re: #129 goddamnedfrank

Borrowing a plot with attribution, or at least acknowledging the source inspiration is one thing, and that’s what you’re describing. Presenting something created with borrowed ideas as entirely your own work, as happened here, is another. Especially when the borrowed elements in total are numerous, specific and novel (ie not clichéd) enough to have left a unique creative fingerprint, and particularly if you’re going to put that derivative work up for a Best Original Screenplay Award.

But you don’t know that, do you? The play was from ‘69, was not a major hit, and can’t reasonably be described as something the general public would know about. Just curious, but why do you have such a hard-on about this? I thought that Shape was a retiling of The Creature From The Black Lagoon from a modern perspective of Cold War paranoia.

But that’s just me.

And oh, by the way, I loved it exactly for those reasons. I jumped up and applauded it for just those reasons when it won.