posted
As I've said elsewhere, there's a degree of irony in a plagerist "By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes." trying to censor Moore's anti-authoritarian Fahrenheit9/11's title because of a vague similarity to Bradbury's title for his anti-authoritarian anti-censorship book.
Also in that Bradbury had no qualms about giving title to Fahrenheit 454 by "plagerizing" the spontaneous combustion temperature of cellulose, 235degreesCelsius, without giving attribution to the discoverer.
posted
What, that I think Moore is a schmuck for not even discussing it with Bradbury? To which you responded with, "Bradbury ripped off Shakespeare!"
Even though Shakespeare is dead, so it'd be *impossible* to ask him, or inform him as a matter of courtesy?
You're right, my argument is dead. Sorry to have gotten involved in your unwavering campaign
Edit: Oh, yeah. Of course, the discoverers of those temperatures, they're the ones who made up both the number and the word, right? And, of course, they were all alive too, right? Right.
quote:As I've said elsewhere, there's a degree of irony in a plagerist "By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes." trying to censor Moore's anti-athoritarian Fahrenheit9/11's title because of a vague similarity to Bradbury's title for his anti-authoritarian anti-censorship book.
Also in that Bradbury had no qualms about giving title to Fahrenheit 454 by "plagerizing" the spontaneous combustion temperature of cellulose, 235degreesCelsius, without giving attribution to the discoverer.
He didn't try to censor Moore's book, he wanted to discuss it with him. Maybe try to CONVINVCE him to change the title.
Moore has wrapped himself up in the title and explicitly billed his movie as a continuation of Bradbury's message in F451. That's far different than using a 400-year old quote from someone who's to decomposed to take a telephone call.
posted
So you are saying that ~36thousand books and ~2thousand other products with Wicked in the title impinge on Bradbury's right to approve/disapprove of the use of the word.
Did Bradbury demand approval rights on Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit"? Did Bradbury get permisssion from all the authors who used the words "Martian" or "Chronicle" in their titles before him?
posted
Turn it around. Bradbury is being rude and obnoxious -- knowing he doesn't have the slightest claim on Moore -- cuz he wanted some extra publicity for his book, what with the TomCruze Fahrenheit454 movie being "in production" and all.
posted
I've got to side with Bradbury on this one, whole-heartedly. Moore made an outward and overt effort to use a title that would directly evoke the sentiments that well up at the thought of Bradbury's book.
While it was clever, it should have been discussed with the author at the very least. He wouldn't legally have had to accede to Bradbury's wishes, but at least he could have made the effort.
How would you feel if Moore's next project were to be an investigation of the Whitewater investigation of Bill Clinton and entitled "Starr Wars"? Surely the subject matter would be grossly different from Lucas' work, but he would be trading on the success of another man's endeavours and playing on our name recognition.
Sure, it would be legal, but it would also be tacky and unscrupulous.
But, with Moore's penchant for framing his own version of the "truth", I'd be greatly offended if he lifted the title of my work to further inflate his own marketability while playing hard and fast with the rules of journalism.
Why does Weird Al get permission to do so many parodies? First off because he treats the source material and the artists with respect and actually asks for their permission before beginning work. Even though, legally, he doesn't have to.
It's all a question of character, something Moore regularly shows he is lacking in. Moore's character, and legitimacy as a journalist, has eroded over the years as he has become more and more a zealot. In short, he has lost the professional ability to distance himself from the subject enough. That distance and abject neutrality is at the core of legitimate journalism.
Of course, he is just one of many in the vanguard of the new yellow journalism.
So many forget that it is impossible to hold a pen in one hand, paper in the other and hoist your own personal banner at the same time.
posted
What if the religious right made a film showing how if church values were stronger in America, the incident in Columbine would have never happened?
They could call it Bowing in Columbine. I wonder if Moore would care. He might not, but then again, he might.
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quote:How would you feel if Moore's next project were to be an investigation of the Whitewater investigation of Bill Clinton and entitled "Starr Wars"?
It would be SO much better than the "real" one coming out next year. I am praying for "Starr Wars!"
posted
zan, i think he'd like that. last night on the daily show he told all the protesters to keep it up since it's free advertising for him.
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quote:That distance and abject neutrality is at the core of legitimate journalism.
I would love to see somewhere that Moore ever called himself a journalist? I think "filmmaker" is about the only thing he used to call himself and now that he wrote books, "author" fits. I saw him interviewed last night on the Daily Show and Stewart came right out and asked him, "Are you being fair?" in regards to the film and Moore replied, "No." He is editorializing, not reporting. He even says very little in the film is new, just a new way to see it (with some new footage to support what many already suspect about Bush and the war in Iraq).
He pretty much said he made a movie to show his point of view on a topic of his choosing. That isn't journalism...and as far as I can tell, he never claimed it would be.
And when was he EVER at a distance from the subject? His first movie, "Roger and Me" was very personal as it was about how his home town was destroyed by the machinations of big business...can't get much more personal than that.
He isn't at the vanguard of yellow journalism...we have cable news and city newspapers to do that. He is just another person in the lovely history of editorial writing and movies. If journalism is to be used, gonzo journalism would be the most apt.
posted
Here's a link to a Democrat doing a fair-minded review of Farenheit 9/11. So, as seems to be the tendency, you can't point fingers at this guy and say he's another model Darth Vader conservative.
Key Quote:
"And then I read A.O. Scott's mealy-mouthed review in The Times. He points out that the movie is full of crap in many ways: "...blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery..." Hey, blurb that!
[Fahrenheit 9/11] is many things: a partisan rallying cry, an angry polemic, a muckraking inquisition into the use and abuse of power. But one thing it is not is a fair and nuanced picture of the president and his policies. What did you expect? Mr. Moore is often impolite, rarely subtle and occasionally unwise. He can be obnoxious, tendentious and maddeningly self-contradictory. He can drive even his most ardent admirers crazy.
But then Scott lets Moore off the hook -- and himself off the hook with that audience that applauded the flick in the East Village, which is Times Country, too -- with this: "He is a credit to the republic."
I guess he'd say the same thing of Rush Limbaugh, then."
Here's what I get, even with the correction to the link:
quote: Your email message has been idle and this link has become inactive. To access the link, close this window and return to your Message. Then click the browser's Refresh button or close your message and reopen it.
posted
Saying the documentary and the book story are parallels is bull. In the 50th Anniversary Edition of Fahrenheit 451, there is an interview in back. The interviewer asks if he thinks the situations are parallel, and he says he sees the problem in education, not politics. And he adds that censorship seems almost impossible now, so we haven't hit 451 times.
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posted
Whew! What a thread. I think we should subtitle it "There and Back Again." ...no wait - Tolkien already used that one.
A couple of random comments:
While it's clear that copyright law doesn't apply solely to a title (film/book/TV etc.) you might possibly be able to get somewhere legally with the claim under trademark law and anti-dilution theory (which is that even if the products aren't confusingly similar, allowing the junior user to trade off the value of your trademark will ultimately weaken your mark). The legalities could get interesting, but there's probably enough differences between Moore's product (documentary film) and Bradbury's (fictional SF book), as well as in the marks themselves, that a court wouldn't find trademark infringement anyway. So in the end, it really comes back again to a question of courtesy and Moore's lack of it.
(I do, by the way, spend some of my time practicing IP (intellectual property) and trademark law. I get my giggles by looking at Haulmark trailers and Crossroads Mill in Draper, Utah, and wondering if they've ever gotten letters from lawyers threatening trademark infringement litigation.)
My husband's favorite example of Moore's misuse of artistic license is in Bowling for Columbine, where Moore acts like he waltzed into a bank, opened an account, and walked out with a rifle a few minutes later. Not true - you have to go through a background check (3 day delay) and the guns are not kept there at the bank. Generally you have to go to a dealer.
It was an eyebrow raiser to see the Moore-bashing on Slate. I'd like to have been a fly on the wall in the editorial board room when this was discussed.
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The real review is down towards the bottom, it has its own banner. It sounds like real demagoguery to me, and it also sounds like any intelligent person on either side of the party system should be able to realize that.
quote: Moore's assumption is venality. He assumes that President Bush and his confreres are venal, that their motives are black, that they are out to do no good, only bad, and that the only choices they make in life are between greed and power.
That sounds familiar. I think some people base their entire opinions off of this idea.
quote: : The real problem with the film, the really offensive thing about it, is that in Fahrenheit 9/11, we -- Americans from the President on down -- are portrayed as the bad guys. If there's something wrong about bin Laden it's that his estranged family has ties with -- cue the uh-oh music -- the Bush family. Saddam? Nothing wrong with him. No mention of torture and terror and tyranny. Moore shows scenes of Baghdad before the invasion (read: liberation) and in his weltanschauung, it's a place filled with nothing but happy, smiling, giggly, overjoyed Baghdadis. No pain and suffering there. No rape, murder, gassing, imprisoning, silencing of the citizens in these scenes. When he exploits and lingers on the tears of a mother who lost her soldier-son in Iraq, and she wails, "Why did yo have to take him?" Moore does not cut to images of the murderers/terrorists (pardon me, "insurgents") in Iraq or killed him -- or even to God; he cuts to George Bush. When the soldier's father says the young man died and "for what?", Moore doesn't show liberated Iraqis to reply, he cuts instead to an image of Halliburton.
He doesn't try, not for one second, to have a discussion, to show the other side -- and then cut that other side down to size with facts and figures and the slightest effort at argument. No, he just shows the one side. And that, really, is a tragedy. It would be good if we had a discussion. It would be good to have a movie that made us think and reconsider and talk.
But polemics don't do that. They're only made of two-by-fours.
But the man could be wrong. Everyone could be right. Bush probably has Darth Vader's suit in his closet, along with the one ring, and he clearly is a fell beast that is strong with the Dark Side.
quote:But Moore wants to pooh-pooh the danger and make it into a conspiracy: "Was this really about our safety or..." [pregnant ellipsis] "...something else?" He adds (and I can't read one word of my scribbled transcription): "The terrorism threat wasn't waht this was all about. They just wanted us to be fearful enough to get behind their plan."
Of course, it was all about Iraq.... Wasn't it?...
: If you don't believe that, well, says Moore, you're an idiot. You're Britney Spears, shown in all her ditziness saying, "Honestly, I think we should just trust our President." There's your spokesman for the other side: Britney.
Again, let me remind you that this is a Democrat saying this. Someone who disagrees with many of Bush's policies. I disagree with many of them, too. There are just many things wrong with a lot of these agruments.
quote: He ridicules the terror threats and alerts, showing goofy stories about poison pens and model airplanes and goofier guys from the canned-bean crowd showing off their terror shelters. He gets a congressman, Rep. Jim McDermott, to downright say that the alerts are all engineered to keep us on edge. The implication is -- the sllipsis says -- that we're not in danger. I watch this scant blocks from where almost 3,000 Americans were killed that day. Oh, yes, Moore, we are in danger.
Of course, it was all Bush. He LET those things happen. He set them up in those very few months in office before 9/11. I mean, granted, there are people in other nations who are stabbing a man repeatedly in the neck with a knife and then ripping off his hand and showing it to a crowd, but, clearly, Bush is the bad guy.
Let's finish up with a real kicker.
quote:In Moore's view, you're either with him or against him. Hmmm, who else looks at the world that way?
Yup, Moore is just he mirror image of what he despises. He is the O'Reilly... the Bush of the left.
Which is what I've been saying all along. Polemics are always wrong. Zealots are always wrong. They're characitures of themselves, people preaching for their cause but actually hurting it, becoming steadily like their other side than they realize. Eventually, their opinions get marginalized completely.
And this is just funny:
quote: : BY THE WAY: The commercials for the film are still saying it's not rated. It has been rated R because of the copious gore and the appeal of that rating lost, even with Mario Cuomo arguing the case. So the commercial isn't quite, well, telling the truth.
Quel surprise.
quote: One last thought: Fahrenheit 9/11 is many things, but for pity's sake let's not call it a documentary. - Ty Burr, Boston Globe
[ June 25, 2004, 03:31 PM: Message edited by: Book ]
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posted
I love partisan sites that care enough about the truth to call it as they see it when it comes to one of their own. Hats off to Slate.
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posted
I have an idea. No one join this thread until they've seen the movie. I'll stop posting until I see it...
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posted
my girlfriend was telling me about that article by Christopher Hitchens, but i can't find where she had read what she was saying, so this is all heresay, but...
apparently Chris used to be a liberal, but has since been converted to the dark side and become a bit of a neo-con cheerleader, but is still writing for Slate. i'm not sure why slate keeps him on, considering they're fairly liberal; maybe they're trying to be "fair and balanced". in any case, i think this just underscores the absurdity of ascribing credibility to someone based on their self-proclaimed political tendancies. "look, i'm a liberal and a hated this liberal movie, it must really be bad..." whatever...
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The legal naivete displayed here is almost charming. Company executives are advised against saying "I'm sorry" after hearing of injury to a customer using their product -- even though it would be the socially polite thing to do -- because it could lead to the "Well, why did you apologise if your company wasn't guilty of causing the injuries?" question in court.
For similar reasons inregard to plagerism charges, there are the absurdities of script writers claiming to never have read others' stories within their genre. And famous authors such as WilliamGibson claiming "I've never read science fiction" after the huge success of Neuromancer. As well as well-known authors and many editors refusing to accept unsolicited manuscripts, making it a policy of returning them unopened&unread.
Irrespective of the merits of the case at this point -- ie none -- any meeting by Moore with Bradbury could have been used in court to tie up the release of Fahrenheit9/11 indefinitely. As I am sure both Moore and Bradbury were aware.
posted
Are you inattentive, aspectre, or just stupid? It's already been said that there wasn't legal merits for this case. On page one of the thread. I said I doubted there WAS any grounds for a lawsuit, if for no other reason than Moore is too intelligent to do that.
What was that you said about charming naivete?
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posted
And nothing was going to interfere or harm the release of that film. Not legal woes, not pictures of prisoner abuse, nuthin'.
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posted
Please. Moore admitted to knowing of the Bradbury title already, and to basing his title on it. He intentionally was making the connection.
A meeting with Bradbury would have done nothing to hurt his case, especially since they've already had a meeting via phone call, just 6 months after initial contact when any possible effect on the schedule would be more severe. Clearly, Moore was not worried about fanciful leagal issues.
posted
On the contrary, Rakeesh, there are no grounds for a lawsuit blocking immediate release because Moore failed to meet with Bradbury.
It isn't a matter of whether Moore would have won eventually -- he would have -- but rather how long the film could have been prevented from being released by a lawsuit arising from "Why, Mr.Moore, did you meet with Mr.Bradbury, if not to discuss his right of approval upon your title?"
Without such a meeting having taken place, any judge would have had to toss the suit out immediately, or be rapidly over-ruled by an appeals judge tossing out the lawsuit.
With such a meeting, the legalities are much more entangled by what each side claims to have been said in conversation. And so the lawsuit could have been ruled as having legal merit. Which in turn could have produced legal delays in the film's public airing.
posted
"Please. Moore admitted to knowing of the Bradbury title already, and to basing his title on it. He intentionally was making the connection."
And Bradbury knows that making literary allusions to past works is perfectly acceptable, well within creative etiquette.
"A meeting with Bradbury would have done nothing to hurt his case, especially since they've already had a meeting via phone call, just 6 months after initial contact when any possible effect on the schedule would be more severe."
A last minute phone call is useless as to the timeliness aspect of the doctrine of laches; at least inregard to blocking release. Whereas a conversation six months ago could easily be viewed as sufficiently timely.
Between Moore's flirtings on the edge of libel, and Bradbury's great experience in dealing with plagerism and film contracts, neither of the two is a legal naif. Both knew exactly what they were doing.
posted
A laches argument could go the other way, because Moore had constructive notice of the objection to the title and took no action. Bradbury could make the case that Moore's delay in attempting to work this out outside of court prevents him from raising a laches claim now.
I'm not saying either one would prevail over the other, but the case would be just as strong. Laches is just one of the many ways for a judge to do what he wants to do.
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