Reader Question: What is the difference between an homage and plagiarism?
Question from @MattHarrisn:
Do you know any resources which discuss the line between what is plagiarism as opposed to merely influence in screenplays?
Perhaps we should ask Shia LaBeouf.
Okay, cheap shot, I know.
Let’s start with a definition. Per our good friends at Wikipedia: “Homage is a show or demonstration of respect or dedication to someone or something, sometimes by simple declaration but often by some more oblique reference, artistic or poetic.”
A classic cinematic example is the stairway shootout in the 1987 movie The Untouchables:
Compare to one of the most famous visuals in film history from the 1925 movie Battleship Potemkin:
Clearly director Brian DePalma (The Untouchables) was influenced by the work of Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin). You can go here to see DePalma’s homage in an article entitled “15 Movies With Awesome Tributes to Other Movies”. On the other hand, you can also go here to see this article: “10 Awesome Set Pieces That Were Ripped Shamelessly From Other Movies.”
Apparently one person’s homage is another person’s rip-off.
And that gets to the heart of your question.
One point I feel pretty safe in making: If you are talking about a scene or even a set of scenes, one film referencing or influenced by a previous one, that’s safe territory. Of course, if you make it shot-for-shot the same, you raise a yellow flag. But everyone in the business knows movies are a self-referential narrative form, so there’s some built-in latitude.
However if you are talking about a story concept or worse, an entire story, that gets into some uncomfortable territory in the whole ‘similar but different’ arena: Too similar and that can become problematic. But as Hollywood as proven time and time again, you have to be really similar to be too similar.
For example, there is the Dude, Where’s My Car vs. The Hangover comparison which I posted about here:
Now consider the movie Dude, Where’s My Car, the 2000 comedy starring Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott. Here’s the premise per IMDB: “Two potheads wake up from a night of partying and can’t remember where they parked their car.”
Good idea, right? Good enough to do $73M B.O. worldwide.
Then along come two screenwriters named Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Now who knows if they were actually thinking about Dude or not, but somehow they came up with this: “Three groomsmen lose their about-to-be-wed buddy during their drunken misadventures, then must retrace their steps in order to find him.” Which results in this: $467M B.O. worldwide.
The story conceit — partying guys who wake up having lost something, but can’t remember what happened the previous night, so they have to retrace their steps — is almost exactly the same in both movies. But is this a case of plagiarism? No, by Hollywood standards, even at the story concept level because the “something” the Protagonists lost is considerably different: a car vs. the wedding’s groom. That simple change is a significant one as I noted in the previous post:
How is The Hangover an improvement over Dude, Where’s My Car? For starters:
* Raise the stakes: They’re not missing a car, they’ve lost a friend, an actual human being.
* Raise the stakes even more: An actual human being who is supposed to be getting married.
* Time pressure: An actual human being who is supposed to be getting married like… right now!!!
* Las Vegas: A much better story universe because what happens in Vegas blah blah blah…
Are there resources which go into homage vs. plagiarism in great detail? I don’t know of any, particularly of the legal kind, but hopefully some of our readers will, and they can provide that info in comments.
Bottom line in my view, Hollywood has a longstanding tradition of ‘recycling’ story concepts and stories themselves, so there is a pretty broad understanding of ‘homage’ or ‘inspiration,’ one story to the next. The more movies you watch and scripts you read will inform your own instinct in this regard.
GITS readers, what say ye? If you can shed any light on the subject, I’d appreciate your thoughts.
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