“Originality” and Franchise Territorialism are self-defeating
PrevNode LinkNextLike it or not - most of the popular art in the 20th century was commercial and/or proprietary ( "All rights reserved" ) . While screenwriters often derive inspiration from older, and now public domain sources, the good ones also reuse characters or texts from real life (Real Person Fiction ( RPF )) or from newer franchises (out of being constructively lazy). And with copyright law being maximalised to covering individual characters, concepts, and worlds and individual sentences, this makes legitimate and commercial reuse/remixing of drama a legal problem.
( Wil Wheaton in "The Happiest Days of Our Lives". Emphasis (bold text) is mine. )At one point, I walked past a booth that had lots of classic Star Wars toys. My eyes fell on an original model of Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter. I had that toy when I was a kid, and just looking at it was like those car commercials where the guy touches the car and gets this rapid-fire burst of images until he takes his hand off of it. I saw myself riding in the car to Kmart with my parents, hoping to buy a new Star Wars toy, playing with the toys on the gold shag carpeting in front of the brick fireplace in the house in Sunland, running around the back yard in the fading evening light in the summer of 1980. I piloted my TIE fighter, chasing my brother who piloted a snow speeder. ( We weren’t afraid to combine Star Wars and He-Man, so why not combine Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back?)
People as young as children have been doing crossovers and Real Person Fiction ( RPF ) of franchises, individual books/stories/films/songs/etc., characters (both fictional and real), and more serious idea systems (see a partial list). E.g: when playing with dolls or action figures, like Wil Wheaton notes in his book "The Happiest Days of Our Lives".
As an example, we can imagine a young girl to write a funny screenplay using GitHub or Google Docs which pits Emma Watson vs. Kim Kardashian on who gets to ride Princess Celestia next, with Darth Vader and Haman as two "evil", but mutually hating one another, arbiters. Might seem ridiculus, but if I didn't want entertainment in my life, then I'd go watch grass grow. It will be a legal and "ethical" minefield, but I'd bet it'd be easier to follow and more entertaining than Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" was even shortly after LotR was written.
There is no way one can expect them (or me) to only use sources earlier than 1900, because technology as well as art, culture, & entertainment / education / amateur philosophy, did not stand still since then, despite being increasingly based on Copyrights’ maximalism.
You can never truly appreciate Hamlet until you've read it in the original Klingon.
But all the mightiest Klingon warriors have watched Disney's The Lion King instead (or in addition), possibly with Klingon subtitles.
In my screenplay Selina Mandrake - The Slayer, the protagonist (Selina) runs into three vampire warriors (“The Three”) dressed as Klingons, who tell her that “Every mighty Klingon warrior has watched Sesame Street”.
As a retort, she exclaims: “Mighty Klingon vampire warriors who have watched Sesame Street… this decade royally sucks!!”. However, most of the best American warriors of the relatively recent past (of all kinds) have watched Sesame Street, because they loved it as happy children (and later as adults).
( Shlomi Fish (= me): "Hackers make the best warriors" )
If we take my Sesame Street Hosting Harry Potter fan fiction as an example, then it mashes together the real world J. K. Rowling, her franchise's characters: Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Dumbledore; the Muppets' characters: The Amazing Mumford (a stage magician), Cookie Monster, and Miss Piggy; various circa 2014 trends (e.g: Sushi, and the model Candice Swanepoel, who was mentioned there because she topped Maxim's Hot 100 that year); and as icing on the cake it closes with a hack of the Beatles song "All you need is love" titled "Do it all with love"
While it also sports a parody of the fable "The miller, his son and the donkey", the donkey there is the one from the Shrek franchise as originally voiced by Eddie Murphy, and he ends up being transformed into a bigger and stronger stallion, like in the second Shrek film.
These are all building blocks of my creative spiritual world. Any screenwriter who can successfully mutate the screenplay (and they have my blessing and legal permission to do so) must use recent enough characters and quotes. To quote Groucho Marx: I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member
. The Muppets franchise did such crossovers and Real Person Fiction ( RPF ) since the 1970s (e.g. "Sam the Eagle versus Alice Cooper") and most of The Muppet Show's early (and later) skits are amazingly fresh and funny even today.
As much as I like Charlie Chaplin, he will be a poor substitute to Chuck Norris in my Muppets' "Summer Glau & Chuck Norris as Grammar Nazis" fanfic episode, despite the fact that he also was Hollywood's "alpha male" at the time.
Anyway, I believe most hobbyist screenwriters either approve of other people taking their works in their own direction ( "If they don't like it, tell them they can go and remake it". ), or lack the time and energy (even if they have enough money) to start a long litigation process.
Good hackers are constructively lazy, and build on the work of others. And this means doing crossovers, parodies, and real person fiction.
As an analogy, most software developers will use high-level programming languages, and convenient desktop or mobile operating systems to write what Joel on Software calls "throwaway code", or "in-house code" or even a lot of shrinkwrap (open source/proprietary/etc.) codebases whose performances are not too critical, as well as libraries, APIs, and development tools. Writing everything in assembly (or ASIC if you're really crazy and rich) will be a grand waste of time, and usually development effort will exceed the runtime of code written using higher level languages.
Real programmers use a nice [text] editor and a programming language and get done in less than O(N!).
Similarly, most competent screenwriters will use characters, concepts, and texts from more than one recent franchises or works for most largescale screenplays. They will either get frustrated at their "lack of imagination" or accept that the screenplay will have to be anonymised. I'm proud of me being a fanfic writer / remixer, and suspect the situation will only get "worse" for the commercial film and fiction industries.
Do note that, like parents, I believe geeky and hackery screenwriters are very proud of their intellectual children (at least when they are happy or hypomanic), and won't mutate them on their own volition without a good reason. They will refuse to de-fanfic them, even if it means that they'll find different jobs (where their hacker and geek nature is being approved of and respected, including lower-paying ones), or become Con-Men (= creators who frequent conventions/conferences, and making an income out of it), or like me publish and publicise their "fics" on the web and social media outlets. I suspect the reason several promising T.V. shows (e.g: Firefly, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, or Game Shakers) got cancelled recently, is that their screenwriters turned "to the dark side" so to speak and started using fanfiction elements there, which would be a legal and pseudo-ethical minefield.
It seems the parodical 2001 film Not Another Teen Movie killed the whole genre. However, I've written the afforementioned "The Human Hacking Field Guide" story in 2005 (after recovering from my Technion "education", or relative lack of it and entertainment), and it is a geek/hacker spin on the teen story model. It too is partly crossover/RPF fanfic, but despite that two teenagers living in the USA (where it takes place) asked me if it was real.
Moreover, its two female protagonists seemed quite farfetchedly competent back then, but I'd bet many younger girls (or older ones that have the right attitude) today can easily blow them out of the water.