One wonders if David Koepp, Akiva Goldsman, or Dan Brown, authors of Angels and Demons, thought that anyone would hear their mildly paraphrased version of Laura Reynolds' famous line from Tea and Sympathy and know the source. I did, and oddly, had just been speaking about the play in the movie theatre with my friend M.O. Some others recognized it too, and wrote about it as I found from a Google search. I suppose the line could have been a gesture to the late Robert Anderson, who died this year. I'm not sure how nice a gesture it was considering the marked difference in quality between Anderson's play and this film. I persisted in watching more programs of low character when I tuned in to The Bachelorette ( yes, it was the most shocking rose ceremony EVER). But I was pleased at the symmetry of events when the preview of next week's episode referenced Whistler, B.C., a place I first heard of as Anna's hometown on Slings and Arrows; when she begins a relationship with a visiting playwright, she is horrified to discover that he is using the stories of her Whistler youth almost verbatim in his new play. "That's my life!" she says when she confronts him. The playwright's response is to say that once she spoke those words, they became his. T.S. Eliot's famous saying "Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal" seems very apt. Also, today revealed what probably should have just been assumed, that Sarah Palin plagiarised (shall we say borrowed?) from Newt Gingrich. Well, now I'm watching Ovation's West Side Memories, about the making of the film of West Side Story, and we've all read Romeo and Juliet, right?
Itself perhaps a dark reference to an old anecdote about Wilde:
ReplyDeleteParty guest after hearing a Wildean apercu: "I wish I had said that."
Wilde: "Don't worry, you will."
Can't absolutely vouch for it - Python referenced it in a sketch once. One of my favorite Strand finds in many, many years was a 99c copy of the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes. Kept it in the newspaper pocket of my bag & browsed it every day until the text literally fell apart.
And playwrights should feel free to write about Hutterites who have accidents with dairy machines, whether or not they got inappropriately drunk at Chinese restaurants with one the night before. :)
I have an unnatural fondness for that show. Frankly, I hope heaven turns out to be a lot like a Canadian classical theatre.
Cheerio!
David F.