Adapting SF/Fantasy story into a Movie without Acknowledgment

[Andy_L]

@Sherrerd

Josephine Tey’s 1949 novel Brat Farrar is a classic. But (due to plot elements I won’t spoil here) the Addams Family movie owes more to the legend of a Romanov daughter surviving the 1918 slaughter of the Russian Imperial family, as depicted in the 1950s stage play-and-movie Anastasia.

That reminds me - the Addams Family theatrical musical is essentially “You Can’t Take it with You” with the Addams family subbed in for the eccentric family in YCTIWY (even relatively small details are the same - in YCTIWY, they play a free association game that causes the stodgy family to reveal secrets that disrupt their lives - while in the Addams Family musical, they play the Full Disclosure game which does the same thing to the equivalent stodgy family)

[Sherrerd]

@Andy_L

That reminds me - the Addams Family theatrical musical is essentially “You Can’t Take it with You” with the Addams family subbed in for the eccentric family in YCTIWY (even relatively small details are the same - in YCTIWY, they play a free association game that causes the stodgy family to reveal secrets that disrupt their lives - while in the Addams Family musical, they play the Full Disclosure game which does the same thing to the equivalent stodgy family)

Interesting! I knew nothing about the AF musical.

The stage play YCTIWY, dating as it does from 1936, is not yet in the public domain—but of course this entire thread is about thefts from works still under copyright. The movie IS in the public domain as the copyright was inadvertently allowed to lapse, but that doesn’t mean the underlying work is free to use without attribution… naughty, naughty writers…

[Andy_L]

@Sherrerd

Interesting! I knew nothing about the AF musical.

The stage play YCTIWY, dating as it does from 1936, is not yet in the public domain—but of course this entire thread is about thefts from works still under copyright. The movie IS in the public domain as the copyright was inadvertently allowed to lapse, but that doesn’t mean the underlying work is free to use without attribution… naughty, naughty writers…

Adding the Addams Family to the story may make the story sufficiently different to avoid legal difficulty, but for people who have seen both the resemblance is unmistakable (as this article for example, notes Review: Joys of eccentricity in ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ – Chicago Tribune)

[TPWombat]

Hardware, a 1990 independent british SF film about a woman making a sculpture from scavenged robot parts that unfortunately includes an intact military hunter-killer cpu was remarkably similar to a 1980 one-off strip in the UK comic 2000 A.D.
The comic publisher successfully sued and future relases of the film included an acknowledgement.

[E-DUB]

@CalMeacham

The TV show Outer Limits episode “Cry of Silence” features Eddie Albert and June Havoc as a city couple that gets attacked driving along the desert – by tumbleweeds. Later by rocks and animals. When you describe this episode to other people, it sounds like the worst sort of science fiction, like it’s the really weird try-out for Green Acres, or something. “Attacked by tumbleweeds? Really?”

But it’s much better than it sounds. The tumbleweeds, rocks, and animals are sort of "possessed by alien beings, who finally possess an old prospector, through whom they can talk to the couple.
"The Outer Limits" Cry of Silence (TV Episode 1964) - IMDb

Cry of Silence - Wikipedia
As Wikipedia points out, the beginning, with the attack by tumbleweeds, resembles Algernon Blackwood’s story “The Willows”. But, overall, the episode seems remarkably similar to Fredric Brown’s novel The Mind Thing, with the possession of animals, and eventually a human, by an alien. Brown wrote it originally as a screenplay that he thought could be filmed with minimal and easy-to-do special effects, but he couldn’t interest anyone in it.

The Outer Limits episode credits the story to Louis Charbonneau and the script to Robert C. Dennis. It was broadcast in October of 1964.
I don’t know exactly when Brown was shopping his script around, but it had to be before he decided to publish it as a story. It was going to be in parts in the magazine Fantastic Universe[, starting in March, 1960, but the magazine folded after that issue. He published the whole novel the next year as a paperback with Bantam Books.

(Although translation were published, it wasn’t published in English again until almost twenty years later in the UK. It wasn’t published in the US again until NESFA press collected Browns stories in 2002. More recently Gateway/Orion republished it in 2011.)

I’ve got a battered paperback of that sucker. Great story.

[Dewey_Finn]

There’s a 2019 horror film called Countdown, in which various young people download an app called Countdown that supposedly can predict how long you’ll live. The concept seems similar to Robert Heinlein’s story Life-line, although the Heinlein story wasn’t dark.

[Andy_L]

@Dewey_Finn

There’s a 2019 horror film called Countdown, in which various young people download an app called Countdown that supposedly can predict how long you’ll live. The concept seems similar to Robert Heinlein’s story Life-line, although the Heinlein story wasn’t dark.

It’s a bit darker than you remember

The young couple the inventor counsels dies in a car accident that the inventor watches but can’t prevent, and the inventor himself is murdered by a mob whipped up by insurance companies