The plagiarism haunting just about every movie

• Pilfery in the cinema is an old and widespread part of the industry

ICINEMA HAS BEEN AN OMNIVOROUS LEVIATHAN WITH VORACIOUS APPETITES FOR FINDING MATERIAL FOR PRODUCTION

n the golden age of Hollywood in the 1940s, acerbic wit and sometime movie scribe Dorothy Parker famously quipped: “The only ‘ism’ in which Hollywood believes is plagiarism.”

As a hungry dream machine constantly in search of material to feed the demands of audiences it’s no surprise that Wikipedia’s category page of “films involved in plagiarism controversies” is extensive and covers films from across the world and the history of movies — from Avatar (basically Dances With Wolves with blue aliens instead of Native Americans) to

The Lion King (liberally inspired in story and animation style by a 1960 anime series Kimba the White Lion) to The Terminator

(suspiciously similar to a short story by notoriously litigious sci-fi author Harlan Ellison) and

Zoolander (a slapstick mangling of Brett Easton Ellis’s paranoid male model political conspiracy novel Glamorama).

Throughout its history, cinema has been an omnivorous leviathan with voracious appetites when it comes to finding material for production.

Novels, short stories, plays, newspaper and magazine articles, comic books, foreign films and even its own children — other Hollywood movies — are all on the menu for the moviemaking juggernaut. As a result, thousands of unhappy creatives have cried foul at the movie business’s callous swallowing up and spitting out of their ideas.

Accusations of plagiarism against filmmakers occupy a grey legal area. The long history of referential homage-paying by directors, from French New Wave legends such as Jean-Luc Godard and American ’70s New Wave film geeks such as Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader and to copycat tribute Easter-egger par excellence Quentin Tarantino, only serves to make things even muddier.

IRANIAN DIRECTOR

Every year seems to bring a new story of some disgruntled playwright, novelist or screenwriter who claims their original idea has turned up in a film they had nothing to do with and were not acknowledged or offered money for.

This year’s plagiarism row does not involve Hollywood blockbusters or yet another outcry of insufficient crediting by Tarantino, but takes us to the small yet critically acclaimed world of Iranian cinema.

Multiple award-winning Iranian social realist director Asghar Farhadi is serving on the jury of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Farhadi has been nominated for the festival’s top prize — the Palme d’Or — four times, most recently for his 2021 film A Hero, which won the festival’s Grand Prix award in 2021.

The film, distributed by Amazon Studios in the US, has been the subject of a controversy that led Farhadi to use his first appearance at this year’s festival to make an impassioned statement, denying all accusations against him.

The plot of A Hero is inspired by the true story of an Iranian man who, while on release from debtor’s prison, returned a bag of money that he had found. Had he kept it and not told anyone where it came from, it would have enabled him to pay off the debt he was serving time for.

The accusation of plagiarism does not come from the man whose story inspired the film, but from Iranian documentary filmmaker Azadeh Masihzadeh, who claims she first brought the story to Farhadi’s attention when she showed him a documentary about it at a workshop led by Farhadi in 2014.

Masihzadeh took her case to court, arguing that while the story was eventually covered in the Iranian press, it was her documentary that drew public attention to it and that Farhadi’s interest had been piqued not by press coverage, but by her film.

An Iranian court is hearing the case and initial reports incorrectly stated that it had been judged in favour of Masihzadeh. In truth, the matter is still to be decided, leaving Farhadi in a potentially embarrassing and careerthreatening situation, which he felt the need to address. He said his film was not based on Masihzadeh’s documentary and he is sorry the fracas “has caused so much ill-feeling”.

These kinds of accusations tend to be taken more seriously when it comes to social realist material and films based on true stories because of the close line such movies walk between real life and fiction.

Perhaps the solution to the problem is simply to take Tarantino’s postmodern route and, flipping the bird at the idea of truth or any other grand narrative, declare that all material — whether real life or fictionally imagined by someone else — is fair game for use, whether you reference it or not. After all, movie plagiarism, borrowing, referencing and homage operate in a much freer realm than literary word stealing where, though you may be given leeway to express a similar idea to another writer, you’re not permitted to express it in exactly the same words.

Of course, adopting such a devil-may-care attitude to truth and creative ownership would wreak havoc on the idea of originality and imagination and the rewards that we give to those who spend their time coming up with the most entertaining and singular stories to feed our narrative hunger. Even if — as literary scholar Joseph Campbell showed in his seminal 1949 tome The Hero With a Thousand Faces — we’ve essentially been telling the same story since the beginning of human history, it’s how we tell it that elevates the yarn spinner from Homer Simpson to Homer.