Andrew Sullivan has piled up a small berms-worth of so-precious-that-it's-swaybacked-under-the-weight-of-it reviews from a few of the Usual Suspect blogs, who all weighed in on the Marxism, or maybe the non-Marxism, or the god-fucking-knows-ism --
...he operates under the assumption that a redistribution will prove isomorphic to an “Operation Twist” and restore full employment equilibrium.-- of "In Time".
However, for all of their many very large and impressive words, one item that none of the reviewers noted was that before it was 2011's breakthrough, visionary whatever, this story was called "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman".
It was written by Harlan Ellison.
In 1965.
It is one of the most famous and reprinted short stories in the English language.
It's plot --
"...a dystopian future in which time is strictly regulated and everyone must do everything according to an extremely precise time schedule. In this future, being late is not merely an inconvenience, but a crime. The crime carries a hefty penalty in that a proportionate amount of time is "revoked" from one's life. The ultimate consequence is to run out of time and be "turned off." This is done by the Master Timekeeper, or "Ticktockman," who utilizes a device called a "cardioplate" to stop a person's heart once his time has run out.
-- appears to have been cut from and lifted bodily out of Harlan's famous short story, then implanted into a Justin Timberlake vehicle without a backwards glance.
This has caused some controversy,
Ellison, a writer who is rightfully proud of the lengths he’ll go to to protect his intellectual property, attempted to prevent the release of In Time, claiming that it shamelessly rips off “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Tick Tock Man,” Ellison’s own short story.the outcome of which I am not 100% up-to-speed on.
In Ellison’s story, an impish rebel named Harlequin, jokingly modeled after Ellison himself, rebels against a futuristic society where the time that people have left in their lives is methodically monitored and even policed by the government. Residents in Ellison’s future have internal clocks that get processed by “The Master Time Keeper,” a heartless martinet that never hesitates before punishing tardy civilians by robbing them of precious hours or even years of their lives.
I’m no legal expert, and it is important to note that Ellison’s suit, which has not reached an official judgment yet, has not successfully stopped the theatrical release of Niccol’s film. Yet his case seems to have merit. In Time has the same exact set-up as “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Tick Tock Man.”
The similarities were so striking and obvious that upon seeing just the trailer 4-5 weeks ago, I whispered to my wife (for I am a considerate movie patron) words to the effect that I was delighted that Harlan had finally been able to get one of his most famous short stories made into a Big Time Hollywood Movie.
"After all," I reasoned, "who is there left in the world of cinema still damn fool enough to steal from this guy?"
I find this completely unsurprising: maybe it is simply another lethal side-effect of a culture whose economics, politics and entertainment all depend entirely on almost everyone forgetting almost everything that happened before yesterday, but (for example) the number edgy, "new" insights that pop up on science fictionally illiterate blogs these days (and then run like a rash through the blogosphere) that are nothing but 3rd generation carbon copies of edgy insights that first appeared, fully articulated, in "Astounding Magazine" in the 1950s is both amazing and depressing.
11 comments:
It's also entirely possible that the movie was written and developed by people who'd never heard of the '50s story. In a world of seven billion people, it's very easy to have an "original" idea that someone else had fifty years ago, and someone else a hundred years before that.
I'm in science, and I've seen plenty of cases of research that was conducted, published, forgotten, then reinvented by researchers in a different field using a different vocabulary.
If an idea makes sense initially but doesn't work on an engineering level, it will probably be tried by a couple of research groups in every generation.
Jay,
Coincidence? Maybe, but only in the same sense that a movie called "Doby Mick" about a great white manatee being chase by an obsessive sea captain named "Rehab" might also theoretically be a purely coincidental copy of "Moby Dick".
This movie wasn't written by "7 billion people". It was written in Hollywood, America, which is a relatively tiny, insular community, an even smaller subset of which are people working in this genre, most of whom have at least heard of Harlan Ellison, a writer who still walks among them. Loudly.
If the producers are smart, and it is at least 2-1 against that being the case, they will pay Ellison not to hurt them, otherwise I suggest they put everything they own in their mistresses' names and then bury their mistresses' name and phone number in a coffee can in the park, because Harlan will eventually eat their lunch, dinner, breakfast and their kids' after school milk and cookies. Mr. Ellison is a cranky, persnickity bastard whose writing I often admire - "Punky and Yale Men" being an old favorite. Unfortunately, I think his uncompromising nature has kept him from fulfulling his full potential as a writer, but that is sort of irrelavant here.
The point is, Harlan Ellison does not make idle legal threats, he is not some moist-eyed dillettante who will be grateful for tiny screen credit and a promise of pie in the sky the next time they use his ideas, he does not take prisoners. When it comes to asserting ownership over his work, Harlan Ellison does not fuck around. He will cut a motherfucker.
'Struth, what the Rev. Paperboy said. Harlan Ellison is indeed one badass humunculus.
But... umm... Don't tell him I said that, ok?
Sheesh, even a gentle-tempered fellow like James Cameron eventually paid Ellison over the TERMINATOR similarities. If I were Andrew Niccol, I would take the hint.
...especially when one considers that Ellison's lawyers are probably way meaner than he is...
Good morning, Mr. Glass.
Tried to post a comment and got "Memcache value is null for FormRestoration" as a reason why my comment wasn't posted.
Great writing as always, also thought you'd like to know that this post got mentioned in Jay Lake's blog.
Pirates get what they deserve. I don't write my stories to be stolen by some bozo. If he wants a story that he can claim as his then he can do what I did - sit his goddamn ass in a chair and write one.
I've seen the movie and read a synopsis of Ellison's story, and the similarities seem pretty superficial to me. The story seems to be a reaction to totalitarianism (not surprising, for something written in the 1950s). The movie replaces "money" with "time" to highlight the insecure, day to day nature of life for the poor. It's not really the same thing.
FWIW, I thought of "Repent, Harlequin..." when I saw the trailers, too. But then I thought of "My Name is Joe" when I saw the trailers for Avatar (and posted on it), and Bester's "The Pi Man" when I saw Pi. Sci-fi contains a ridiculous wealth of ideas (golden and silver age alone), and key elements from printed stories (sometimes famous) can be found in The Matrix, Dark City, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Back to the Future, Pitch Black and Groundhog Day, among many others. (I sometimes play a game of identifying a sci-fi story that used the premise of some new film.) Hollywood cribs a lot, often without attribution. In some cases, someone just comes up with the same idea independently, or the mix of elements is truly original, or the angle is fresh and inspired, as in some of the films I mentioned. But other times, it is theft. I'd have to see In Time to judge it fully, but the similarities are striking, and it is Ellison's most famous story and one of the most anthologized sci-fi short stories ever. I'll be interested to see how this one plays out.
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