SOMETIMES THINGS to write about fall into your lap. Out of the rubble of the great fanfic contretemps of '07 (Still no caps, but yes, they're still coming, and yes, they're still pissed) I wrote a week or so ago about ideas, and how they spookily sometimes seem to be snatched out of the ether by different people at different times -- and how it sometimes happens at the same time, too.
But what about when you're working with "provided materials?" An angry commenter on the original fanfic post apparently doesn't like my high horse. Which is funny, because I happen to have bought a piece of artwork called "The High Horse" from NY illustrator Molly Crabapple. I have to go get that framed.)
Alison, in part, wrote:
while you rant about people not writing original work, you are being paid to use someone else's characters in a world that you did not create, using the rules that they setup in regards to that world. How original can that possibly be?
It isn't. It's professional fanfic. Any writer who writes as a freelancer or on staff of a show that he or she did not create is a fan fic writer.
Though she plays a few rhetorical games in her comment [like insulting the show I worked on in an attempt to insult me...heh heh. Yeah, like that stings. -- go read it if you want the full flavor] Alison raises an interesting and provocative question: (the answer to which she wouldn't get, but we're writing for pros and would be pros here, chickens, aren't we? Yes, we are) How can you claim any originality in work that's based upon something else? And how does that work separate out from... fanfic (shudder)
To an extent I think this is a question that all writers wrestle with. It's wrapped up in the whole, "am I a hack?" question. You can be glib, and talk about there only being seven stories, or everything's stolen from Shakespeare and the Bible... but finding the original idea -- even in a world that's not your own -- is one of those things that separates out the pros from the amateurs. (For the purposes of this post, I'm including any of you spec monkeys who haven't made a sale yet. Because that's how you have to think of yourselves: pros who haven't made a sale. Yet.) It's what separates the writers from the fanfic writers.
Which brings me, Brothers and Sisters, to Top Gun! The Musical.
If you happen to be in Dallas, Texas starting this weekend, you can (and I hope you will) go down to the Dallas Hub Theater, pay your 20 bucks and sit down and watch one of the most fun things I've ever written.
I've written a bit about Top Gun! The Musical before. It came out of a rant about musical theater and how crappy it was that the only properties that rated the musical treatment seemed to be Disney shows and bad movies. (I think it was the Urban Cowboy musical that popped my cork, though I'm sure someone will write in and tell me that the brand new, Legally Blonde musical is "OMG...rilly good!"]
Anyway, in the spring of 2002, I sat down with a great composer and musical director named Scott White, and started banging out songs for TG!TM. We talked about Sondheim, he played me tracks from Company, and we hashed out what we wanted to do, starting from this ridiculous premise: somewhere, a big-budget megamusical based on the 1986 Tom Cruise movie Top Gun, is in rehearsals.
Scott and I decided to go in a few directions fairly early:
We decided we didn't want to tell the whole story of the movie.
This was mainly from me. The more I looked at Top Gun, the more I realized that the plot basically (forgive me, father) ran out of jet fuel at the point Goose died. Top Gun was the first MTV movie, and as such, it was slow and choppy because nobody had gotten that newfangled style down yet. The meta-commentary on the gay subtext of the film was way more interesting that anything that was going on on the screen.
We decided that we wanted to show more of the rehearsal than the movie.
The more we talked, the more we realized that Top Gun was really a metaphor here, a placeholder. The story we wanted to tell, like Chorus Line, was the story of the performers in it, and more than that: the entire idea of the creative process, how fragile it is, and how difficult. We focused quickly around the Director of the piece, who is desperately trying to tell himself that he's doing something artistically worthy (even though the audience knows that's bogus.) From there, we sketched in a few other characters: we had our Director, Billy Palmer, sleeping with the actress playing Charlie (the bitch,) while his long-suffering stage manager, Wendy, carried a torch for him (there's your love triangle.) Then we had some stock characters: the actor playing Maverick was dumb as a post (and insisted on being called "Maverick," at all times,) the actor playing Iceman was "gayer than anything in that Will & Grace show," and Goose...well...we made Goose a chick. We always knew that the heart of the piece was killing Goose, and it seemed to flow better that she was a woman. Also, let's face it, the real Top Gun didn't have much room for women and in a seven person cast we wanted more females. When we clocked the script, we realized that between book and songs, the amount of material that was actually from the musical-within-a-musical clocked in at about 30-35% of the show.
We didn't want to steal.
If Top Gun was a metaphor, and if people recognized the tropes, then, I very quickly decided, there was no need to stamp all over it. We wouldn't be using Danger Zone, or You've Lost That Lovin Feelin. We were going for fair comment, cultural criticism and parody, and we didn't want to be accused of plagiarism. It became very clear to me that there was no need, in fact, to use any dialogue from the movie. Even the situations could be turned around a bit. So in the show-within-a-show bits, we didn't take any lines from the movie. And you know what? It was easy. Because it really was about the experience of the movie more than the movie itself. It was about us, the audience. Trippy, eh?
We snuck in every theater in joke we could think of.
Which meant stuff like, though Goose's character was now female, that change wasn't really reflected in the rewrites, and the actress was suffering through having a non-existent characterization. We made our Charlie a little-bit-past-it actress to deal with neurotic issues, and to humanize her a bit. And we decided that we wanted a larger-than-life producer to enter at about the forty minute mark.
Why?
We wanted to change things up and get subversive.
We wanted the show to be about seventy, eighty minutes so it wouldn't outstay its welcome. And after about forty minutes, we wanted to shake it up -- by then all the in jokes about theater and creativity would be familiar, and everybody would know our characters, what their deal was and where their relationships sat.
Enter The General. The General is one of my favorite ever character creations. His dialogue, when I wrote it, poured out in a torrent, and most of what's in the show is first draft. Whole speeches came unbidden from his lips. The General is an ex-military man who's turned to theatrical producing, and just as you think you know what's going on in the show, he torques it another way. Because the General sees this show not as an artistic piece, and not even as a cash cow: he sees it as an example of American Cultural Imperialism, a way to win the hearts and minds of the world, through Musical Theater.
The General...in short...is batshit insane.
But he's a ton of fun. And then, just as you get his deal -- that this guy sees this show as an instrument of war by other means, we "show him" the 11'oclock number -- "That Goose Is Cooked."
Top Gun! The Musical did extraordinarily well for a modest Fringe musical. It was completely sold out. People scalped tickets. Seriously. We remounted the show the following summer and did well, receiving two Toronto Theatre Award nominations (called Doras) for Dmitry Chepovetsky (who played Maverick) and Best Musical. The cast was stellar and top notch. We took the show to the New York Musical Festival in 2004, and there have been other productions in Halifax, and Houston. We still get inquiries about it all the time, which is how it's going up in Dallas this weekend. (If you want to read an interview of me whoring the show, click here.)
When I went down to Houston to see the U.S. premiere in 2002, it was an important moment for me. Because it was the first time I'd seen something I wrote performed by people who I had had zero contact with. They only worked off the script. Also, the deep heart of Texas is a very different place from Toronto. Would the show play, and would the jokes land?
They did. The differences were intriguing. The General, a part that I saw as a savage indictment of the parts of the American psyche that scared me, was cuddlier down south. That's to be expected, I guess. But all in all, it was ... great. And now it's flying again. Yay!
So what to make of this?
In searching for stuff on the Dallas production of TG!TM, I came across info on a Chicago production which just closed in April 2007. There it is, folks. It's Top Gun, the Musical.Am I upset? Not even slightly.
Because you can't copyright an idea. And as Alison would be quick to point out, deciding to do a musical based on Top Gun isn't original. The only way, in fact, to mine any originality is to see what you do with it.
Now, in mine and Scott's Top Gun! musical, our thematic targets were really the artistic process, and how do you know you're a hack, and how your dreams for something never quite live up to the reality. And it was also about hope, and longing to be part of something good and not knowing if you measured up. And it was about propaganda, and how culture can be used to sell wars, and all manner of nasty stuff. And it was about gay subtext becoming text. And it was about eighty minutes.
What's intriguing, of course, is that in the five years between TG!TM and this version of the Top Gun musical, the U.S. is in a very different place. We made dark jokes about Iraq that were yet to come true. The kind of jingoistic, TG swagger sits in a different place in the American cultural mindset now. The other thing that changed, of course, is YouTube came along, which allows me to show you this:
Interesting. See, they chose to go with the Danger Zone, interp dance route. Funny, but more of a sketch than our opening number, "We've Got a Plane to Catch." Looks like they made Goose a girl, too...but a girl in drag. Funny. Different way to go.
Poking around, it doesn't look like this Top Gun musical got very good reviews. Some of the commentary seemed to indicate that there was no there there -- that once you got over the initial joke, it wasn't saying anything. Which is exactly the litmus test we put up to our TG musical: it had to say something different than the movie. It had to stand on its own.
And interestingly, that's basically the legal argument as to what constitutes a derivative versus an original work -- how much is you, and how much is the thing that you're parodying or commenting upon? In our case, the heart of the piece is not TG, it's making art, and how difficult that is. And that's what made the difference, I think, in the affections of audiences and critics both.
Of course, both Top Gun musicals rely and are informed by a very funny sequence in an otherwise forgettable movie called Sleep With Me. (And interestingly enough if you believe the scuttlebutt, old Quentin isn't being too original himself here.)
We never did too much more with TG! It's a seven person cast, which is large for a small cabaret style show. It's got swears, and you kind of have to have an 80's sensibility (ie: Top Gun has to have been formative for you) to get it. So the commercial appeal is limited. But the rights are still available, should you want to do it in a theatre near you.
To the cast and crew in Dallas, I say, "Good Luck." Now, back to my high horse.
5 rumbles:
My initial reaction to Alison: You're making a philosophical argument whereas the situation that inspired the recent dialogue and why writers don't read a spec or fan fic about their show is legal argument.
Essentially, the legal side addresses issues of who owns the rights to the characters and the execution of those ideas, and those legal barriers were put there to protect the "intellectual property" of these creative works. These protections are there to keep creatives from thinking, "There's no economic point of making these creative works because someone else can just print(or whatever) out a copy of something I worked long and hard on then make money off of something (while I make nothing) I put the effort into, and this other person just distributed it." When Disney enters into the issue of protecting Mickey Mouse, it's a whole other issue. . ..
If someone wants to hire someone else to do the actual writing, there's nothing wrong there. They have the right or "rights" to do so, since they own the rights. In regards to the writer doing it, nothing wrong there since they're (getting economic here) trading a skill of their's to make money. That's the basis of our economic system!
So Alison seems to be philosophically saying that staff or project writers are analgous to fan fic writers, except that they've been hired to do the writing (or given the right to write about a certain world or characters) whereas fan fic might do it for free. In reality, that enters an economic situation again, because if fan fics actually wrote for these shows without getting paid, that totally destroys the livelihood of project and staff writers. . .because to make it in a market that hires writers at a premium of 0, the staff and project writers have to write for free. In my opinion, that would suck because like we see in the fan fic community, the majority of that writing isn't all that good (for whatever) reason. . .so that would mean by diluting the market with free writing, we dilute the market of quality.
So, Alison, even philosophically, your argument doesn't pan out in having good TV, movies or anything that requires writing in reality. Yes, in sense, whether a "hack" or a project or staff writer can do a similar thing as a fan fic writer of not necessarily creating original characters, world, etc. etc. Nonetheless, people need to make a living and the audience wants good quality. We get good quality by paying people for their time, so they dedicate their time to writing good stuff.
Now, whether the audience gets good stuff depends on each individual case. . .but by people trying to take down the system of laws in place to protect creative works, they're helping to take down a system that encourages quality for the audience.
And with all this in mind, I can totally understand Denis's distaste for fan fic attitudes of blaming someone of plagarizing them when they never had the rights to write about those characters in the first place or by trying to influence the writer's of show, etc. etc. Again, it dilutes the system that encourages quality, and when your audience does that, I can see how that would feel like a betrayal and make someone cynical.
As for fan fic, as a practice of doing it, keeping it to yourself or showing it to a small group of people and doing it for practice, that's not necessarily a bad thing. When it's done in such a way as to dilute the product, though, I am against it.
Lex, that's a very reasoned argument. But I think we have to be clear about something else. You're never really going to win an argument like this with an Alison, because she might be making a philosophical argument now, but that could easily change in a moment, because what she's really doing is making an *emotional* argument.
Probably true, where I would say something to the sort of "You come up with a good system for paying people to make quality work without creating a patronage system, and I'll agree with you."
Hell, I've tried to think up some kind of non-profit or not-for-profit that could do something like that. . .but that probably wouldn't work until more people actually had the literacy and interest to create an audience for such at thing.
And on the flipside, I think the existing audience needs to get more critical of stuff out there on a literary criticism/theory level. . .very much like this blog to encourage quality of works by influencing the audience rather than trying to fantasize through fan fic or trying to influence the writers.
On the point of multiple instances of the same idea popping up, I think I mentioned long ago that there was a poster for "Con Air: The Musical" in the background of a shot on 30 Rock. While I don't doubt that Tina Fey secretly has a crush on you, too, DMc, I think the concept of a testosterone-filled movie being made into a musical is so obviously hilarious, that joke has been independently created multiple times. She didn't get quite as much mileage out of it as yours, though.
I still reckon that the idea Jim came up with over dinner is the way forward.
It made you laugh so much, you almost spat your food across the table... ;-)
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