Thursday, February 24, 2005

Today's Word: Personal

I absorb it, what you said. I know when you stood up in the middle of my friends and said you loved me, that it was the cruelest thing you could say, considering what I did to you. You ripped me open, you make me hate myself even more.

Holy crap.

Story here I dunno how I missed this.

Monday, October 4th 2004 ended a six-year dispute involving Sophia Stewart, the Wachowski Brothers, Joel Silver and Warner Brothers. Stewart's allegations, involving copyright infringement and racketeering, were received and acknowledged by the Central District of California, Judge Margaret Morrow residing.

Stewart, a New Yorker who has resided in Salt Lake City for the past five years, will recover damages from the films, The Matrix I, II and III, as well as The Terminator and its sequels. She will soon receive one of the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood, as the gross receipts of both films and their sequels total over 2.5 billion dollars.

Stewart filed her case in 1999, after viewing the Matrix, which she felt had been based on her manuscript, "The Third Eye," copyrighted in 1981. In the mid-eighties Stewart had submitted her manuscript to an ad placed by the Wachowski Brothers, requesting new sci-fi works.

According to court documentation, an FBI investigation discovered that more than thirty minutes had been edited from the original film, in attempt to avoid penalties for copyright infringement. The investigation also stated that "credible witnesses employed at Warner Brothers came forward, claiming that the executives and lawyers had full knowledge that the work in question did not belong to the Wachowski Brothers." These witnesses claimed to have seen Stewart's original work and that it had been "often used during preparation of the motion pictures." The defendants tried, on several occasions, to have Stewart's case dismissed, without success.


Her novel was the basis of two of the most successful sci-fi film trilogies not involving lightsabers ever. That's just astounding. Congratulations to her. And it sorta makes sense with everything I heard about how the first Matrix was so amazing, and the other two were lackluster. Stewart gave them enough juice for one film, the Wachowskis had to rely on their own devices for the last two. The differences are night and day. Or, if you prefer, red and blue.

P.S.

My iPod Shuffle is being delivered today. As the kids on the street say, woot!

4 comments:

poppycock said...

Wow. It takes a very major absence of scruples and total lack of conscience for taking the credit for something as big as The Matrix.

Those filthy, cheating Wachowski brothers pulled one on a lot of us, the sneaks. And to think that i was trying to figure how they could possibly have envisioned the Matrix, like they probably went on a deliberate ketamine overload and lived to write about it. Well, maybe Ms. Stuart did.

What a girl.

ps
Sorry for the long absence. I'm busy busy busy like you'll never know and it's making me really tired now. :(

See you.

MM

John said...

It's alright, MM. It's just good to see you again.

poppycock said...

hi john,

you see how i'm all so worked up on the matrix thing? it sounds like a hoax but not quite. and then i was led to this page by one of the bloggers.

http://davidpoland.typepad.com/thehotblog/2004/12/more_on_termina.html

what do you think?

John said...

Hmm. From what I read, it looked legit. It's a very curious case. The strange thing is how little coverage it got. if I'm wrong, and this is a hoax, then it's a big ol' lesson not to believe everything I read on the web. I'll read it more later. Very curious. Thanks for providing the link.