Category: Literature

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Stealing Ideas and Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola just received $20 million from a Superior Court Jury in Los Angeles because they jury believed that Warner Brothers stole his idea of a live action version of Pinocchio.

Do you ever get paid for your ideas? I’ll bet. I’ll bet you never got $20 million. But then, this is Hollywood, which will spend $120 million on a movie about Kevin Costner riding sea-doos around an old oil rig.

So a jury decided that this idea– to do Pinocchio with live actors– was so good, so brilliant, so original, that it was worth $20 million. Suppose that just by reading this you got an idea. Suppose you thought, hey, why not do a remake of Bambi with live actors? Or how about a remake of “The Ten Commandments” with a live actor instead of Charlton Heston? Or how about a remake of “The Love Bug” with a DeLorean instead of a Beetle? Or with one of those new sexy Beetles that just came out? With all of the remaining Spice Girls stuffed inside? There– that wasn’t hard.

Now all you have to do is find a lawyer and wait for Hollywood to steal your idea. Wait– you might have to prove that they stole the idea from YOU in particular, and not any other person they might have had lunch with. The trick is, you have to have lunch every day in those exclusive Hollywood restaurants frequented by producers and directors and script-writers. As you’re having lunch, just talk loudly about your great new idea. Someone is sure to turn up. Be sure to keep track of who might be stealing your ideas. And believe me, it is a lot less painful than spilling hot coffee in your lap.

Well, Warner Brothers, hold on to your pants. Here are some ideas that I think are way better than Coppola’s idea about Pinocchio, or even my idea about “The Ten Commandments”.. But don’t try to steal them, or I’ll be suing your asses for more than $20 million!

1. The Three Stooges, in an all-new adventure: Curly, Larry, and Moe star as Microsoft software engineers. Starring Jim Carrey, Reg Varney, and Rip Torn as “Moe”. Come to think of it…

2. A lobbyist from the tobacco industry courageously fights prejudice and injustice and succeeds in bribing 50 Senators to vote against a restrictive tax bill that would deprive us of our freedoms and liberties and prevent gas stations from selling cigarettes to pre-teens. Starring Tom Bosley as Newt Gingrich.

3. A courageous high school student brings a semi-automatic rifle to school and is able to prevent a tragedy by shooting 13 fellow students who were all planning to shoot their class-mates and teachers. Starring Sean Penn, and Charlton Heston as the compassionate, understanding, phys-ed coach, who encourages the student to keep lots of ammunition in his locker since you never know when you will be called upon to defend your freedoms and liberties against encroaching atheists, communists, homosexuals, and unarmed liberals. Ellen DeGeneres plays the depraved lesbian sex-education teacher.

4. Let’s see: we’ve had meteorites, volcanoes, tornados, earthquakes… what else is left? What else? I know. A gang of rugged, individualistic, violent, unshaven criminals (all of whom are the only men who could possibly save the world from some stupid massive improbable disaster or psychotic super-killer)- – form a gang and decide to take over the world and require all soldiers and policemen to carry three-hundred pounds of weapons and work alone when confronting enemies. This would be a short movie– about three minutes, or as long as it takes for them to make up a set of rules for the new world order and then break them because “rules only get in the way” and kill each other. Starring Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Chuck Norris.

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Stuffed Prig for Dessert

I recently went to see the Water Street Theatre’s production of “Shadowlands”, the play by William Nicholson, about the love affair between an aging C.S. Lewis, the Christian apologist, and an American poet, Joy Grescham.

I like the Water Street Theatre. We’ve been subscribers for about three years now. It is a dedicated little professional theatre company that operates in a small space (about 200 seats) and maintains a high level of polish in their productions. If they have one weakness, however, it is that almost all of their productions lack the fire, the spark, the intangible element that brings good theatre to life. First-rate theatre companies find this spark about half the time. Community theatre groups are lucky if it strikes once in two years. One of the luckiest plays is Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”– it seems to weave it’s own magic. The Water Street Theatre, however, has never found it. I don’t know why it eludes them. There is something about the composition of the company, the combination of actors and directors and scripts that just doesn’t work.

For one thing, Theatre and Company takes bigger risks than most community theatre groups, but never a really big risk. For another thing, they occasionally do something really dumb. And one of the dumbest things they do, about once a year, is a British play, in accent.

I think most fourteen-year-olds with a minor interest in theatre know that you should never do an accent unless you can do it well. Alan Sapp, who played C.S. Lewis in “Shadowlands” can’t do it. Not even close. In fact, embarrassingly distant. I don’t think he uttered a single compound sentence all night without wavering back and forth, between British and Canadian. The result was like watching Tonya Harding skate: sure, she’s got the training and the outward skills, but she can’t hide the trailer park make-up or the bingo-hall manners.

The accent wasn’t the only problem. Sapp was surrounded by actors, good ones, who knew timing and intonation and rhythm, and proved over and over again that he didn’t. And in scenes with Linda Bush as the dying Joy Gresham, he displayed all the warmth and sensitivity of a buccaneer. He emoted towards the audience mostly.

One of the reviews tacked up in the theatre lobby claimed that the only good thing about the second act was Sapp’s brilliant performance. I think this reviewer confused style with substance here. Sapp raised his arms often and gestured towards the audience and hammered away at his lines like a good thespian should. But none of it belonged in the play. There was a dying woman on the bed, but Mr. Sapp might as well have been standing on a soapbox, or a pulpit.

I never liked C.S. Lewis, and I never understood why he was so popular with Christians. He was really a stuffed shirt, a prig, and he held archaic views on almost everything. The charm of his Narnia stories has always eluded me, and as an apologist for Christianity, none of his ideas were new or particularly convincing.