www.thewrap.com: Writer Simon Stephenson, who has a story by credit for the Pixar animated film “Luca,” ignited a debate in the screenwriting community Saturday following his claims that a script of his was plagiarized by “The Holdovers.” While the charges are serious, many screenwriters have taken issue with the charge that the Oscar-nominated screenplay was plagiarized “line-by-line” from Stephenson’s 2013 Black List script “Frisco.”
2 comments:
After reading the comparisons, I definitely agree that I see no signs of plagiarism. Any similarities are minor, and even if the overall stories have the same broad premise (which it doesn’t even seem like they do), the scripts are approached differently enough that it’s clearly a different thing. I get that this stuff gets confusing sometimes with similar ideas, but that doesn’t point to plagiarism. Obviously this is an important issue to consider, and I think everyone is a bit on edge with regards to intellectual property at the moment because of the whole AI being trained on works without the authors’ consent thing, and of course plagiarism becoming more widespread all the time in general. So, yes, it’s better to be safe than sorry and to be vigilant when accusations arise. But in this case, the accusations are definitely unwarranted. I will say a lot of the responses are really funny to read.
There’s a famous quote that reads something along the lines of “all art is plagiarism.” While this may be an overgeneralization, it does have some truth to it. Everything that we create as artists is drawn off of our life experiences which of course includes all of the other art we’ve experienced up to that point. In the modern world, it is almost impossible to create something completely original that nobody else has thought of before. By even reading someone else’s script, it may unconsciously and unintentionally have an impact on what you write in the future, even if what you write is not exactly the same or even similar enough to be considered plagiarism. After reading this article and some of these comparisons, it seems that this may be what happened in this case. These comparisons do not seem at all like The Holdovers was plagiarized from Frisco but instead may have some similarities because it’s completely possible for two writers to have drawn upon similar experiences in life.
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