Re-Tell Me a Story

It seems that I get a lot of my ideas for SleuthSayers posts from what I see on my TV--and that's what happened with today's column.

My inspiration: The other night I watched, for probably the 20th time, A Fistful of Dollars, the Clint Eastwood movie from the mid-'60s that launched the Spaghetti-Western subgenre. And I was reminded, for maybe the 10th time, of two other films, Yojimbo and Last Man Standing (neither of them Westerns), that had almost exactly the same plot: A mysterious stranger arrives in town and pits each of two rival groups against the other for personal gain. And these three similar movies even feature similar ways that the protagonist accomplishes his goal. They're so much alike that if you're familiar with any one of them, it'd be impossible to see either of the others without immediately thinking of the first.

Legally, how can that happen?

Well, that's a simple question with a long, complicated answer that I don't want to go into. (Because I would quickly get into matters over my head. I will say, though, that I believe the Yojimbo folks successfully sued the Italian director of A Fistful of Dollars and eventually received a settlement--but Fistful was so incredibly successful, financially and otherwise, it hardy mattered.) What I do want to go into are a few thoughts about how many stories, novels, and movies ARE retellings of other stories. And that we as writers can re-tell stories ourselves, if we're careful and follow the rules. (All of us know what plagiarism is, and nobody wants that. What I didn't know, until I looked it up, is that it's derived from the work plagiarius, which means kidnapper. Which makes sense.)

Here's the deal. Basically, we can copy ideas, concepts, titles, structural frameworks, and tropes but cannot copy specific character names and traits, quotes, exact sequences of events, etc. We would also need to be cautious about things like pacing, exact settings, character motivations, and the overall "feel" of a story. I'm no lawyer and I'm certainly oversimplifying, but a lot of this boils down to common sense. For example, I could write a story about a young girl on a farm who finds herself transported into a fantasy world with magical creatures and then comes back home with a headful of helpful life experiences, but I couldn't name her Dorothy and have her help a scarecrow and lion and tin man fulfill their wishes and fight with witches.

To my knowledge I have never in any of my stories "copied" the plot of another story (maybe because my plots, like me, are sometimes a little weird). A couple of years ago, though, I did write a story featuring a private eye who, in the course of investigating a wife suspected of infidelity, wound up in the middle of a conflict involving a wrong phone number. I'd once heard a joke about that kind of misunderstanding, and I had that plot detail on my mind throughout the writing of this story--but the story itself was far different in terms of characters, setting, mood, and the theme of the idea that inspired it. The joke didn't even feature a PI, and mine wasn't even the protagonist.

Having said all that, here are several examples of movies--again, I'm using movies because many of us have seen them--that are highly similar to each other:

High Noon (1952) and Outland (1980) -- High Noon is the classic Western with marshal Gary Cooper and new wife Grace Kelly counting down the minutes until the arrival of three killers on the noon train; Outland--an entertaining movie, I thought--stars Sean Connery as a marshal on one of the moons of Jupiter preparing to fight three hitmen who are on their way to his location via shuttle, to kill him.

Battle Royale (2000) and The Hunger Games (2006) -- Battle Royale is a Japanese film about teenaged students being chosen and forced by the government to fight to the death; the plot of The Hunger Games is pretty much the same, except that the story is set in a different location and a different time (the first movie takes place in the near future and the second in the distant future).

Yojimbo (1961), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and Last Man Standing (1995) -- As mentioned, the basic plot is the same for all three, but Yojimbo is a Japanese adventure film starring Toshiro Mifune, A Fistful of Dollars is an Italian-made Eastwood Western directed by Sergio Leone, and Last Man Standing featured Bruce Willis and Christopher Walken in Prohibition-era Texas.

Shane (1953) and Pale Rider (1985) -- Shane is another American classic, with stranger Alan Ladd helping homesteaders Van Heflin and Jean Arthur fend off a cattle baron and his hired gun Jack Palance; Pale Rider features Clint Eastwood helping a group of independent prospectors defend themselves against an Old West mining company. Pale Rider is like Shane in an amazing number of ways, which I realized about halfway through the movie.

The Seven Samurai (1954) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) -- The Seven Samurai, again starring Toshiro Mifune, is about a village of Japanese farmers who hire seven samurai to help them keep a group of bandits from stealing their crops. The Magnificent Seven, with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, is about a village of Mexican farmers who hire seven gunfighters to help them keep a group of bandits from stealing their crops.

Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966) -- Rio Bravo is a Western about a Texas marshal who arrests the brother of a local rancher for murder and then has to fight off the rancher's men until the judge arrives. El Dorado is an almost-remake about a gunfighter who helps a sheriff defend a rancher's family against another rancher. The plots are extremely similar, John Wayne stars in both, Howard Hawks directs both, drunk Dean Martin in the first movie becomes drunk Robert Mitchum in the second, third sidekick Ricky Nelson (nicknamed Colorado) becomes third sidekick James Caan (nicknamed Mississippi), etc., etc.

Dances with Wolves (1990), The Last Samurai (2003), and Avatar (2009) -- Dances with Wolves stars Kevin Costner as a soldier who meets, befriends, and lives with a group of Lakota Sioux in the post-Civil War West; The Last Samurai forces American cavalry officer Tom Cruise into the same kind of situation in the 19th-centry Japanese samurai culture; and Avatar has human Sam Worthington infiltrating and befriending a humanoid tribe on a moon of Pandora in the 22nd century.

Some other movies that are loosely based on previous films/novels/stories but that don't venture as close as those I've mentioned are Air Force One, Passenger 57, Under Siege, and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. These are all part of an unnamed sub-subgenre that began with Die Hard and feature an often reluctant hero who has to stand alone against a group of terrorists in an enclosed space like a building, ship, train, or airplane. These movies are just more proof that a certain amount of copying is allowed if you don't overstep the boundaries--or at least don't take giant steps. And there's also another way to do it: The surprisingly delightful movie Ever After, with Drew Barrymore, is an obvious ripoff of the Cinderella story, but it takes a direct and open approach by making its title Ever After: A Cinderella Story.

There are of course many more films out there that are copies or have been copied--The Lion King, Clueless, Bridget Jones's Diary, The Lord of the Rings, Cruel Intentions, Downsizing, Easy A, Freaky Friday, Yellow Sky, Romeo and Juliet, The Little Mermaid, Barb Wire, Trading Places, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Wolf Man, The Nutty Professor, The Most Dangerous Game, and so on.

So, how about you? Have you--those of you who are writers--based any of your stories or novels on stories, novels, or movies that you've read or watched? How closely do they resemble those previous stories/plots? Are you regularly inspired by previous works? Have you used them to create retellings, homages, or pastiches? If you've written a great many different stories, and if you--like me--try to keep learning from what you've seen or read in others' works, how do you keep from including/repeating some of those things in your own work?

If you do re-tell a story, be careful. I think I'll stick to new and original.

See you next week.