Here is a story. Or, here is the beginning of a story:
One evening, a man and a woman, strangers, meet and engage each other in vaguely flirtatious conversation. The woman says that her roommate makes bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights out of plaster of Paris, and asks the man if he'd be interested in buying one. He expresses interest. She gives him her name and phone number.
Later that evening, the man calls the woman and says that he'd like to learn more about the paperweights she'd mentioned. They have another semi-flirtatious conversation, during which it is agreed that he should take a cab downtown to her place. A few minutes later, he is in a cab traveling downtown.
A few blocks from the woman's apartment, the cab driver stops at a red light. The man places some money in the taxi's change cradle. When the light turns green, the cab driver accelerates rapidly, and the resulting gust of wind blows the money out of the cradle and out the window of the cab. When the cab drops him off, the man apologizes to the cab driver, explaining that he has no money to pay him.
Shortly thereafter, he sits with the woman, in her bedroom, on her bed. He's met the woman's roommate (scantily clad, wearing a large amount of makeup), but there's been no serious discussion of paperweights. The man makes a few gentle advances; the woman ignores or declines them.
He asks her if everything is alright. Eventually she explains that some time ago, she was raped: the rapist had entered her apartment via the fire escape and window, and then had forced himself on her, for six hours, holding a knife to her throat as he violated her. The rapist, it transpired, had been an ex-boyfriend of the woman. The woman tells the man that she slept through most of the rape, which gives the man pause.
They decide to go out for coffee. They find a place that's open; there, she tells him that she is married. She explains that her husband lives on another continent; that they were together for a very short time; that she'd left him on account of some odd behavior on his part, which she describes. She is still close to her husband, though, she says: they write each other daily.
Shortly thereafter, the man walks the woman back to her apartment.
If this story (or this beginning of a story) sounds familiar to you, that's probably because it is the beginning of After Hours, Martin Scorsese's 1985 film about a guy named Paul (Griffin Dunne), stuck in a dead-end word-processing job in Midtown Manhattan, who is lured downtown by the alluring Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) to the underworld of mid-1980s SoHo. Once he realizes that Marcy is, at best, bad news, Paul wishes to leave SoHo, but with no money (even for the subway), there's no obvious way for him to do that. The remainder of the film (the above summary describes the first half-hour of it, less the opening scene at Paul's workplace, which shows us how much Paul's job sucks) concerns Paul's increasingly desperate attempts to escape from SoHo.
 |
| Dunne, Arquette in After Hours |
It is a dark, dark comedy -- a fantastic one, I think -- and given its setting in mid-1980s New York City, close to being a period piece: most telephones have dials, and awkward silences occur if people don't answer them when they ring; LPs are played; there are white cab drivers; there is a crime problem in SoHo; you get into the subway system, if you have the means, by purchasing a token from a person in a booth, after which you walk eleven feet to a turnstile and insert this token into it; computer screens are black, with green letters; Dilbert is absent; Cheech & Chong are present; etc.
After Hours didn't do particularly well at the box office. It did, though, get reasonably good reviews, and won or was nominated for some awards -- a few Golden Globes and others -- and Scorsese won Best Director at Cannes for it, where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or.
And the screenplay, too, written by screenwriter Joseph Minion, was nominated for an Independent Spirit award. Minion wrote it when he was in film school at Columbia; Lies was Minion's working title. Tim Burton showed initial interest in Lies; so did Scorsese, so Burton stepped aside. Not bad for a screenplay written by a film student, right?
Except for this: Minion lifted thirty minutes worth of plot (specifically, all of what I summarize in italics at the beginning of this post) -- word-for-word in a few cases, and plot-point-for-plot-point in many cases -- from a 1982 radio monologue called "Lies," written and performed by radio monologist/auteur Joe Frank.
Compare, for example, Frank's description in "Lies" of the woman's bagel-and-cream-cheese-paperweight situation...
...to this exchange between Marcy and Paul regarding the paperweights:
Or compare the woman's description of the rape, as told by Frank in his monologue...
...to Marcy's version:
The stories, of course, are not identical. In the monologue, it's a five-dollar bill that flies out of the cab window; in the film, it's a twenty. In the monologue, Mary (the "Marcy" character) claims to want to help her friend sell her bagel paperweights so that her friend will have enough money to move out and get her own place and take her bagel paperweights with her; in the film, it's Marcy who's staying at bagel-paperweight-girl's place. In the monologue, despite deciding to go out for coffee, Mary and the man go to a bar; in the film, it's a diner. In the monologue, Mary's husband's "odd behavior" consists of -- there's no nice way to say this -- shitting the bed; in the film, it consists of shouting "Surrender, Dorothy!" during sex. In the monologue, Mary is plain; in the film, Marcy is Rosanna Arquette.
And finally, the monologue ends with the man walking Mary back to her building; in the film, as Paul walks Marcy home, his troubles have barely begun.
But, to be clear: the seven italicized paragraphs at the beginning of this post accurately summarize both Joe Frank's "Lies" Monologue and After Hours' first thirty minutes (again, less one short opening scene which shows us how dismal Paul's job is), which amounts to just under a third of this ninety-seven-minute movie.
And both reference plaster-of-Paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights, for Christ's sake.
Frank did not discover that a Martin Scorsese film contained half an hour of his material until 1986; shortly after this discovery, he produced his "No Show" show (Frank was, by this time, broadcasting weekly from KCRW, the public-radio station in Santa Monica, one of the Los Angeles area's main public-radio outlets and Frank's radio home for fifteen years). "No Show," as originally broadcast, was ninety minutes long (his shows during that period were generally sixty minutes long); during it, in contrast to his usual scripted, highly edited style, he spoke extemporaneously, explaining to his radio audience why he didn't have a show to broadcast that week. A main reason for the lack of a "real" show was the amount of time Frank had spent that week dealing with a lawsuit he'd filed against Joseph Minion. (Other reasons: Simon & Simon was filming on his block, messing up his sleep schedule; his cat had a seizure; to his horror, a dinner party was given at which he was the honored guest; etc.)
Most of Frank's work (over two hundred shows) is available for download (and for a price) on his web site, but not the original ninety-minute version of "No Show." A sixty-minute version is available instead (presumably this version was the one later syndicated by KCRW to other public-radio stations, as "No Show" is something of a classic, Minion material aside), from which has been removed any mention of anything After Hours-related. (I have never, therefore, heard the ninety-minute version; I have only read about it, and also read reasonable speculation that the ninety-minute version is neither syndicated nor aired by KCRW because its not being syndicated/aired was part of an agreement that Frank reached as a result of the suit he brought against Minion.)
There's very, very little information on the web about this incident -- odd, I think, given Scorsese's stature (not that Scorsese had any knowledge of Minion's plagiarism). Odd, too, given that while Frank is far from a household name, he was on the air on KCRW and other public-radio stations for over two decades (and is still on the air, in "reruns," on Sunday nights on WNYC here in New York). Odd, I think.
There is very little; there is this: speculation that Joseph Minion is actually Joe Frank (extraordinarily improbable given that Joe Frank, while being relatively obscure and also rather private, has appeared in public and looks nothing like Joseph Minion, whom we see in the featurette that accompanies the film on the After Hours DVD and who, by the way, has since directed two films himself); a Wikipedia entry for Joseph Minion describing him as having "borrowed minor details" from Joe Frank, who "successfully sued [Minion] for an undisclosed sum" (a claim which is not sourced); conspiracy-type theories centered on the fact that actor Larry Block plays the small part of the cabbie who drives Paul downtown to Marcy's place (Block was a later collaborator, much later, of Frank's); and very, very little else. (I could swear that I've heard Frank in an interview discussing this incident -- saying something to the effect of, "I can't really discuss that incident" -- but I can't find the interview anywhere.)
So: the details are a bit of a mystery. But, to me, not as much of a mystery as this: how could someone think that he could get away with not subtly but brazenly plagiarizing, for a major motion picture to be directed by a major director, anything that had ever been broadcast on the radio in the major markets where Frank's work was broadcast? How did Minion think that all of this was going to turn out? The sour icing on the cake being that Minion's working title was Lies, after Frank's "Lies" monologue: a "catch-me-if-you-can" of sorts, perhaps. Was this a Stephen Glass type of pathology, but with plagiarism replacing making-shit-up?
I find it fascinating, but I don't get it.
