What's your policy on writing stories based on incidents that happen to people in your life? Or stories that people in your life tell you about their friends or relatives? Or stories where a character is clearly Aunt Harriet or Uncle Bob? If you know they'll never see it does it change things?Where do you draw the line? What's the proper protocol here?
The Black Book. I really, really disliked this movie. It played out as one long chase with intermittent scenes of torture, degradation.
There were so many wildly improbable incidents I stopped counting. The director clearly is indicting the Dutch and all of mankind as black-hearted scoundrels. Unfortuntately, so is he.
4 comments:
I freely rip and pillage stories from real life and from real people. Usually it's only a small part of a larger story, but not always. I have certainly been brough to task for this at times from the people involved, but I don't really care.
The only exception to this is stories or anecdotes I hear from other writer's lives because I assume they will use them at some point.
What, Verhoeven a black-hearted scoundral? Not the director of SHOWGIRLS. I haven't seen this movie yet, but there have been some really mixed views on it. Most have given it a thumbs down, but FILM COMMENT, not exactly a minor voice in film criticism, actually praised it - along with SHOWGIRLS, so you can see where the writer is coming from. For me, Verhoeven is hit or miss, but I have to say that I like most of his stuff, especially ROBOCOP. As for castigating the Dutch, Verhoeven is dutch - and THE BLACK BOOK was the Dutch's official selection for the Oscars this year.
As for taking from real life, I've done it. I haven't incorporated anything from close friends or relatives, but I have used stories or features of others; most noteably a poet who wrote about her husband's sperm (why?) and a freakazoid who broke into a couple's apartment looking for three-way sex and dressed in a French maid outfit. I really don't care if either of those people read the stories or not.
I wanted to like the movie. I lived in Amsterdam in 1997 for six months so I was so geeked to like it. And yet, it was so boring-endless chases and coincidences. Door left open, meeting up with people unexpectedly. Bad Nazies, bad Dutch. Yikes.
Bryon-have fun in NYC.
Verhoeven is a rancid smartass, as has been obvious since at least SPETTERS, with its charming, tossed-off provocation about the latently gay guy who was just waiting to be therapeutically raped (I suppose one could try to defend PV with citation of the similar motif in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, but not successfully to me). There are some (usually bad, usually intentionally bad) laughs in his films since, but he's basically Spielberg with a sense of humor, and that's no compliment. The first story I wrote that was half-decent, as opposed to a clever joke/anecdote, was a slight concentration of events from my own life...at least, my professors Robert Onopa and A. A. Attanasio were encouraging, and I might rewrite that some day and try to market it (wonder how much TIN HOUSE is paying).
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