Blatant pandering

There would be no cries of protest from me if any of my fine friends wishes to email programming@baycon.org suggesting yours truly would be an excellent BayCon 2008 panelist. Just sayin'...

Open Can, extract worms

Something jaylake linked to started me thinking about the whole issue about fannish writing derived from commercial works. By way of background, I took some Communications Law classes in college ('68-'72) as part of my degree work. Laws have changed since then, but I don't think the general principles behind them have. My understanding is this:

A person who creates a work owns that work, and the right to using that work in other formats, or allowing others to do so. In overly simplified terms, if I write a book, I own the right to make it into a play or movie or set its words to music or turn it into an audio book, pot holder, calendar, coffee mug or T-shirt.

Critics have the right to lift excerpts from my book for their reviews, and teachers can do the same for educational purposes. Satirists also have this right. It's called Fair Use, and more often than not it helps sell more copies of my book.

So what about fans who take my characters and write their own stories or novels?

I say as long as they use proper attribution, they're in the clear. Point your readers to my book, and that's one more chance another copy of my book will be sold. What someone else does with my characters is their problem. Sending out Cease and Desist letters is just plain stupid. It does nothing to protect my work or increase my sales, and it turns a rabid fan into a sworn enemy. OTOH, sending out a "You realize you need to include a pointer to the original book, don't you?" letter strikes me as the smart thing to do.

Monkey Love

So here's the story. In 1984, when Amy Stewart was a Palo Alto 12-year-old, she played the title role in Annie, a joint production between Palo Alto Players and PA Children's Theater. I played several small roles in that show. Later that year, she was The Artful Dodger in TheatreWorks' production of Oliver!. I was Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker. Four years later, she played Wendy in the TheatreWorks production of Peter Pan. I played one of the pirates. She lived across the street from Lucie Stern Theater, and her folks hosted cast parties. The next thing I knew, she was moving to Hollywood. She had been doing commercials regularly, both in SF and LA, so this wasn't a huge surprise.

She landed a pretty good part in a soap - "Glory Days" in 2002, and has an impressive string of credits for one-shot gigs on well-known TV shows. Also in 2002 she starred in a shot-on-videotape movie called Monkey Love. I just stumbled across it a couple of weeks ago browsing her IMDB listing. She plays a flaky Venice Beach college student stuck in a rut living with two boring parents, and hanging out with two boring guys. One flips burgers the other is an auto mechanic. The title comes from a running theme in which we learn that chimps have massive testicles while gorillas have tiny ones. And why. I won't spoil it for you.

This Amy is 14 years older than the last time I saw her, and while there are moments when I see a spark of the Amy I knew and loved (especially at the end when she finally smiles for three scenes in a row), but for the most part she's playing someone else. It's called acting, I know. But it's not a role she is well suited to. The Amy in the movie (it's her character's name too) is an angry young woman with no sense of direction, a short temper and shorter attention span, who rarely smiles.

The script is uneven - it has its moments, and it has some great ideas, but the writer, Dave Eisenstark, is pretty ham-handed at trying to tie them together. Videography is okay, production values are shoestring, audio is also shoestring. Mark Stratton probably was not nominated for Best Director for this effort (or lack thereof) - the characters show two emotions, "on" and "off". There's no depth here.

It's a shame. Amy is a much better actress than this film gives her a chance to be. I hope she gets an opportunity to prove me right.