…and he’s getting sued by a woman named Kelly Van who claims he ripped it off from an on-line book of hers called “Sheila the Warrior: The Ðámņëd”? Really?
This isn’t exactly Harlan Ellison & Terminator redux. First of all, not to go all Comic Book Guy, but that is quite possibly one of the worst titles I’ve ever heard, even for on-line. Sheila the waitress, Sheila the aunt, Sheila the hairdresser, Sheila the paralegal, okay. Sheila the warrior? Doesn’t work for me, and tacking on “The Ðámņëd” hardly adds gravitas. It’s right up there with “Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter,” and that was a joke. Second, with all the screamingly obvious predecessors that “Avatar” clearly has, she’s trying to claim he ripped it off from her? Based on the fact that her protagonist, situated in a mystical place called Tibet (yeah, that’s original), has blue skin and yellow eyes? Congratulations: You both ripped off Nightcrawler.
It would amuse me tremendously if this actually went to court. Because the obvious way to counter her claim is to produce all the progenitors for Cameron’s–and presumably Van’s–work. “Your honor, obviously my client didn’t rip off this material from the plaintiff, because every single aspect of this story is thunderingly unoriginal. Allow us to introduce Exhibits A through E: ‘A Princess of Mars,’ ‘Dances With Wolves,’ ‘Pocahantas,’ ‘Ferngully: The Last Rainforest,’ and the 13th episode of the 13th season of ‘South Park’ which accurately characterizes my client’s film as ‘Dances with Smurfs.'” The best defense is to drive home how monstrously derivative the work is.
I am mystified as to why Ms. Van would want to claim kinship with something that’s as much of a rehash as “Avatar” considering it hardly reflects well on the originality of her own work. Because if she’s produced a story that’s basically “Dances With Wolves” on another planet except she modeled the visual of her heroine on Mystique, that’s hardly something to boast about.
PAD
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I don’t know. “Sheila the warrior” is not all that different from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Title wise, I mean. (Agreed that “the Ðámņëd” addendum doesn’t really add anything except a few consonants and vowels.) Both are trying to set up a discordant image in the mind of the reader.
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Jim
If the book was just called “Sheila the Warrior” I might agree, going on the assumption that–like Buffy–it’s meant to be a tongue-in-cheek send-up of horror tropes. But the addition of the portentous “The Ðámņëd” and the descriptions of the book make it sound like, no, she meant it to be serious. And if she firmly believes that “Avatar” is a faithful rendition of the tone and style of the work, then it’s just a serious romance of the jungle with a bad title.
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PAD
The title “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is also kind of a joke. The idea was about the contrast of a valley girl as a heroine. If that was the intent of Ms. Van, then she didn’t do it clearly and adding “the dámņëd” muddied things further.
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I actually didn’t get the joke of the title for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” when I first heard it. My brother had to convince me that it was worth seeing the movie. After I started watching the show I tried to convince many other people to ignore the name and watch. So even though the name was appropriate to the show, it also had it’s difficulties.
I saw the Buffy movie… you mean they made a TV show? 🙂
“I am mystified as to why Ms. Van would want to claim kinship with something that’s as much of a rehash as “Avatar” considering it hardly reflects well on the originality of her own work. ”
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In a word: money. You notice no one tries to claim ownership of, say, Ishtar.
“The Adventures of Pluto Nash” totally ripped off a story I wrote in second grade. I successfully sued them for 50% of their profits and now I’m 50 million dollars in debt.
Art Buchwald would have sympathized. Remember, he successfully sued over “Coming to America” and yet even though it was one of Paramount’s biggest hits to that date, they claimed it was still deeply in the red. Once legal costs were deducted, Buchwald wound up a loser financially.
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Read his book “Fatal Subtraction.” It’s amazing.
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PAD
Oh, I’m sure there are some flops that people have tried to cut in on the action for as well. But yeah, the successes are the bigger targets.
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Although with studio accounting what it is, how much you wanna bet that they could make a case that it still hasn’t earned out?
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PAD
That’s why agents always negotiate a percentage of the gross for their clients rather than a percentage of the net.
If the client has the clout to get one…
I know of one. A professor of mine when I was going to Towson University sued Disney (successfully) for not paying or giving him credit for ‘The Air Up There’. He was wise enough not to seek a percentage but a modesty set sum so that the House of Mouse couldn’t claim it wasn’t there.
Cameron may want to avoid taking this one to court, though – otherwise, he might wind up having to pay royalties to the estate of Poul Anderson for so blatantly ripping off “My Name Is Joe”….
That’s what i thought of immediately i heard about the movie.
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And the magazine cover showing the blue-skinned centauroid avatar…
Exactly the point I was going to make. Poul Anderson’s 1957 novella would definitely have to be added as “Exhibit F.” For anyone unfamiliar with the story, “Call Me Joe” is about a paraplegic who explores an alien world (in this case, Jupiter) by having his mind placed in an artificially created body.
First thing i thought of when i read this was “Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson”.
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Except that George was definitely being satirical…
And then there’s Discworld’s Cohen the Barbarian.
…and his daughter (name temporarily eluding me) who only really wants to be a beutician…
There’s also GROO THE BARBARIAN. Plus there’s a kid’s show called DAVE THE BARBARIAN (which includes a My Little Pony-type horse that sounds just like Christopher Walken. Really.). Of course these are knowing parodies of their genres.
It’s “Groo the Wanderer,” actually.
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PAD
on the Ellison/”Terminator” thing, i think that the case could be argued either way … but my own thought when i first saw it was PKDick’s “Second Variety, which strikes me as being a lot closer to the central concept.
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And Heinlein’s ” – All You Zombies – “ came to mind after i saw it, of course… (Not to mention his “By His Bootstraps“, for that matter…)
Better wait ’til after August to make the move, I hear they’re re-releasing “Avatar” into theatres with *gasp* 9 minutes of extra film. Because it’s so worth it.
Actually, 9 minutes is just how long it took James Cameron to apologize to everybody he ripped off.
I got emails from friends everywhere telling me Cameron ripped Avatar from this or that, and saw an article that claims he lifted most from Arkady and Boris Strugatski. Me, I don’t care much. It’s eye candy with a really thin story. And Jim’s not doing anything others haven’t done. De Palma, guys?
Well, the point is Cameron is usually better than that. If you’re just doing the same thing as everyone else, what is the point?
You could say that about everything. In the last week I’ve seen both a story about how the original Star Wars changed everything and a story about all the things that the original Star Wars borrowed a lot from the early Flash Gordon serials. Raiders of the Lost Ark was Lucas and Spielberg saying, “Hey, let’s do something like the old Allan Quatermain B movies.”
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Originality is good, but pretty much every movie has a story that’s been told before in some form or another. What matters is the execution. If people enjoy the ride, then they don’t care if they’ve ridden in that vehicle before.
As I recall, people also claimed that “Star Wars” was–believe it or not–a recycling of “Wizard of Oz,” in that its hero had farming origins, Ben was something of a wizard, and Chewie and 3PO were likened to the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man.
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The question becomes, does the new work transcend its origins and make it into something fresh and original? That, of course, is a judgment reserved for the audience. In my case, the work utterly failed to provide us something new and different from all its predecessors. 3-D and blue skin was insufficient; to me, the story was what mattered. It’s hard to enjoy the ride, as you say, when the journey’s been already taken a number of times and the view is pretty much the same.
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PAD
Well, the storyline of the original Star Wars lifted heavily from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress – especially the droids, who seemed specifically modeled on the two peasant farmers – but not that many American filmgoers are familiar with Kurosawa, so it went unremarked for some time.
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On the other hand, Lucas was also willing to acknowledge the Kurosawa influence on his writing, as well as the space-combat sequences lifted whole from WWII movies, so we can give him a pass on that.
Jason, if you’d like, somewhere I have the transcript of the Raiders story sessions…
Yes, Mike, Cameron is susally a lot better than that, but again, who cares? Certainly not the writers that he’s accused of ripping off. Arkady Strugatski hasn’t said much yet, Poul Anderson hasn’t. I agree with my Evil Twin, the weak story can’t compensate for the badass wrapper it comes in… although with like, it’s a stepping stone to some far better work down the road. There’s the Pixar “Princess of Mars” in the works, the film adaptation of Lensman, and Rodriguez’ live action version of Bakshi and Frazetta’s “Fire and Ice”…
A “Lensman” film? I hadn’t heard. Who? When? Where? How?
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I thought the anime thing had poisoned that pool forever.
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(I loved that the anime pretty much based major aspects of itself on “Green Lantern”, BTW…)
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Personally, i’d rather see it done (by someone who knew what they were doing) as a TV series, a la B5…
Reply to Mike Weber. I recall something about a LENSMAN movie being in development as well. I would think that the dating of the material would be a bigger problem than a previous anime incarnation. The STARSHIP TROOPERS anime (never released in the U.S.) didn’t stop Paul Verhoeven from raping the Robert Heinlein novel.
It appears that Universal is teaming with Ron Howard’s production company to develop the LENSMAN project. It’s been reported that J. Michael Straczynski has written a script for the film.
Mike Webber – Last I heard, Joe Straczynski was working on a Lensman screenplay for, I believe, Joe Silver.
Peter David: Based on the fact that her protagonist…has blue skin and yellow eyes? Congratulations: You both ripped off Nightcrawler.
Luigi Novi: Or someone suffering from both hypothermia and liver damage.
Well, Spielberg ripped off my self-published novel “Billy and the Clone-a-saurus”
Seymour Skinner
*tsk* Almost everyone rips off everyone else these days. Though from what I hear, Avatar was just like a big budget Pocahontas. Not many of the people I know who’ve seen it were all that impressed by the story line. That and it was but another movie where Michelle Rodriguez’s chacter dies.
Sometimes I feel as is Copyright is becoming a joke.
But I guess, as a struggling writer myself, we can’t help but to look to others for insperation and if we take out of it a little to much? Well, not everyone can be as terrific a writer as, say. C.S Lewis, J.R.R Tolken and even yourself.
The Nightcrawler comment did make me laugh. 🙂
Actually, I ripped off the Nightcrawler comment from my wife.
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PAD
She’s not suing you, is she?
I got a few pages into the lawsuit itself (the full complaint is on Gawker) and all I could think was “Seriously? That’s the argument? Your predictable cliche-ridden film is suspiciously like my predictable cliche-ridden book?”
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And I didn’t think it was possible for something to come along and make the name I go under in my artistic endeavors look less silly.
I heard that someone was suing Heroes over the carnival storyline saying that they stole it from this person’s book.
If that’s the case that person owes the Heroes people money because that was the season that officially sunk the series…It’s like cheating on a test and discovering the person that your cheating off of has all the wrong answers.
For most folks, Heroes sunk loooong before they got to season 4.
Gee, and the first thing I thought when I read the inital plot for Avatar was that they had ripped off Poul Anderson’s novella “Call Me Joe.” Parapelegic has his mind ported into the big blue body of an alien cration to explore a new world. Poul Anderson’s estate would have a better chance than this woman.
I’m still waiting for Rob Liefeld’s Effigy