Some Light Bedtime Reading

I once was hired to write a film for the legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis. He insisted on flying me from Los Angeles to New York to tell me the story. If I liked it and wanted to do it, he promised, we had a deal. In our first meeting he "pitched" me his entire idea: "a Chinese detective is working in Chinatown." For this he flew me first class all the way to NY and put me up at the Mayfower in a suite overlooking Central Park. I needed the money, so I loved the idea. In one of our early story conferences he handed me a stack of books, a series of novels about a Japanese detective in Los Angeles. Chinese, Japanese, New York, Los Angeles, to Dino it was all the same. "Take whatever you like in these and incorporate it into the film," he told me. Naive me, I asked if he owned the rights to the books. "Oggi giorno," he said, "non si deve creare, si deve rubare." Nowadays you don't create, you steal." I'm guessing that plagiarism has been with us in the world ever since the second person put pen to paper, or scratched symbols on stone.

Referring to il Professore's comment on Dec. 26, you weren't off-topic at all. Good story. Another one I love concerns Samuel Goldwyn, who drove writer N. Richard Nash crazy all through the scripting of "Porgy and Bess," calling him at all hours of the night and day with minor suggestions and notes. When the script was done Nash retired to a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel for the weekend, and got Goldwyn to promise not to bother him. Sure enough Nash's phone rang at 3 in the morning that first night. It was Goldwyn. "Sam," Nash mumbled almost incoherently, "do you know what time it is?" Nash heard Goldwyn turn to his wife without missing a beat and say, "Frances, Nash wants to know what time it is."