BROKEN FLOWERS: Did a squirrel bring Jarmusch Reed Martin’s script? |
Stealing someone’s screenplay is serious stuff. I know first-hand, for, a decade ago, the LA-based director/co-writer of a feature we wrote together crossed my name off the script. When I sued through a nice-guy Hub attorney, she counter-sued with a Beverly Hills big shot who had defended Steven Spielberg. What chance did I have when said big shot contended that I had stayed over at the young lady’s house not to write the screenplay but because I was desperately trying to bed her! It just got uglier, more traumatic. And costly.So I can feel for fledgling screenwriter Reed Martin, whose Two Weeks Off, 12 versions of which are registered at the US Copyright Office, has, in his mind, been stolen from him. Worse, it’s been put on screen and has turned out to be a most successful film, with others getting the credit and the money. Martin’s sad tale became the basis of a June 28 Boston Globe story written by long-time staffer Joseph P. Kahn, According to Kahn, Martin and his attorney, John Marder, filed suit last March in US District Court asking $40 million in damages.
Who is the heinous culprit who claimed this script as his own? Hard to believe, but Martin is suing New York filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, alleging that Two Weeks Off became the basis of Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers. “It was the perfect crime,” Martin told Kahn. “Who would believe that someone like Jarmusch, an icon of indie-film integrity, would rip off a struggling screenwriter like me?”
Here’s where we split. I don’t believe it, and Kahn, to my mind, believes Martin much too much: in paragraph after paragraph, he insinuates that the Stranger Than Paradise/Dead Man director is guilty as charged. The long Globe article is sprinkled with the flimsiest evidence of Jarmusch’s borrowings. I kept wondering: is that all?
I know Jarmusch a bit: several interviews, several personal meetings. I’m satisfied by his e-mail answer to the Globe: “I have never had any contact with him [Martin] or his work. I’ve never even heard of him. . . . Anyone who is familiar with my films and my writing process will know that this claim is ridiculous.”
Many people are familiar with his writing process: Jarmusch doesn’t read anyone’s scripts, ever. Ever. No agent or actor sends him any. There’s no reason to: he works from scratch, doing original works, not even adaptations. He has a cabin in the Catskills where he sequesters himself to write.
Would a squirrel have brought him Reed Martin’s screenplay? What evidence does Kahn offer that the script was lifted? “One curiosity,” he writes, “was the lack of information about its script and plot” on Web sites prior to the movie’s release. Actually, few films based on original scripts offer on-line details: someone might steal them. What else? “In a burst of candor, Jarmusch wrote a magazine column saying, ‘Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere. And don’t bother concealing your thievery.’ ”
This is a preposterous point. Anyone familiar with Jarmusch’s æsthetic knows exactly what that means: you “steal” great visual moments from the masters of cinema — Ozu, Melville, etc. — in a way that openly honors them! It doesn’t imply swiping a script from some poor writer!
The actual content of Martin’s script remains evasively sketchy in Kahn’s article. We’re informed that the protagonist’s girlfriend walks out on him and he’s puzzled as to why, and that a character talks to her cat. Both events turn up in — stop, thief! — Broken Flowers! But, hey, remember Susan Alexander bolting on the perplexed Charles Foster Kane? And every film fan relishes Philip Marlowe’s conversations with his feline in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye!
