Smith snafu, Gravity suit raise questions about plagiarism
After listening to the first few bars of the second song, the problem becomes apparent: Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” is indeed strikingly similar to the 26-year-old Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers hit “I Won’t Back Down.” The basic melody behind the verses “Oh, won’t you stay with me?” and “Well, I won’t back down” are the same. They are performed at different speeds and with different emotion, but the musical backbone of the songs are the same. This week, Petty and his co-writer for “I Won’t Back Down,” Jeff Lynne were awarded a combined 25 percent of the royalties to “Stay With Me” with what amounted to no opposition from the Smith camp. Petty released a statement to the effect of “these things happen” by calling the whole affair a “musical accident.” Rarely do these disputes resolve themselves so neatly.
Also this week, Warner Bros. Entertainment and New Line Cinema made headlines because a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that accused them of intellectual theft. To summarize, author Tess Gerritsen says that the script for Alfonso Cuarón’s space rollercoaster, Gravity, is not an original creation of Cuarón’s — as Warner Bros., claims — rather, that it is based on her 1999 novel of the same name. She claims that she signed a deal to have that book produced into a film, and that Cuarón was attached to the project but that it was ultimately scrapped. Then, she claims, Gravity some years later pops up, shares considerable plot elements with her story and features the same Cuarón as the writer of the new original screenplay. Though the case was dismissed in court, Gerritsen continues to fight, and there is a good chance that things will get messy. Gerritsen has 20 days to resubmit her case, which she will surely do, and if Cuarón was indeed attached to the New Line project of her film back in 2008, it could be pretty damning. This would be a shame, especially with a film that exhibits the technical creativity that Gravity does. Cuarón and master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who each won a well-deserved Oscar for their efforts, developed trailblazing cinematic techniques while filming Sandy Bullock tumbling in space — a scene that Gerritsen claims to have written — and darting through the corridors of the International Space Station. There is a reason that the film won seven Oscars, trailing only Cabaret (1972) for the most ever for a film that didn’t win Best Picture. It would be a shame if Gerritsen’s claims were proved true because it seems absurd that such a talented team would reduce themselves to such petty antics.
Smith’s agreement with Petty is a breath of fresh air. Accusations of plagiarism have been part of pop culture since the beginning, and the results usually veer towards the uglier side of the spectrum where denials, lawsuits and the Gravity proceedings currently reside. When George Harrison was accused of plagarizing The Chiffons’s 1962 “He’s So Fine” for his own “My Sweet Lord,” it took an entire court case to settle the matter. The plagiarism was so obvious that the judge presiding over the proceedings felt the need to declare at the end of the trial that Harrison’s first single as a solo artist was “the very same song as ‘He’s So Fine’ with different words.” Anyone who listens to the two songs can hear that in five seconds, but it took five years to settle in court.
Another way that these things can turn is towards the absurd. Perhaps the quirkiest case of this was when Fantasy Records sued John Fogerty for plagiarizing his own 1970 composition “Run Through the Jungle” for his 1985 hit “The Old Man Down the Road.” But, much more than a 30-year-old Fogerty song, the plagarism scandal that people will now remember is the farce that ensued after Shia LaBeouf was accused of plagiarizing Daniel Clowe’s comic Justin M. Damiano in late 2013. Shia LaBeouf’s subsequent apology consisted of word-for-word recreations of other public apologies from the likes of Tiger Woods, Robert MacNamara and Kanye West. He then tried to start a conversation about plagiarism and the nature of creativity itself. LaBeouf’s artistic credibility is nonexistent, and he’s become a bit of a cultural oddity thanks to his antics.
As painful as it is to say it, however, LaBeouf brought up some very interesting points about the creative process. The line between “inspired by” and “copied from” is more blurred than one realizes, and it can hinder creativity if an artist has to stop and wonder if their new creation is too similar to another work that came before. For example, if one of Smith’s producers had caught the similarity between his song and Petty’s in the recording booth and pointed it out, would it have caused him to try and shoehorn in some changes so that his song would be more different? Would he have scrapped the song? “Stay With Me” is a great, albeit overplayed, song in its own right, and it very well could’ve been stifled by fears of plagiarism.
If the allegations against Cuarón and Warner Bros. are true, then the implications are even darker, as the end result was much closer to the alleged source material than Sam Smith’s tune. And yet, similar questions to those from the Sam Smith conversation arise. Gravity is definitely a film that we are better off having. It is a stunning spectacle, and it is very possible that Warner Bros. would have shied away from producing it had it had the stigma of being a film stuck in production hell for a few years when Cuarón pitched it to them.
If Gerritsen’s work indeed turns out to be the basis for the film then naturally she should be given her due. It does raise interesting questions, however, that would perhaps had been more in the forefront if they hadn’t been coming from the voice of a former child actor wearing a paper bag reading “I am not famous anymore” over his head on the red carpet.
Daniel Grzywacz is a senior majoring in anthropology and neuroscience. He is also the lifestyle editor at the Daily Trojan. His column, “The Showbiz Must Go On,” runs Mondays.