Reprint: Rebecca Eckler Knocks Up Judd Apatow

This is a little out of date -- but seeing as the "how do I keep somebody stealing my idea" stuff still seems to be number one with a bullet on the questions list, I thought it beared a bit of revisitin' Does anyone know if this lawsuit is still ongoing?

FOR WHAT it's worth, I've met Rebecca Eckler a few times. Back in the previous life, when she wrote for the National Post and I worked at the Sci-Fi Station, she came by and did an article on us and talked to me and some of my compatriots. Eckler and Leah McLaren have taken heat for years for being the young pretty female writers at their respective papers (the Post and the Globe.) Sometimes the criticism shot their way made me feel a little oogy, because you could never quite lose the feeling that at least part of it was sexist in nature. Ie: if the reporters were male and young and good looking, there wouldn't be quite the focus on the looks, or the dismissal. Then again, the young male writers probably wouldn't specialize in the confessional stuff. And both McLaren and Eckler did trade in a certain kind of solipsistic...

Oh, who knows? Anyway...

The news that Eckler is suing the makers of Knocked Up for copyright infringement on her similarly titled memoir is cringeworthy for a number of reasons.

First, any time writers sue other writers, it's bad. Second, it taints the rise of a guy who's done a lot for refreshing movie comedy in the last little while. Third, because you know at least somebody is going to try and make this a little Canadian vs. The Big American kind of thing, and I hate, hate, hate that shit.

But finally, the reason why it makes me slap my head is that it's probably completely bogus.

Now, there's going to be no shortage of people bashing Eckler, so I want to link to the story she wrote for Macleans, because I think at least it paints a sympathetic portrait.

Here she writes about the similarities:

The movie Knocked Up features a woman named Alison who becomes pregnant after getting drunk. While she gets drunk going out celebrating a promotion at work, I got drunk, and knocked up, celebrating at my engagement party. Both my book and the movie feature one night of passion and the nine months that follow. Fine. Whatever. But what got me was the fact that "Alison" was an up-and-coming television reporter; in my book I was an up-and-coming newspaper reporter.

There were other similarities that hit close to home. In my book, I have a best-friend- with-screaming-children named Ronnie, who I go to often for advice. In the movie version, Alison has a sister, named Debbie, with screaming children, who is her sounding board. Both "Alison" and I did numerous pregnancy tests. What also got my back up was that Ben, the man who gets Alison knocked up, is not only Jewish, but from Canada, like my man. (I still can't figure out why the fact that someone was Canadian would add value to any movie.) And then there's this one scene in the screenplay and movie, where Alison and Ben are having sex. Ben stops. Ben, in the screenplay, says, "My dick is like, four inches away from its head. What if it kicked on purpose 'cause it didn't like it?" I actually wrote in my book about a joke I once heard, "A man and his pregnant wife had regular sex throughout her pregnancy. When their son was born, the father held him in his arms. The baby looked up at his new father and, without warning, punched him. 'See?' said the baby. 'Now you know what it feels like to be bonked in the face.' "

Now. What the whole article does well is give you a feel for how sweaty and awful it must feel to be in Eckler's position. My heart goes out to her. It really does. But in that excerpt above, you start to see a lot of the inherent problems in this kind of thing.

Simply put: in the realm of "originality," none of the concepts she's talking about are that off-the-charts original. Calling a story of an accidental pregnancy Knocked Up? It's clearly the vernacular way to describe that situation. Having a character with kids as a sounding board? A Screenwriting 101 choice that most writers would look to make. She even admits that she heard the joke about the baby punching his father from someone else. Of course she did. We've all heard that joke. She makes other, similar points -- the image of a martini glass and a pacifier -- a simple, easy image that encapsulates the character she's talking about.

Right there in the excerpt is the line that blows everything away: Apatow's wife was pregnant at the time he was writing. And as for the "why make him Canadian and Jewish?" Well, by now you've probably read something about Apatow's comedy other half, Seth Rogen...who's...umm...Canadian. And Jewish.

Sigh.

I know that everybody thinks that their pregnancy experience is a unique and beautiful flower. But like weddings, like christenings, like most passage life experiences -- essentially, every one is the goddamn same.

The simple truth is that none of the concepts in either Eckler's book or the similarly titled movie are that original. They're both derivative, and recognizable. That's why she sold her book. That's why he sold his movie.

Once you get past that, it all comes down to execution.

In fact, this is what I was talking about a few weeks ago the last time when we talked about ideas, and where they come from, and the difficult concept of originality in film and tv media.

It's also, by the way, a spoke of the whole fanfic argument. The fanficcers continue to link here and go off stamping their feet on their little livejournals about what a big ol meanie I am. But this kind of ugly fight, this kind of thing, is exactly what skeeves me out about fanfiction so much -- and especially the out of touch members of the community who write extensions of stories already written and turn around when they show up on the real show and ask, "hey! did they steal from me?"

Originality vs. Derivative work. Ideas vs. their execution. Being hired vs. writing on the side. Fanfic vs. Spec Scripts. All of these can be nuanced arguments -- but not when you're coming from an utterly emotional, not-grounded in the real world kind of place. A professional attitude is just that. We don't get to stamp our feet. And we better think three times before filing a lawsuit for copyright infringement.

Eckler vs. Apatow shows the scorched earth result. I'm pretty sure that Eckler probably won't work in Hollywood now. She probably will have trouble optioning or selling any future book to the movies. And you know what? It does suck that now she probably could never sell film rights to her book. That's a pain. But it happens. As for Apatow, I'm not gonna be too worried about him, but... his movie is now under a cloud, whether there's merit or not to the suit.

The only one who comes out ahead in this thing, is, predictably, the lawyers.

Of course, there's the bogeyman lurking in the background. Dan Brown might have cadged from a whole bunch of better non-fic books (like, say, anything by Karen Armstrong) when he was writing his DaVinci brick. Or he might not have. But the guys who sued him didn't prove their case.

Then there's Art Buchwald...oooh...now there's a bogeyman to be feared. Because he won. The producers of Coming to America had to settle with him.

Occasionally, someone does try to rip you off.

But the Occam's Razor explanation -- usually -- is that similar experiences lead to similar stories being created at roughly the same time.

Which is all the more reason why -- if you're a powerless and just-starting-out writer, you may as well swing for the fences in the originality department. If you'd written Pan's Labyrinth I bet you could have shopped that script for a lot longer without seeing something similar on screen than if, say, you'd written that definitive slacker working in a video store movie.