Yeah, okay, maybe he swiped Poul Anderson's stove and then went back for the smoke, but check out the new Avatar trailer here.
You know you are gonna go see it. It has occupied the third largest computer in the world at 100%+ capacity (the one which did the digital work for LOTR and took 30% capacity, mind you) and has been more than four years in the making. It might be dances with wolves in space, but it's gonna look terrific.
This ain't gonna be Jar Jar Binks, folks ...
"Why'd you say that name?! You promised me that you would never say that name!"
ReplyDeleteThe Secret Project wouldn't be a novelization for an upcoming blockbuster film, would it...?
ReplyDeleteHe DID rip it off, wholesale. I thought we spoke about this. Although I will go see it, I have to wonder...Why is Cameron, of all people, always the one who does this? Is giving credit for someone else's work so damn hard? Look, I'll show you how it's done:
ReplyDelete"Hello everybody. Do you remember that short story I wrote called "Razor Games"? Well, guess what...It's based on the Matador universe created by Steve Perry! I didn't make up a damn thing except the circumstances. The spetsdods, martial arts, particulars of the pattern, various character names and references...Those were all Steve Perry's! He gave me permission to write it! We're splitting the proceeds of the story (thus far, zilch) 50-50."
Or how about this: Hey everyone, that collection of horror short stories I'm almost done with, called "Night Sweats"? It was inspired (not copied or borrowed from, mind you) by Fritz Leiber's "Night Monsters". In fact, I'm dedicating it to him!
Huh. Look at that...didn't hurt a BIT. I could do this all day.
To me, it doesn't make you look clever when you take someone else's idea and run with it, even if you improve on it. It's like, all the groundwork has been done. Imagining it in the first place was the hard part, committing it to paper. But as far as that goes, it's an even worse sin to claim it all your own. "Call Me Joe" is a CLASSIC, and I can't believe that Cameron thought no one has read it.
Phil: Steve is working on a layman's guide to incurable sexually transmitted diseases. His time spent living in the gay brothels of San Francisco, serving as a towel boy for Liberace, are what he uses as background information.
Maybe it's because of the weird anatomy, but that picture looks like TERRIBLE bow technique.
ReplyDeleteYou know Kid, I wasn't gonna bring up your gig working the bath houses of San Francisco as a fluffer, but you brought it on yourself ...
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure Poul Anderson's story was the first time we saw that notion, even though it was way back in the 50's and is a classic. You could argue that ERB's John Carter of Mars, who gets attacked by Indians in Arizona and wakes on Mars, which is tad on the, um, unscientific side.
If you don't give credit, you don't have to split the money, until somebody sues, and sometimes, people don't bother. Poul is gone, and maybe his family wants to bother, maybe not. Might be in the public domain, for all I know.
If Harlan had written it, I bet Cameron would have acknowledged it ...
Cameron knows what he knows, and he's a man's man -- he rides bikes, shoots, dives, and apparently can fix a falling helicopter while he is in it. Some kind of mechanical genius -- invents his own cameras and shit.
ReplyDeleteHe's a helluva moviemaker -- Aliens alone would prove that. T2? Even Titanic was spectacular. The Abyss? The director's cut? Oh, man. That was just wonderful.
The story with that bow is that he hired an archer to teach his actors how-to, and the archer laughed and said, "That grip won't work."
Whereupon Cameron took the bow, said, "Really?" and proceeded to nail a difficult target using that release.
It would be nice if he came up with some terrific new ideas for SF, but hey, sometimes you don't get everything. Mozart was a terrific composer, but there have been guys who could play what he wrote better than he did.
Take what you can get.