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My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

tessgerritsen.com

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Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#91

Post by hkmurakami »

dxhdr wrote: post #3

What's wrong with these people? Why couldn't Warner Brothers reach out to Tess and say "Hey, we're going to produce a sci-fi film based on GRAVITY. We'd like to work with you and are interested in re-negotiating your contract for a new version of the story." You know, acting in good faith. Instead they just screw her, no recognition, no money? How is that the default thought process for a company? This may be vindict…

"It's easier to apologize than to ask for permission."

Not that I agree with the above, but let's remember that this attitude is pervasive in every industry today.

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#92

Post by fubarred »

Large shops have huge bull's-eyes painted on them. If they act in bad faith, they will eventually lose reputation and business, spectacularly. This is why top VC's aren't going to do things that tiny VC's might try to get away with.

Also it's worth nothing that going out-of-your way to be fair isn't just "being nice," it selfishly reduces risk of issues, especially in small, highly-connected industries where reputation is the first consideration.

So if we are to take her account at face value, it seems like WB misjudged that word would get around and then lawsuits. (An expensive lesson in hubris.)

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#93

Post by otis_inf »

voyou wrote: post #42
madsravn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's turn it around. If they (WB) feel like they didn't buy it all, they shouldn't have the intellectual property to make a movie based on the book. Seeing it this way, they never bought anything.

The author clarifies in another post on her blog[1] that she isn't claiming that the film is sufficiently similar to the book that it would infringe on her intellectual property. Rather, she is arguing that she has a contract which guarantees her certain compensation if the studio make a film "based on" her book, and that "based on" doesn't require that the film be so similar to the book that it would infringe her co…

I likely miss something, but I find it intriguing that the movie isn't apparently based on her work, yet she wants the original contract being honored because the movie IS based on her work: if the movie isn't based on her work, the contract isn't in play here.

So if the movie isn't based on her work, how can it be seen as a result of the contract she signed?

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#95

Post by blueskin_ »

ubernostrum wrote: post #38
dxhdr wrote: post #3

What's wrong with these people? Why couldn't Warner Brothers reach out to Tess and say "Hey, we're going to produce a sci-fi film based on GRAVITY. We'd like to work with you and are interested in re-negotiating your contract for a new version of the story." You know, acting in good faith. Instead they just screw her, no recognition, no money? How is that the default thought process for a company? This may be vindict…

Well, some of the issues seem to be: 1. The movie "Gravity" is primarily an action/special-effects pageant about an astronaut trying to get safely back to Earth after an accident destroys the space station she was on. The book "Gravity" is a medical techno-thriller about a doctor in space fighting a disease outbreak on a space station. Reasonable people can probably disagree about whether the movie, given its signifi…

>The lawsuit was not regarding plagiarism

I didn't see the word plagiarism mentioned anywhere. That's overused, and means presenting someone else's work as your own, not ripping someone off by basing something on their work. If someone else had made the Gravity movie, then the studio took it and released it as theirs, that would be plagiarism, but not stealing plot ideas.

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#97

Post by jamestnz »

blueskin_ wrote: post #95
ubernostrum wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, some of the issues seem to be: 1. The movie "Gravity" is primarily an action/special-effects pageant about an astronaut trying to get safely back to Earth after an accident destroys the space station she was on. The book "Gravity" is a medical techno-thriller about a doctor in space fighting a disease outbreak on a space station. Reasonable people can probably disagree about whether the movie, given its signifi…

>The lawsuit was not regarding plagiarism I didn't see the word plagiarism mentioned anywhere. That's overused, and means presenting someone else's work as your own , not ripping someone off by basing something on their work . If someone else had made the Gravity movie, then the studio took it and released it as theirs, that would be plagiarism, but not stealing plot ideas.

I guess I'm wandering away from the topic here (since the current issue seems more related to contract law than to the ethics of plagiarism)... but I'm not sure it's so cut-and-dried a definition. Plenty of people and academic authorities include the uncredited appropriation of ideas in their definition of plagiarism, not just the wholesale lifting of entire passages/works word-for-word.

e.g. Harvard's "What constitutes plagiarism" at http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k70847&pageid=i... says:

"[I]t is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source ... When you use your own language to describe someone else's idea, that idea still belongs to the author of the original material. Whenever you use ideas that you did not think up yourself, you need to give credit to the source in which you found them, whether you quote directly from that material or provide a responsible paraphrase."

Wikipedia and the dictionary on my Mac also make reference to the taking of ideas as plagiarism, so it doesn't seem uncommon to include ideas in the definition.

EDIT: markdown fail.

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#98

Post by fabulist »

rosser wrote: post #31

Hollywood is much easier to understand if you look at it as a collection of interrelated financial instruments, that also occasionally makes movies.

This seems like an interesting perspective, would you care to elaborate?

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#99

Post by rjaco31 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #83
ctdonath wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I, Robot" was a great movie, but not based on the book. "Starship Troopers" was, as I like to repeat a quip, "based on the back cover of a novel by Robert Heinlein". "Frozen", while not involving a contract to the long-deceased author, is allegedly based on "The Snow Queen" though I fail to see the connection. There are numerous other examples of a movie being almost entirely unlike the book for which rights were pu…

> "Starship Troopers" was, as I like to repeat a quip, "based on the back cover of a novel by Robert Heinlein". ST was actually written as a script completely unrelated to the book, and the rights to the book later purchased and superficial changes (character names, etc.) made to align with the book.

Uh? The story is not the same, but the whole universe and political system are exactly the ones of the book, they just basically removed the mech-armors stuff.

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#100

Post by warfangle »

clay_to_n wrote: post #82
WillPostForFood wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stories are not similar at all. The similarity is the title, that both are sci-fi, and that there is a female lead. Judge for yourself: Book: Dr. Emma Watson has been training for the adventure of a lifetime: to study living beings in space. But her mission aboard the International Space Station turns into a nightmare beyond imagining when a culture of single-celled organisms begins to regenerate out of control -…

Are you intentionally ignoring this claim by the author? While my film was in development, I re-wrote the third act of the film script with scenes of satellite debris destroying ISS and the lone surviving female astronaut adrift in her spacesuit.

Probably. Their account was created 9 days ago and has only a few comments under it, none of which are meaningful in any sense. They're either a troll or an account owned by an Astroturf network.
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