I noticed while watching Field of Dreams last night (I love that movie!) that at the end of the credits there was a small little blurb. It stated something to the effect (I don’t remember the exact words) that all the characters in the film were fictional and that any resemblence between them and any real persons was purely coincedental.
How could they claim this? All the ballplayers in the film were real people. Joe Jackson, Eddie Ciccotte, Mel Ott, and even Archie Graham were all real people. Even if you say that this were just characterizations of the real people, it is still a far cry from “coincidental.”
So, how could they make that claim in the credits?
I think the purpose of that blurb was to distance the character of Terrance Mann from J.D. Salinger, the real-life author who was a character in the book Shoeless Joe that the movie was based on.
According to the commentary on the Field of Dreams DVD, they changed the character from J.D. Salinger to Mann because Salinger wouldn’t give his permission to use his name.
However… as you point out, there are clearly a bunch of other characters who are not fictional, and also, similarities between Mann and Salinger are not coincidental at all, they are completely intentional.
IANA lawyer, so I don’t know how this kind of disclaimer offers them any protection.
The blurb is at the end of every movie. It keeps people whose name matches that of a character from the movie from filing a nuisance lawsuit. It also protects them from someone from claiming the actions of a character were taken from his own.
Even if real characters are portrayed, the disclaimer is used.
And if there was someone named “Eddie Cicotte” who wanted to sue, couldn’t he prove that the blurb is meaningless since the movie has all these other real personages in there?
True, but according to the way I read Reality Chuck’s post, the danger is not from the deceased Eddie Ciccotte, but from another “Eddie Ciccotte” (or “Mel Ott,” or “Archie Graham,” etc.) who may be alive today.
I don’t think the disclaimer is very strong protection. If I made a movie with a character recognizeable as an actual person, and falsely portrayed them as a pedophile, couldn’t they sue? Any lawyers want to chime in?
I have noticed this for years… even without the obvious stupidity of applying this phrase to Field of Dreams, where many of the main characters are obviously based on real people, I have always found this amusing for fictional works which take place in some “real” situation, and reference real events and people that have no real connection to the story. I would always make a wise-ass comment to my friends at that point in the credits, such as “I guess Hitler was not a real person” or “That means they made up that John F. Kennedy guy” or some such thing.
However, I have noticed a change recently in SOME movies. I have seen this phrase changed to something like “although this movie is based on true events and characters, not all the characters in this movie are real, and any similarity between the fake people in the movie and real persons is purely coincidental…”
They word it better, but it is actually refreshing to see a couple of films every now and then acknowledge the fact that at least some of the characters in their story ARE based on real people. I am sure this is not needed for legal reasons (saying any resemblence to real people at all is purely coincidental in all cases would protect them against any lawsuit, as no one can successfully sue them for telling a true story, so only those that really are coincidental could sue them if they left this out), but either they are acknowledging that today’s movie-goers have a bit more intelligence than we were formerly given credit for, or this is one case where raging political correctness has a beneficial effect.
We just saw Adaptation the other night*, and there was a disclaimer at the end that indicated while there really was the author of the orchids books, etc., the film added a whole bunch of fictional stuff. (It was complicated and hard to remember exactly.)
Since they make the author into a drug using, murderous adulteress, it requires a somewhat creative disclaimer.
So I think having real people portrayed in movies should force a little more in the disclaimer.
(After the disclaimer came the dedication to Donald Kaufman. But there were only 4 people in the theater to see it. Read the credits folks, they’re interesting.)
The movie disclaimer is boilerplate, filler. Someone, some where, sued over something. So some body thought up the words and its now a tradition. It probably has no legal effect.
Your mileage will vary, satisfaction guaranteed and contents sold by weight not volume.
The disclaimer is different in MAD magazine, where it says that there is no resemblance “…without satiric purpose…”
Also, in the time-travel novel The Proteus Project author James Hogan took the interesting step of actually asking permission of the living historical personages to use them as characters in his book, and I think the disclaimer reflects this.
One of the more interesting uses of the “no similarity” wording, as pointed out in The Golden Turkey Awards, was for The Greek Tycoon, a movie starring Anthony Quinn as an almost completely undiscguised Aristotle Onassis.
Certain early episodes of * Law & Order * contained a disclaimer between the final scene and the credits. It went something like: “While this episode is inspired by the events of the [name of real-world defendant] case, certain elements have been fictionalized. [RWD] is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.” Since at least the second season, they’ve used the standard disclaimer mentioned in this thread, which probably wouldn’t jive well with the “ripped from the headlines” ad campaign if someone sued.
Actually, the disclaimer makes sense. The movie features actors playing characters based on the lives and experiences of real people. Though these are fine distinctions, actor-as-character and real person are not the same, and the difference is important.
Further, as ftg pointed out in the case of Adaptation, if I make a movie about someone I know, but attribute to them things like drug addiction, etc., moviegoers might confuse the person I know with the character-version featured in the movie.
A similar thing happens to soap-opera actors all the time. Actors who play TV villains will be accosted by an angry fan in the grocery store, etc.
The fiction-based-on-fact question doesn’t even have to be that dramatic though. The disclaimer is also necessary if a writer makes up dialogue for a character but cannot confirm whether or not the real person the character is based upon said whatever the dialogue might say. Again, we tend to believe that historical film/fiction is “what really happened,” but the truth cannot be so easily told.
Agreed, and I understand the need for the distinction, as I mentioned in my OP. However, calling any similarities “coincedental” is simply outright lying in my book. As such, I would think that that would nullify the disclaimer.
My favorite use of the disclaimer was in the Nicole Kidman movie TO DIE FOR. The movie was almost a scene for scene depiction of the Pam Smart murder case, the only difference being that the names were changed and Nicole Kidman was much prettier than Pam Smart ever dreamed of being.
The same disclaimer appeared at the end of the movie THE GREEK TYCOON, starring Anthony Quinn and Jacqueline Bissett. In that movie, an Irish Catholic American president is assassinated and his widow marries the richest man in the world, a Greek shipping magnate, partly for his money and partly to protect her children. The marriage is lucrative for her but unhappy. Yeah, like that would happen…
It’s not all that strong, but it’s better than nothing.
Primarily, it’s to protect people who have the same name as the fictional character from a lawsuit. If the only similarity is your name, you can’t make much of a case. So if “Zev Steinhardt” is used as a character name, you can’t just come along and claim damages because the names are the same. If that character is a pedophile, then you can’t claim they are defaming you because the disclaimer says they’re not.
However, if the similarity was more than just the name, and you could show that they knew about you, then you’d be on stronger grounds. It still wouldn’t be easy, but you might at least be able to convince a lawyer to file.
For public figures, it’s different. The standard for libel is much more difficult to prove. The people portrayed in “The Greek Tycoon” could have tried to sue, but it would have been hard to make their case and they figure it wasn’t worth the effort.
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