Okay this is all stuff I heard in a podcast recently but the person who said it actually was the producer on several shows for CBS so I assume what he said was true albeit with maybe a bit of exaggeration.
Basically at some point in the mid-00’s he pitched a show that was basically Mystery Science Theater 3000 (For those who don’t know, it was a show where they would take bad movies and play them in almost their entirety and put an audio commentary track on topic where they made fun of the movie) except even cheaper. Instead of getting the movie rights, they would just take the entire film, cut it down to about an hour timeslot (so about 40 minutes) and replace the entire audiotrack with them doing funny voices over it, basically a gag dub. He claimed that if you got rid of the original audio but also cut out a little over 50% of the original source you could basically do it without paying for the rights for the films and call it fair use under parody. CBS apparently was interested in it but turned him down since they thought people talking over movies was no longer in vogue. They apparently did get to the step of talking to their lawyers to see if they could get away with it and they gave them the go-ahead.
He also claimed you could do the same thing but in reverse, take the full audio of something but then have puppets or stick figures act it out as the visual component and also not have to pay licensing fees.
So it this guy telling the truth or just another product of Lying Hollywood?
With parody, it’s less about how much you use and more about how much new commentary on the original you add. If the puppets or stick figures are commenting on the script, themes, and value of the original, then it’s likely to be considered parody. If they’re commenting mostly on unrelated things, then it may not be an actual parody.
Actual parodies are considered transformative–they take something old and turn it into something new–so without that transformation, the piece isn’t actually a parody, and regular Fair Use guidelines would apply. But with that transformation, they can essentially use all they want.
As with most things in IP law, it’ll be up to a court to decide whether they met the requirements for a parody and whether Fair Use was violated.
He did, but the legal question is whether he got permission first.
The idea itself wasn’t new. Putting dialog onto silent movies was used in movie gag shorts in the 1930s. (I just saw one on TMC.) I sorta remember hearing of various television shows doing something similar in the 1950s. But I have no idea whether they just grabbed the films or bought the rights.
Two completely different situations. The MST3K crew used entire movies with the original dialog. The CBS proposal was to use small chunks of movies with new dialog. Not at all the same legally.
I think that sounds pretty shaky. First of all, half the film is more than enough to be a violation. If it were a five-minute clip, that’s one thing, but far too much of the original is being used.
Second, that’s not parody. Parody would be performing a version of the movie on your own, using the plot and characters in an exaggerated way. Airplane!, for instance, parodied Zero Hour!, even down to the dialog.*
Third, using the entire soundtrack is not fair use.
*Both films were produced by Paramount, and Hollywood studios had a long history of people reusing elements from their own pictures – just look at Looney Tunes.
The films they used were silent era. The usage rights for such films were incredibly cheap. (What else were the studios going to do with them?) Add goofy dialogue, sound effects and Hans Conried. Comedy gold!
It might not be clear when such an “enhanced” version would have been produced to some people.
Just from listening to Leonard French, a copyright attorney on YouTube, One problem jumps out at me. It would be a commercial work that could function as a replacement for the original. That’s definitely a no-go.
There is also no strict amount of the work that makes fair use allowable. And, even then, the guidelines cite 5-10%, not anywhere near 50%.
And, anyways, if this was a good idea, why wouldn’t it have been tried in a totally legal manner? CBS and the other stations all have extensive back catalogs of content they own outright. Even if they only have access to TV movies, they could do this–but most are arms of bigger companies.
That no one has made such a show suggests it’s not a viable idea.
That said, with a little sleuthing, you can watch the entirety of Toy Story and Shrek online in shot for shot remakes with new audio. They’re on YouTube, where you’d expect them to have been shut down if the studios cared.
been there done that I don’t know if it was syndicated but in the late 80s nick at nite used to a show called “mad movies” that did exactly that that was done by a so cal comedy group …… The one movie I remember because they reran it so often was the original “D.O.A.” …
edit:
Heh it was syndicated but reran on nick at nite for about 3 years although it only lasted 1 here it is :Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection - Wikipedia
The problem would have been the same as MST3K had. The silent era consisted of hundreds of tiny studios, winking in and out of existence under dozens of legal shells. Or illegal shells. Most people don’t remember that the film industry moved to California because the Edison Trust (The Motion Picture Patents Company) had cornered the patents on film stock and cameras. The independents hid in California where the New York and New Jersey courts couldn’t easily find them.
The Trust wasn’t busted until 1915. Most of that early, illegal, stuff is lost today, but nobody could afford the time to pay lawyers to track ownership of the rest down. (Of course, the really early films would have moved into the public domain if their copyright was not renewed. That often was not easily determined as I discovered when I put together an anthology.) Even the later films that survived came from obscure companies until the majors slowly consolidated the industry until the expense of making talkies and owning theaters around the country essentially drove everyone else out of business.
Copyright’s protections were designed to keep pirates from freely copying an item and keeping the money. The idea that every item of art, including ephemeral silent films, would have value decades later and that a proper updated database of rights ownership was essential was beyond anyone’s comprehension. Today everybody understands that but nobody does anything about it. Progress!
I see that a lot of the films on that list are public domain, and I’d guess that all of them are, so copyright wasn’t an issue and they could do what they wanted.