esthetic intent. There's no interpretive effort made at all, no attempt to filter the light of the original through the lens of the intervening decades.
Instead, the remake is merely a two-pronged excuse to (a) get a free ride on the title's popularity, and (b) assemble a ready-made platform for a pair of marketable starts (Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson). As viewers, we're left simply to compare the casts, and the "contemporary" verdict is almost always negative. Occasionally, very occasionally, a great actor will fulfill Eliot's dictum and singlehandedly redeem the venture -- think of Marlon Brando's foppish take on Fletcher Christian in the 1962 reissue of Mutiny on The Bounty. Yet that outcome is as rare as Brando's talent.
Point of No Return, a cover of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita (1991), represents a second category of remake -- the kind where Hollywood steals not from its own archives but from foreign vaults. The obvious advantage here is that much of the mass audience doesn't even realize a theft has taken place, thereby reducing the risk of pernicious comparisons. How many casual movie-goers will know, or care, that Sommersby is a rejigging of the 1982 French film, The Return of Martin Guerre?
Weighed against this advantage is the traditional difficulty of transplanting a foreign property to American soil, and making it seem organic. Happily for them, the Hollywood gardeners have never had exacting standards. The Magnificent Seven hardly measures up to The Seven Samurai, buy it works relatively well as a conventional Western. And neither Cousins nor Three Men and a Baby can hold a comedic candle to the French originals (Cousin, Cousine and Trois hommes et un couffin), yet the premises travelled well enough to general a little mirth and a lot of box office.
However, as evidenced by Point of No Return, there's a big problem looming in this category. Under the pressure of those ubiquitous commercial imperatives, national film industries are becoming ever more "international" -- a buzz word that loosely translates as "starting to make pictures that look a whole lot like Hollywood pictures." In La Femme Nikita, Besson borrowed heavily from the American action genre, then gave the borrowings a visually stylish twist. Alas, the Yankee version eliminated the style and compounded the theft -- it was a rippoff of a rip-off, a level of incestuousness that is taking us perilously close to television-land. Point of no return, indeed.
The final type of remake is the scarcest -- the one that equals or surpasses the original. In the recent past, Martin Scorsese's revisiting of 1962's Cape Fear fits that narrow bill. While certainly not Scorsese's best film, it at least brings a strong and well-conceived purpose to the task -- the purpose being to recase the black-and white absolutes of the early sixties in the morally ambiguous greys of the early nineties, demonstrating how today's victims can be complicit in their own fate.
Also, it's no coincidence that there's a strong "horror" element to this picture. The horror genre seems to lend itself to a greater proportion of successful remakes -- like Philip Kaufman's cover of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or David Cronenberg's take on The Fly. In fact, that totem of horror, Dracula himself, is the cinematic equivalent of Hamlet -- every generation wants a crack at him, often with engaging results. Why? Part of the reason is simple technology -- the special effects keep improving. Another part is visual permissiveness -- filmakers are freer to explore the repressed sexuality that has always lurked at the shadowy heart of the genre.
But there may be a further element at work here, too. Psychologically and emotionally, all horror films are remakes of the first horror film. At that level, they're mimetic by definition, all hoping to reproduce on the screen the experience of sitting in the audience -- the characters mirror us, a bunch fo isolated individuals seeking solace in the dark.
Thus, regardless of the script, each director and every audience are looking for the same cause and effect -- to be alterantively scared and comforted. Horror aficionados have had a lot of practice.
Conclusions? Only that the term "original artist" is never as redundant as it sounds, in any culture, at any time. Mediocre artists will always copy their betters; the irony is that the copied are also copying -- they're the ones who are good enough to borrow or great enough to steal. That makes for a circle that should be vicious, and usually is. The wonder is that sometimes it isn't. The wonder of art is that sometimes, somehow, that same old circle looks lyrical and lovely and astonishingly unique.
PARIS (AP) - French novelist Regine Deforges plagiarized Gone with the Wind for her best-seller The Blue Bicycle, a court ruled this week as it ordered her and her publisher to pay Margaret Mitchell's heirs $333,000 US in damages and interest.
The court concluded The Blue Bicycle constituted an "illicit reproduction" of Gone with the Wind.
"Based on a comparative study of the two works, it is clear that what Regine Deforges borrowed from Margaret Mitchell's work and incorporated into The Blue Bicycle is perfectly identifiable and relates to the most important elements of Ms. Mitchell's novel," the judgement said.
The court said Deforges copied the "general intrigue, plot development and narrative progression, the physical and psychological characteristics of the major figures, the relationships between the characters, several secondary characters, a large number of characteristic situations, the composition and expression of numerous scenes and key dramatic moments" of Gone with the Wind.
The Blue Bicycle, set during the Nazi occupational of France, has sold millions of copies since it was published in 1983 as the first part of a trilogy.
Its heroine, Lea Delmas, is the beautiful, headstrong daughter of a southern vintner. Like Scarlett O'Hara, her carefree youth is interrupted by the horrors of war.
The opening scenes of garden parties, pretty dresses and breathless suitors are reminiscent of the U.S. South.
And France, like the United States in the Civil War, is divided. Pro-Vichy Petainists condemn Charles de Gaulle's freedom fighters. Collaborators and militia men hunt Jews and resistance members.
Lea sides with the underground, roaming the Bordelais countryside on her blue bicycle carrying secret messages.
Like Scarlett, Lea wants the one man she cannot have. Laurent d'Argilat has married the sweet, fragile and morally upright Camille, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Melanie.
Deforges's French Rhett Butler - Francois Tavernier - is a swarthy, cigar-smoking rogue who miraculously turns up whenever Lea needs him.
The American Trust Co. Bank, which holds the worlds rights to Gone with the Wind, had sought $833,000 from Deforges and her publisher, Editions Ramsay.
The case has been long and complicated because there are few precedents. French law forbids plagiarism, but it does allow pastiche, a centuries-old literary form defined as a humorous take-off or remake of a recognizable original text.
Mitchell's heirs saw nothing funny about The Blue Bicycle, despite Deforges's repeated assertions that her novel was meant as a pastiche.
"I know what plagiarism is, and it's a very bad thing," Deforges said when the case went to court two years ago. "From the beginning The Blue Bicycle was intended to be a pastiche. I never said it was supposed to be anything else."
The court rejected her argument, saying the differences between the two works were "undeniably secondary and inoperative, given the extent of their similarities."
By William Broad, The New York Times
One of the triumphs of modern science is the general theory of relativity, which defies common sense by describing the gravitational attraction between planetary bodies as the curvature of a bizarre entity called space-time.
Despite its many predictive successes over the decades, the theory has existed under a cloud since its publication in 1915 because of questions over its authorship.
Albert Einstein sought the title and was usually hailed publicly as deserving it. But behind the scenes, a prominent German mathematician, Dr. David Hilbert, claimed to be the theory's author and clashed with Einstein over who had priority in the insight.
The dispute eventually became caustic. Einstein, a lowly young patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, at the time he made the finding, contended that Hilbert, a celebrated professor at the University of Gottingen, had stolen the theory after reading one of his papers. Years later, some of Hilbert's supporters quietly suggested that it had actually been Einstein who committed plagiarism.
Now, three historians of science have examined the dispute and have vindicated Einstein. They say Hilbert appears to have lifted a key concept from Einstein's manuscript.
"A close analysis of archival material reveals that Hilbert did not anticipate Einstein," Dr. Leo Corry writes in the current issue of the journal Science.
The conventional wisdom among contemporary scholars was that Hilbert, who died in 1943, completed the general theory of relativity at least five days before Einstein submitted his conclusive paper on Nov. 25, 1915, and that the two men had hit upon the revolutionary idea independently.
That view came into question when Dr. Corry, a historian at Tel Aviv University in Israel, was doing some archival work and stumbled upon a hitherto unnoticed set of publishing proofs of Hilbert's paper. Detailed analysis and comparison of the proofs with published versions of both Hilbert's paper and Einstein's papers on gravitation enabled Dr. Corry and colleagues Dr. Juergen Renn, of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and Dr. Joihn Stachel, of the physics department of Boston University, to reconstruct an account of the crucial weeks in November, 1915. And what they uncovered differs radically from the standard view.
The new evidence shows that Hilbert's proofs lacked the critical ingredient for theory's success, something called covariance. "The theory he originally submitted is not generally covariant," the athors write.
Although Hilbert's article bore the submission date of Nov. 20, 1915, it was not actually published until March 31, 1916 -- long after Einstein's paper was public. The final article was covariant.
The new revelation, say the three authors, "excludes the possibility that Einstein plagiarized from Hilbert the last crucial step in completing general relativity."
Associated Press
NEW YORK - Martin Luther King Jr. borrowed words and ideas extensively from other sources for his doctoral dissertation and other writings without giving proper citations, a Stanford University historian says.
"Several of King's academic papers, as well as his dissertation, contain numerous appropriated passages that can be defined as plagiarism," Clayborne Carson said in a story The Wall Street Journal published yesterday.
The slain civil rights leader's widow, Coretta Scott King, chose Mr. Carson to lead the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, which she founded in 1984 to gather his papers from locations around the country and produce a multi-volume collection.
Mrs. King's spokesman, Steve Klein, said yesterday that she was aware of the newspaper story but had no immediate comment on it.
Mr. King's school papers are his most obscure and insignificant writings, but the discoveries have prompted debate, anguish and soulsearching among scholars who have worked on the project.
Associate editor Ralph Luker, a follower of Mr. King who was jailed during a civil rights protest, said he suffered "deep anxieties" over the findings and "many hours of lost sleep."
The questions about his academic work surfaced in late 1987, nearly 20 years after his death, when evidence was discovered by a Stanford graduate student who was working for the King Papers Project.
In some parts of the dissertation Mr. King wrote as a doctoral candidate at Boston University, he lifted passages nearly verbatim from other texts without using any quotation marks or footnotes, the Journal reported.
When the problem was found, three project editors and six student researchers worked for nearly two years annotating all of Mr. King's 150 or so academic papers.
Mr. Carson said Mr. King likely did not intentionally do anything wrong by sometimes failing to attribute materials in his writing.
"The best evidence for that," he said, "is that he saved his papers and donated them to an archive - at B.U. of all places."
Boston University Acting President Jon Westling announced yesterday that the university had begun an investigation into the charges against Mr. King.
The prominent civil rights leader was gunned down in a Memphis, Tenn., motel in 1968.
By Jerry Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, August 10, 1991
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, we seem to be entering an age not rivalled since royal courts teemed with bowing courtiers in plumed hats. Everywhere you look somebody is getting busted for plagiarism, which is imitation carried to its highest form, the exact copy.
Journalists in particular are getting caught red-handed right and left. The professoriate is not far behind and may actually lead the pack in total offences, given that it publishes in obscure jargon-laden journals nobody reads unless the pay cheque depends on it.
But it's happening not only in jobs where words sit on the page begging to be ripped off.
Hollywood has its plagiarism scandals, as do science, art and the music industry.
In this another of the swinish legacies of the greed-choked, devil-take-the-hindmost eighties, when men in red power suspenders assured us that life's winners were decided by how many adult toys were accumulated?
Or does the problem run deeper?
Experts like Philippe Nonet, professor of law and sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, look out windows and tap pencils against teeth, pondering. "What prompts any man to deceive?" he muses in a rich French accent. "It is just another deception, right? Why do embezzlers embezzle""
"It has to do with the geneal lessening of moral standards affecting all areas of life," more briskly answers Alan Caruba of the media-monitoring National Anxiety Center in Maplewood, N.H.
Yet plagiarism probably goes back as far as writing itself.
The Roman poet Martila, in one of his epigrams, compared his poems to freed slaves and described another poet who claimed them as his own as abductor, for which the Latin word is plagiarius.
Some of these recent cases involve exposure of the most mortifying kind, as with Fox. Butterfield of The New York Times. He was nailed recently for lifting whole paragraphs from The Boston Globe -- in an article that was about plagiarism.
This case began to unfold when H. Joachim Maitre, dean of the school of communications at Boston University, delivered a commencement speech in which he copied 15 paragraphs of a film critic's article on -- prepare yourself -- sliding moral standards in Hollywood.
"My folly and carelessness are indisputable and indefensible," Mr. Maitre wrote when the business hit the fan.
He was cashiered to the rank of professor and jeered by students, some of whom believed that he should be driven form the campus under a rain of blows.
Mr. Butterfield, who seemingly forgot that New York isn't all that far from Boston, was suspended for a week after the Times conceded that his article had been "improperly dependent" on the Globe account, a more weighty way of saying "copycat."
Mr. Butterfield got off better than The Washington Post's Miami bureau chief, found guilty of filching a story from The Miami Herald about mosquitoes.
Like him, Laura Parker repeated quotes and whole paragraphs without change, apparently forgetting that Miami isn't all that far from Washington. She was fired.
"I made a mistake which I deeply regret," Ms. Parker said. "My integrity and ethics have never been questioned in my 16 years in journalism, and I think I was very harshly punished."
Given the same stiff sentence as Ms. Parker was Hidetoshi Okada, a senior editor at Japan's Kyodo news agency. He claimed credit for writing 51 articles about medicine that turned out to have been published 17 hears earlier in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun.
Mr. Okada seemingly forgot that a Japanese newspaper would print the ar ticles and that somebody from Ashai Shimbun might read them.
"Plagiarizing is easy to discover if the source that is copied is relatively well-known or easily traceable. Insofar as you copy stuff that's not very well-known or not easily available to the particular audience to which you are speaking or writing, then you can get away with it."
After Mr. Okada was shown the door, deep bows and apologies were offered to the public. Even though they werent' to blame, six Kyodo editors were suspended or took pay cuts, in keeping with the Japanese trardition of collective responsibility. The president of the agency said he would resign.
Not everybody takes it lying down. Former Wall Street Journal assistant foreign editor Jonathan Kandell filed suit against the newspaper for $12.6 million after it fired him for an article that it thought too faithfully followed a book on Communist entrepreneurs.
Mr. Nonet of Berkeley said nobody knows how extensive plagiarism is among the nation's faculties. "It is not always discovered. When it is discovered, it is often hushed up for all kinds of reasons, usually bad reasons. I wouldn't want to commit an indiscreation, but I certainly have in my times at Cal known of several cases where the matter was hushed up.
"How great is the risk of discovery in the scholarly community"? I find it hard to generalize. Plagiarizing is easy to discover if the source that is copied is relatively well-known or not easily available to the particular audience to which you are speaking or writing, then you can get away with it."
Lincoln scholar Stephen B. Oates of the University of Massachusetts hired a New York public-relations firm and a Manhattan law firm in April to defend himself against charges that parts of his 1977 book. With Mailice Toward None: the Life of Abraham Lincoln were cribbed from a biography published in 1952.
His accuser is English Professor Robert Bray of Illinois Wesleyan University, an expert in the relationship between texts. Two other scholars, one a criminologist who used a computer to anlyze similarities between the two books, are backing him.
"The law recognizes that any two biographies of the same subject will by necessity have similarities in facts, sequence, themes and theories," Mr. Oates said in a 200-page rebuttal written in his defence.
Alan Dundes, a folklore scholar at UC Berkeley, revealed in February that the late psychiatrist Brukno Bettelheim helped himself to a lot of an earlier book on fairy tales in writing his 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.
The amount of borrowing Mr. Bettelheim did form A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales, written in 1963 by Julius E. Heuscher, would get an undergraduate an F in the course and maybe get him tossed out of school, Mr. Dundes said.
David Kirp, a public-policy professor at Berkeley, somehow or other put six paragraphs or so of another writer's words at the beginning of his article on the California textbook adoption controversy. The Kirp article appeared in Image magazine, which a week later admitted the amazing similarity to one published in the Social Studies Review. Image called this "an oversight." While Mr. Kirp blamed confusion with his notes and said he couldn't have committed plagiarism as that was not his intent.
Just last month, Stanford University's graduate school of business said it was looking into a complaint that a lecturer's book on corporate management used passages form a 1986 Business Week article without adequate attribution.
Maybe plagiarism is due to stress.
"It's an interesting premise," says Beverly Potter, a Berkeley psychologist who is an expert on job burnout. "In academic life, you're under such severe pressure to perform. It's the whole publish-or-perish phenomenon. But they'd have to be afraid someone's going to catch them, addition to the feeling of trapped powerlessness."
Far from feeling trapped or powerless, Shervert Frazier, a former director of the national Institute of Mental Health and psychiatrist-in-chief at a Boston hospital affiliated with Harvard, was on the top of his world in 1989.
Then he was felled by a graduate student whose hobby was nosing out plagiarism.
"I apologize profoundly for my actions." Mr. Frazier said, resigning his faculty position and falling into a deep depression.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was discovered last year to have made a practice of plagiarizing the work of other theologians and academics during his student years. His 1955 doctoral dissertation was liberally fleshed out with the work of others. He'd reminded people in a sermon once, however, that he was no saint.
But some studies have shown that plagiarism is a virtual way of life among undergraduates.
A poll at Miami Universty of Ohio revealed that 91.2 per cent of students owned up to it. A UCLA survey of 200,000 undergraduates said more than 30 per cent had plagiarized work in the past year.
"Many students believe it is bad and unethical," said a researcher,"but they do it anyhow."
Plagiarism sometimes richochets, claiming unintended victims. Louisiana State University Chancellor James Wharton was forced to resign when he allowed a student found guilty of plagiarism to remain in school on the groundd that she was related to a powerful state senator. "He brought LSU from a run-of-the-mill school to a pretty dad-gum good one." lamented a dean.
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Yo, James Brown! You may be sitting in jail, but your soul's on the loose in all kinds of songs, thanks to rap's booming use of a musical borrowing technique called sampling.
Mixing a hunger for instant recognition with a disregard for copyright law, rappers are exploiting sophisticated electronics to lift drum beats, guitar riffs and vocal phrases from old songs and plunk them into their new works.
Through digital sampling, for example, your typical cool rapper dresses up a song with Chuck Berry's guitar licks.
Both sampling and rap are so popular that American lawyers are loading up their litigation bags to handle the potential barrage of copyright lawsuits.
At the heart of the debate is whether rap is a legally protected, hip-hopping art form or just high-tech cattle rustling.
"I don't see any protection for (sampling) anywhere, ever," said Peter Paterno, a music industry lawyer whose clients include Guns N' Roses. "I think every one of these guys who samples is going to lose (in court)."
Ricky Grundy, co-president and owner of Graffiti Talk Music, says there should be compensation for sampling. "The (rappers) ae not being creative. They're using other talent to make up an idea."
However, rappers and their supporters insist that this pop-culture pastiche represents rap's essence. Without sampling, they insist, there wouldn't be any raps worth rapping.
"That's a part of rap - sampling," said Tone Loc, whose Wild Thing includes bits from Van Halen's Jamie's Crying, and whose Funky Cold Medina appropriates parts of Foreigner's Hot Blooded.
"You bring back old songs that you might have forgot about or never heard before," said Loc, one of the few rappers who seeks permission for his musical raids. "When you hear the little riff, that little tune in your head, it starts coming back to you, and it sounds good.
"We don't have live musicians to play for us. I never had a live drummer."
Today's digital technology reduces even the most complicated, multilayered songs to individual data bits. Thus, a single tambourine hit from a '40s classic that has been digitally rerecorded can be electronically extracted with surgical precision. It can then be stored in a computer for use with other music without missing a beat.
Discovering musical samples in current rap songs, therefore, can be a bit like Easter-egg hunts: some can't be missed; others require a painstaking search.
De La Soul's Eye Know borrows from Steely Dan's Peg and Otis Redding's (Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay. Glove-E's Suck on This contains a sequence from Three Dog Night's Mama Told Me (Not to Come).
But the biggest source of this digital dredging is James Brown, now serving a six-year sentence in South Carolina for aggravated assault and failing to stop for police.
Brown's work has been replayed by the Fat Boys, Ice-T, Public Enemy and a host of other rappers. "The music out there is only as good as my last record," Brown joked in a recent interview from jail with Rolling Stone magazine.
While an increasing number of rappers are following Tone Loc's lead by obtaining rights and paying fees of several hundred dollars for each sample, many do not.
The Beastie Boys, for one, are facing a copyright infringement suit over their song Hold It Now, Hit It. The case could be the first in the United States to establish a legal precedent for future sampling disputes.
It is alleged that the Beastie Boys lifted the words "Yo Leroy" and some drum beats from Jimmy Castor's 1977 single, The Return of Leroy (Part One).
Chuck Ortner, a lawyer representing Beastie Boys label Def Jam Recordings, said even if the rappers did sample from Caster - which he disputes - the band is protected in part by the Fair Use doctrine of the U.S. 1976 Copyright Act, the same doctrine that allows a college professor to photocopy a short article for a class.
Yet when one of Ortner's own clients was sampled by the group Blue Mercedes not long ago, he didn't hesitate to bring action against MCA Records, resulting in a favorable settlement for Ortner's client, the band M-A-R-R-S. The difference between that case and the Beastie Boys', he said, is that Blue Mercedes' sample was far too lengthy to let pass.
So how will the dispute be resolved? Ortner and some lawyers suggest a sliding fee scale in which rappers would pay a few cents (or less) on the sale of each record featuring sampling.
"The sampling and the use of somebody's prior material...is something I have no objection to," said Jay Morgenstern, executive vice president and general manager of music publishing giant Warner-Chappell Music. "But if you're going to use somebody else's material, you should pay them a fair amount for it."