Substantially Similar--A Blog on IP Issues, Writing and Film

Thoughts on Impeachment 2020

by John Aquino on 01/20/20

As the impeachment trial of President Donald John Trump is set to begin in the U.S. Senate on January 21, 2020, I wanted to post random thoughts accumulated over the past three months of hearings in the House of Representatives.

The article of impeachment for abuse of power charges that the president withheld $391 million in funds approved by Congress to aid the government of Ukraine in its war against Russia in order to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate one of the president's political opponents. On Jan. 16, 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, an independent government watchdog agency that advises Congress, concluded that the president's action violated the law, specifically the Impoundment Control Act, which established procedures to prevent the president from substituting their own funding decisions from those of Congress. Kelly Conway, an adviser to the president, responded to the media that the aid had ultimately been released, and therefore there was no problem. Critics of the president's actions have argued the law was still violated. But the bigger question, it seems to me, is that if the funds were approved by Congress in the 2019 federal budget to aid the Ukrainian war effort against Russia and the president sat on the funds for seven months, did Ukrainian people die as a result of the delay? And remember, the president didn't inform Congress or federal agencies of his reason for withholding the aid, and it wasn't until seven months had passed and the action was drawing flax that the aid was released that general comments from the White House about fighting Ukrainian corruption surfaced, If the answer is no, that there is no indication of any additional deaths, then perhaps the funds were not as important to Ukraine's war with Russia as Congress originally thought. If the answer is maybe, than that is very damning for the president.

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Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), majority leader, and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have both stated to the media that they support the president and will not be impartial jurors in the impeachment trial. The response that comes to mind is that they should not take the oath of impartiality administered to all senators before an impeachment trial and should recuse themselves as jurors. If this were a criminal trial and the judge learned that they had made such statements, they would be excused as jurors. And if, as McConnell has argued, the impeachment process is only a political act and therefore impartiality is not relevant, then why is the oath required? The requirement of the oath indicates that senators are meant to vote for what they personally think is right and just and not because their vote will benefit their political parties. The decision to have the senators swear to be impartial has been credited by historians as prompting those voting in the first (1868) impeachment trial to vote their conscience. President Andrew Johnson avoided conviction by just one vote. On Jan. 16, 2020, McConnell and Graham took the oath--anyway

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Sen. Graham has dismissed the testimony presented during the House impeachment hearings as both "circumstantial evidence" and "hearsay." Circumstantial evidence relies on inference to connect the evidence to a conclusion of fact in contrast to direct evidence that makes the connection directly. While Graham and television courtroom drama lawyers may belittle circumstantial evidence, during a criminal trial a judge will either tell a jury on his/her own or at the prompting of a prosecutor that direct and circumstantial evidence must be given equal weight in proving or not proving a defendant's guilt. This is because people usually do not commit murder before witnesses and do not brag that they are committing embezzlement. As to hearsay, which is the report of another person's words, Graham, a former military judge advocate, should know that the first step in prosecutors' building criminal cases is often hearsay. Someone hears another person say that he/she saw or heard or knows something. This leads to tracking down the person who actually saw or heard or knew something, which becomes direct evidence. And that is what happened in the case of House hearing witnesses against Trump; it led to people with direct evidence, many of whom have been prevented from testifying by President Trump. While hearsay testimony is generally not admissible in a court of law because a defendant has a right to cross examine a declarant, there are hearsay exceptions that make the hearsay testimony admissible. Several apply in this situation, including when the person who made or heard or knows the something is unavailable due to death, illness, or due to privilege--and President Trump has made potential witnesses unavailable by claiming executive privilege. Another exception is excited utterance, which could apply in the Trump/Ukrainian situation (e.g., John Bolton was heard to compare, in what appeared to be an excited utterance, the withholding of the $391 million to a "drug deal" that he would not be a part of). And so, the testimony from the House hearing should not be disparaged as circumstantial evidence or hearsay, because circumstantial evidence is just as acceptable as direct and hearsay can be admissible in a court of law.

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President Trump and his attorneys, including Alan Dershowitz, argue that a president cannot be prosecuted while in office. President Nixon told interviewer David Frost that if the president does something that might otherwise be illegal the fact that the president does it makes it legal. If either or both of these statements is true, then impeachment is toothless, Congress has no real oversight over the president, and there are not three coequal branches of government but, at best, two--the president and the judiciary--and, most likely, one. But the founding fathers included impeachment in the constitution for a reason, and they laid out three co-equal branches of government because they wanted checks and balances to prevent one branch running the country. Therefore, Trump and his attorneys are simply wrong.

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When President Clinton was impeached in 1998, as an attorney, I felt that a president lying under oath, even about a private matter, was worthy of impeachment and conviction. He had, after all, been ordered by a judge to testify on the matter, and he lied. I was appalled that members of two of my professions--journalism and law--argued that lying under oath didn't rise to the level of impeachment. And so, I reasoned, these attorneys will be okay about people lying under oath to them because the president did it and got away with it. I even talked to a group of patent attorneys who were afraid of that happening because defendants would figure out if they lied they kept their patents and if they told the truth they would lose them and President Clinton had shown that lying in one's self-interest was okay. Twenty-two years later, senators who voted to acquit Clinton have been criticized for not taking the testimony of women who accused Clinton of sexual harassment seriously and with respect in the wake of the me-too movement, and it is a stain on their reputations and, perhaps, a burden on their consciences. In addition, anecdotally speaking, lying under oath in one's self-interest appears to have increased. And now, two decades later, we have another president who lies--not just under oath--but all the time and specifically about his involvement in pressuring the Iranian president to get dirt on a political amount. I have several rules in life. One of them is, if someone lies to me about big things and lies a lot, I won't trust him or her--ever--or associate with them. Why would anyone want a president whom they can't trust--because that kinda defeats the point of having that person as president.

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Did the Democrats do everything right? Of course not. But their trying to get everything related to impeachment done before the 2020 election makes sense because the high crimes and misdemeanors President Trump is accused of are related to his trying to influence the 2020 election and he has shown no regret or remorse about his call to the Ukrainian president and has even implied that he would do it again.

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President Trump and his attorneys, including Alan Dershowitz, argue that abuse of power is not an impeachable offense. Dershowitz specifically cites the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson and arguments made then. But the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 approved articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon that included abuse of power. The president’s team would (and probably will) argue that that is not a precedent because the articles were not approved by the House and did not go to trial. (Nixon resigned as a result of the House committee’s actions.) But the point is that the analysis of a House committee was that abuse of power is an impeachable offense. The House committees who developed the articles of impeachment against President Trump probably felt safe in creating the abuse of power article because the charge had been entered before and recently, more recently than the trial Dershowitz cites.

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"My Fair Lady"--The "Most Perfect Musical" Is in Search of an Ending

by John Aquino on 01/16/20

For its recent run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., My Fair Lady was promoted as "the most perfect musical." This is grammatically incorrect because perfection cannot be improved on. There cannot be two perfect musicals with one more perfect than another. But even describing My Fair Lady as "the perfect musical," which has been done, is overreaching. It is an enjoyable musical, it is an expertly-packaged musical, it is a lucky musical, it is the perfect storm of a musical. And it is a musical in search of an ending.

My Fair Lady is the 1956 musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, which is itself a riff on the classical Greek story of an artist who creates a statue of a beautiful woman that comes to life. In Shaw's play, Professor Henry Higgins, a misogynist teacher of speech, takes a bet that he will be able to teach Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl, to speak properly and then pass her off a real lady. After weeks of lessons, having won his bet, he finds that Eliza is angry, complaining that she has no real place in the world now because she really isn't a proper lady and no longer speaks like a flower girl. She had enjoyed the excitement of working closely with Higgins and now finds the teaching process has ended. To my mind, Higgins' dilemma is similar to that of Mary Rose in James Barrie's 1926 play of the same name about a woman who has seemingly come back from the dead decades later and has not aged, although her family has. Alfred Hitchcock, who struggled and failed to make a film version of the Barrie play in the 1960s, described the play's theme as he saw it: If the dead were to come back to life, what would we do with them? In Pygmalion, the theme is, If a man who doesn't like women recreates a woman into a completely different person, what happens to her? Shaw's play ends with Eliza telling Higgins that she is thinking of marrying Freddie Eynsford Hill, a callow and poor young man who really loves her, and not Higgins and then she walks out on Higgins. Shaw added a prose epilogue to the play that described how Eliza did marry Freddie and set up a shop of her own (see https://www.bartleby.com/138/6.html). In the original production, the actors Beerbohm Tree and Mrs. Patrick Campbell tried to suggest with stage business that Higgins was in love with Eliza at the end. Tree, as Higgins, tossed a rose to Eliza, who caught it, sniffed it, and exited smiling. But when Shaw heard about this, he shut down their efforts. He insisted, not unreasonably, that, while Higgins had grown to depend on Eliza, he was incapable of loving her.

In 1938, Shaw agreed to a film version of Pygmalion on the condition that only his dialogue would be used and authored the screenplay to which he added a number of scenes that were not in the original play. The filmmakers, feeling that they needed a romantic ending but were hampered by their contract with Shaw, came up with a solution that Shaw didn't learn about until he saw the completed film at the premiere. In the film, Eliza leaves Higgins. He returns to his home alone and turns on the recording her made of her speaking in her Cockney dialect, and Eliza returns, turns off the machine, and repeats what she had said. Higgins clearly wants to run to Eliza but, instead, smiles and says to her, "Where the devil are my slippers?", something he had said earlier to her. No new dialogue was added, the wording but not the spirit of the contract was honored, and the implication was that Eliza had returned and would marry Higgins. Shaw, who received a substantial amount of money from the film, was said to have smiled weakly while watching the ending but said nothing about it. His screenplay received the Academy Award for that year, and the film was a great international success.

In 1956, composer Frederick Loewe and lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner, wrote a musical version of Pygmalion. They were required by Shaw's estate to use a certain percentage of Shaw's dialogue. (Shaw is sometimes written off as a rhetor or polemicist rather than a playwright, but he created incredible stories like Pygmalion, Don Juan in Hell which follows the characters of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni to a debate in hell where Don Juan was sent after murdering his lover's father, and The Devil's Disciple, which is set during the Revolutionary War and ends with a minister switching roles with a colonist rebel. If he was just a polemicist, he was an incredibly imaginative one.) Rather than feeling restricted by these contractual requirements, Lerner ended up having access to not only Shaw's original play but to added scenes Shaw had written for later printings of the play and also Shaw's 1938 screenplay with its additional scenes. The play had already been "opened up" by a gifted playwright, and lucky Lerner made good use of the material at his disposal.

This is not to say that Lerner and Loewe didn't utilize considerable skill in adapting the play. The music is sweeping and luscious, and Lerner's lyrics and dialogue generally channel Shaw well. But the requirement that they keep Shaw's words and plot gave them a major, albeit now dead, collaborator. It was a perfect storm of ingredients that is unlikely to be repeated. (Lerner and Loewe certainly weren't able to repeat it. They followed it with the 1958 film Gigi, which, in spite of attempts to put it on the stage, is unplayable today with its plot of a young woman who is forced by her mother, grandmother, and aunt to be a mistress to a rich man, and Camelot (1960), which has a marvelous score but, again, structural problems with its book. Lerner tried to work with other composers and produced a long string of mostly failures.) Lerner's work on My Fair Lady sometimes betrays his lack of familiarity with the period and subject matter. He has Higgins sing, "By rights she should be taken out and hung/For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue." The playwright and actor Noel Coward told him it should be "hanged" and not "hung," and Lerner replied that "hanged" didn't rhyme with "tongue." A strange response for a man writing a play about the proper use of language.

As to the ending, there's Shaw's original ending, the film's collage ending that was foisted on Shaw, and the musical's ending that is borrowed from the film with the background music of "I Could Have Danced All Night" from the show. But the director and producers of the 2018 Broadway revival that toured at the Kennedy Center were concerned about how Eliza's crawling back to the misogynistic Higgins would play amidst the "MeToo" movement against male domination of women through sexual harassment and assault. (SPOILER ALERT for those who have not seen this production.) Their solution was to replay the ending of the film and the original musical production but, at the point where Eliza turns off the machine and says in the Cockney dialect, "I washed my face and hands before I came in" and Higgins says, "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers," Eliza strokes his face sadly and then walks away.

It played very strangely. The meaning, as best I could figure it out, is that, either, having given him yet another chance to treat her with respect and even love that he muffs, she walks away with finality, or Higgins is trapped in a hellish time loop and condemned to repeat over and over the misogynist things he once said to her. What it comes down to is that, from a musical comedy perspective, the story has never had a satisfactory ending and never will. In many ways, the 2018 production reverts to Shaw's sequel ending in which Higgins and Eliza do not get together. Actually, Tree's tossing of a rose to Eliza might actually have played better as a musical ending than the 2018 production's ending.

As for the rest of the Kennedy Center production, as has been the case of many recent touring productions I've seen such as Hello, Dolly!, I found that it lacked energy and that the direction was perfunctory. The leads were not well cast, the Eliza having a pleasant but not a strong voice. For her grand entrance in her gown as she and Higgins leave for the ball, she entered through a door and was blocked by the couch. Her entrance down the staircase at the ball was from the side and not the center toward the audience. For the ball, there were three couples dancing, clearly a issue of costs for a touring production. The scenery was mostly a revolving structure of Higgins' flat that revolved for no clear purpose. They had Higgins' mother advise him not to bring Eliza to the ball while standing with him outside his flat in the street, presumably to avoid a scenery change for such a brief conversation. And the choreography of the few numbers that danced was mostly nonexistent--the actors mostly moved around or strutted.

On the plus side, they retained the magnificent Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations in which the percussion bangs as if struck sharply by a ball-peel hammer, and they depicted the gradual evolution of Eliza's transformation to better speech more realistically than I have ever seen. But other audience members of the audience also appeared to have problems with the production. My wife heard one woman say to another in the restroom, "I thought the pace picked up in the second act." "Yes," her companion answered, "but I think that was because the conductor went rogue."

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The Divergence from Facts in the Movie About Richard Jewel--Defamation, Unethical, or Both?

by John Aquino on 12/11/19

I have written a book and several articles on the legal issues that arise when filmmakers fictionalize characters and events in movies based on facts. Examples of these issues keep coming, most recently in Richard Jewel, a film directed by Clint Eastwood about the 1996 Olympic bombing in Atlanta.

The focus of the movie is on Jewel, a security guard who discovered a green backpack containing three fragmentation-laden pipe bombs underneath a bench outside of a concert held during the Olympic games. Jewel alerted the authorities and helped clear the area before the bombs exploded, with casualties limited to one dead and injuries in the low 100s. Initially hailed as a hero, Jewel was later vilified after an article by Kathy Scruggs and Ron Matz reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the FBI was investigating Jewel for planting the bombs in order to obtain celebrity. The agency had based their suspicions on a "lone bomber" criminal profile. It formally cleared Jewel 88 days later, and seven years after that Eric Rudolph was arrested and later convicted and sentenced to multiple terms of life imprisonment. But Jewel's reputation was ruined as a result of non-stop reporting and speculation in newspapers and on television. He sued the AJC, the New York Post, the television networks NBC and CNN, and his previous employer Piedmont College for defamation. The last four reached settlements with Jewel, but AJC did not, standing by its contention that its reporting was accurate--the FBI was investigating Jewel., and in 2011 the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in AJC's favor. Some media attorneys and advocates have argued that the AJC reporting was unethical and inappropriate because Jewel had not been formally charged.

My writing had stressed several conclusions concerning legal issues involving fictionalization in fact-based films. The only person who has "standing" to sue for defamation is the person whose reputation has been injured. The dead cannot sue for libel--because they are dead--and neither can their families because they have no standing. Filmmakers, consequently, often wait for those portrayed in their fact-based films to die so that there will be no defamation suits; This forces families to attempt to find other causes of action for litigation, usually without success. If the people portrayed are still alive, filmmakers may still go forward, but usually seek those individuals' cooperation. Finally, filmmakers will often "toy" with the facts to make them more dramatic. For example, in the 2012 film Argo, which was based on a CIA agent's plan to rescue six Americans hiding in the Canadian Embassy in Iran during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis by pretending they were part of a movie company preparing to make a movie in Iran. In real life, the plan worked perfectly, and the hostages simply flew out of the country. This, evidently, wasn't dramatic enough, and the filmmakers showed the Iranian officials detecting the ruse at the last minute and sending troops firing at the plane as it takes off--none of which happened.

Richard Jewel follows the facts closely. But, rather than show Scruggs finding out that the FBI suspected Jewel of planting the bombs through dogged investigation, the filmmakers decided to portray Scruggs as having obtained this information by sleeping with FBI agent Donald Johnson. No reporting of the events of 1996 claim that this happened. But Scruggs died, apparently by suicide, in 2001, Johnson in 2003, and Jewel in 2007, which likely eliminates any defamation claims concerning the portrayals of them. The AJC has written Eastwood, screenwriter Billy Ray, and the film's distributor Warners that the portrayal of Scruggs is false and that the newspaper is falsely shown as pimping her out in order to get the story. The AJC demanded that the filmmakers publicly acknowledge and "prominently" insert a disclaimer stating that some events in the film have been invented and that dramatic license has been taken.

The film already has such a disclaimer, but it is placed at the end of the closing credits and in small type. Whether the AJC has grounds to sue would need to be firmly expressed and established in a legal complaint filed by the filmmakers. The AJC's refashioning the argument that was leveled against them in 1996--that falsely showing Scruggs to be a slut to make the story more interesting is unethical and inappropriate--is definitely justified. Scruggs, who appears to have been a very talented and troubled person and who died at from a drug overdose at just 42 years of age, deserves better.

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Should--and Can--the Work of Artists Who Are Atrocious People Be Banned?

by John Aquino on 09/23/19

It's been a question for centuries Does an artist's bad behavior forever taint his art?

In the world of music, for instance, it has long been asked, should the works of Richard Wagner be performed in spite of deplorable aspects of his behavior and writings? He brazenly had an affair and fathered a child with the wife of a conductor who had tirelessly supported his music--Wagner later married her. He wrote an essay titled "Judaism in Music" in which he attacked Jewish composers, claiming that they were to blame for all that was bad in music. His operas extol German nationalism and denigrate Jewish characters, which led to his being the favorite composer of Nazi Germany. Wagner's widow and daughter were antisemitic, and his daughter-in-law, who became head of the Bayreuth festival that celebrates Wagner's operas, was a friend of Nazi leader Adolph Hitler. Even today, Wagner's operas have never been staged in Israel, and his instrumental music has been effectively banned because the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews--in September 2018, a classical music station in Israel was forced to apologize for playing a Wagner piece.

Ironically, the recording played by the radio station was conducted by Daniel Barenboim, whose parents were Russian Jews, and who is a Wagner proponent. Barenboim and others have insisted that it is important to separate an artist from his art.

More recently, the actor Kevin Spacey was rendered unemployable in 2017 by accusations made by 15 men that Spacey had engaged in sexual misconduct with them. He was fired from his hit cable series House of Cards. His scenes for the completed movie All the Money in the World were re-shot quickly with another actor, Christopher Plummer, taking his part. Plummer was nominated for an Academy Award, probably, in part, because voting members of the Academy celebrated his feat of performing under such circumstances. Screenwriter Paul Schrader was publicly chastised in November 2018 for saying he wanted to work with Spacey. Schrader, somewhat awkwardly, had said something similar to Barenboim: "I believe there are crimes in life but no crimes in art. Spacey should be criticized for any crimes his actual person created. But not for art. All art is a crime. Punishing him as an artist only diminishes art. Put [Louis Ferdinand] Celine in jail, put [Ezra] Pound in jail, punish [Oscar] Wilde and [Lenny] Bruce if you must, but do not censor their art. " (Celine was imprisoned for collaborating with the Nazis, Pound for treason, Wilde for sodomy, and Bruce for obscenity.)

I believe that if producers, actors, and directors do not want to work with an actor because his or her personal behavior offends them and/or because the behavior will offend the audience, then one cannot force them to do otherwise. I believe that if a composer's music summons up in the minds of audience members images of the bodies of their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins lying dead on the floors of gas ovens or stacked in piles in trenches, then the audiences simply will not pay to hear it.

But will the art of these artists with atrocious behavior nonetheless survive? Wagner's obviously has. Not in Israel, but his music is performed in many countries (although not by every opera company or university) and admired by those who evidently do separate the art from the artist. In 1949, the actress Ingrid Bergman was ostracized by the U.S. film community because she left her husband and family to live with and later marry the Italian film director Roberto Rossellini. Seven years later, times had changed, and she won an Academy Award for her performance in Anastasia and went on to win another 17 years after that for Murder on the Orient Express. What if times do not change the view of what is atrocious behavior? Fifty years from now, just as some people listen to Wagner, will audiences readily view films directed by self-exiled accused sex offender Roman Polanski, such as Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, even though the behavior of which he is accused will always be regarded as criminal? Books have been censured and burned, frescoes and statues have been crushed by the hammers of philistines, films have evaporated through neglect. But art, which has the solidity of light and shadows, still has a knack for survival.

My views are somewhat mixed on Stacey's art. I remember seeing him in a production of American playwright Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in 1987 that was directed by the London-born Jonathan Miller. Miller had the actors overlap dialogue, which resulted in cutting an hour from the play's lengthy running time, speeding up the pace, and making the action seem cartoonish. But Spacey stood out. I saw him next in the first season of the television drama Wiseguy (1988) in which he portrays a crime syndicate boss who has an incestuous relationship with his sister and whose paranoia causes him to mentally disintegrate. Spacey made the character believable, repellent, and, yet, somehow, sympathetic. He went on to win Academy Awards for The Usual Suspects (1995) as a crippled criminal with a secret and American Beauty (1999) about a father who becomes infatuated with his daughter's best friend. But I think he was more of a character actor than a lead and, like Anthony Quinn and Rod Steiger, other character actors who won Academy Awards and unsucessfully graduated to lead roles, he soon seemed to get on audiences' nerves with bigger than life performances. He ended up playing the villainous Lex Luthor in Superman Returns (2006) and comic villains in Fred Claus (2007), Horrible Bosses (2011), and Horrible Bosses 2 (2014). He found renewed success in the U.S. version of the British television drama House of Cards (2013-2017) and was riding high--he even hosted the 2017 Tony awards where the audience appeared to idolize him--until the sexual misconduct accusations hit. Many doubt that he will be allowed a career resurgence. One legal case against him was dismissed in Nantucket, but others are active. But what art there is in The Usual Suspects and Wiseguy is still there if one looks.

Bill Cosby starred in three memorable television series--I Spy (1965-1968), The Bill Cosby Show (1969-71), and The Cosby Show (1984-1992). For the first, he was the first black performer to win an Emmy. In the last, his performance was so endearing, he was dubbed "America's Dad." In 2015, however, 46 women accused him of drugged sexual assault. The statute of limitation prevented trials of the charges from all but one accuser. He was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to 3-10 years in prison. As a result, his reputation as "America's Dad" evaporated, his image was removed from the mural outside of Ben's Chili Bowl in Washington, D.C., and The Cosby Show is no longer shown on network television--it is only available from the Amazon Prime subscription service.

But some of Cosby's art has survived. My brothers and I and most of my friends grew up listening to the records of his stand-up comedy performances. He had such a natural style, and his stories of his childhood and his re-envisionings of history struck a chord with us. We played the records so often we memorized his routines. I remember one fantasy of his of an operating room with the patient under local anesthesia and therefore awake. The doctor goes, "Scalpel, sponges, suction, oops." The startled patient says, "Oops! I know what it means when I say 'oops.' What does it means when you say 'oops.'" Years later, we were watching President George W. Bush and Russian President Bush on television at Bush's ranch. Bush got into a jeep and said to Putin, "You ride shotgun," meaning the passenger seat. I immediately began to do a riff on Cosby, imagining Putin saying, "Shotgun! I know in Russia what it means to ride shotgun! What does 'ride shotgun' mean in the United States? Where is the shotgun!" And everyone around knew that I was doing Cosby.

There's no forgiving or forgetting what he was convicted of doing or so widely accused of doing. But art does have its ways of surviving.

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More on Literary, Film, and Theatrical Influences

by John Aquino on 09/14/19

I've always been fascinated by influence a play, film, or book has on other works of literature or film, as have so many writers and scholars. My first (and only) article in a scholarly journal was written when I was right out of graduate school and was teaching a course in fantasy and science fiction that was created by my friend and colleague Verlyn Flieger. Included in the curriculum was Perelandra, a science fiction novel by C.S. Lewis in which there was a character named Pshaw who said things that were paraphrases and quotes of what the dramatist George Bernard Shaw, on whom I had written my master's thesis, had said. I couldn't find any reference to this in the published scholarship, so I wrote an article on Shaw's influence on Lewis, sent it to the Shaw Review, and it was published. The only reason I could figure why more experienced academics scholars had not noticed this connection before was that they were not readers of science fiction.

Academics write articles on questions such as was Shakespeare influenced by this or Dickens by that. In this blog, I made reference to an article in the Times (London) Literary Supplement (TLS) that circulated the suggestion that Samuel Beckett's 1953 play Waiting for Godot may have been influenced by either Honore deBalzac's 1848 novel La Falseur or by the film versions of the novel--(1936) and The Lovable Cheat (1949)--in which there is reference to a character named Godot. Did Beckett read the novel or see either film? There appears to be no documentation that he did, so all that can be said is that it is possible.

Sometimes similarities between works are the result of two writers separately responding to the same event or situation. In a recent TLS article, Ian Buruma noted that in 1944 Anne Frank wrote in her diary about the tension that developed in sharing a secret and confining hiding place from the Nazis with family members and Jewish friends: "Relationships here in the Annex are getting worse all the time. We don't dare open our mouths at mealtime (except to slip in a bite of food) because no matter what we say someone is bound to resent it or take it the wrong way. . .if only there were no other people in the world." In the same year, Jean Paul France in Nazi-occupied France wrote in his play Huis Clos (No Exit), which depicts three people trapped in a locked room that represents hell. In the play, one character says, "Hell is other people." Obviously, Anne Frank had no contact with Sarte, and her diary was published after his play was produced.

Similarly, I remember reading in an interview how the film director George Cukor responded to the question about whether his 1942 film Keeper of the Flame was influenced by Orson Welles Citizen Kane. Both films are about newspaper reporters trying to determine the "truth" about legendary and just-deceased Americans. The films shared not only similar stories but tones and atmospheres. Cukor noted that Keeper started filming in 1941 and that the production of Kane was clouded in secrecy in fear of a negative reaction from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst on whom the character of Charles Foster Kane was loosely based. "There was just something in the air," Cukor said in explaining the movies' similarities.

I was thinking of influences today when I saw a bit of the movie Mogambo (1953), which was a remake of the 1932 film Red Dust. Both starred Clark Gable as a hunter in Africa who is attracted to two women: a prime and proper wife whose husband has hired him to lead an African safari (plays by Mary Astor in Red Dust and Grace Kelly in Mogambo) and a more worldly woman (played by Jean Harlow in Red Dust and Ava Gardner in Mogambo). Nine years later, the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote The Night of the Iguana about a defrocked minister who has become a tour operator in Mexico. He is stuck with and drawn to two women: the prim and proper Hannah who is there with her father, an elderly minor poet, and the lusty innkeeper Maxine. Bette Davis played the innkeeper on stage and, interestingly enough, Ava Gardner took the part in the movie. Williams expanded the play from his 1948 short story, which was just about Hannah.

Could Williams have seen Red Dust or Mogambo before he fleshed out the short story and, either consciously or subconsciously, borrowed the premise? He went to movies, he wrote movie screenplays, he attended of film versions of his plays. It's possible he saw one or both. I'm not a Williams scholar, but I haven't discovered anything published on this. Unless there is a letter or diary entry or something documenting his watching the film(s), the conclusion that he was influenced by one or both is informed speculation.

And that's often what claims of influence are.

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