Exhibit B
I rented the movie, having read the book, and was surprised to find that the movie was not an adaptation of the book at all. I don’t mean it “failed to maintain fidelity to the book” in the sense that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining or the Alex Proyas film I, Robot with Will Smith in it failed to correspond properly with the original source material. No, The Songcatcher was a book about a folksinger named Lark in modern times (with flashbacks to an ancestor in the 1700s), whereas Songcatcher was a movie about an academic musicologist, Dr. Penleric, in the 19th Century. And the events do not correspond at all (it’s not like they recast the plot in a different time and gave the character a different name).
On the other hand, it’s not quite like Bladerunner (the futuristic move about replicants) versus Bladerunner (the science fiction novel about a surgeon violating restrictive medical laws), or The Lawnmover Man (short story about a possessed lawn care guy with a bloodthirsty lawnmower at his disposal) versus The Lawnmower Man, a movie about a lawn care guy who gets a mental makeover courtesy of state-of-the-art brain-enhancement technologies. That is to say, it doesn’t appear to be a titling coincidence or a case of simply swiping a title and then going on to make a completely irrelevant movie from it. For one thing, Lark is trying to acquire some ancient folk tunes from the Appalachian mountain country to record as a career singer, and Dr. Penleric is trying to acquire some ancient folks tunes from the Appalachian mountain country to do academic papers on. Both of them are therefore career women who are delving into these old Scottish-ancestral ballads that were brought to the US and retained in the hillbilly country by descendants of those settlers, and doing so in order to further their respective careers. That, when added to the near-identical titles, seems like a rather large overlap, a bit too large to be accidental.
I havent successfully Googled so much as a single discussion of how massively dissimilar plots and set of characters with the same focus on these old folks songs got produced and released at virtually the same time with virtually the same title.
Anyone know if they at any time purported to have anything to do with each other*?
Is the term “songcatcher” a conventionally used word that always means “person who goes into the backwoods or boonies to hear and document old folk songs” or something? (i.e., could the title be a simple by-product of the coincidence of two works both concerning themselves with songcatching, as opposed to title and subject matter being two separate parallels?)
- OK, I did find a reader comment on a review of the book that said something about “Oh, and Maggie Greenwald is going to make a movie out of it”, but that could’ve been someone who simply made the same guessing error that I did when I rented the DVD. From the way it was worded, the person who entered the comment had not seen the movie.