--- d.brin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
My friend Paul Preuss probably won't be suing the guys who made THE
CORE. Still, the possibility glimmers as we stack up comparisons and
things stolen from his book CORE. (Oh, and several scenes and thing
clearly borrowed from EARTH.)
It makes me wonder if someone sometime should set up a whistleblower
site - akin to some of the urban legends sites - that simply posts
point by point comparisons between movies and books. Do any of you
know of such a site already in existence?
A comparison is below. WOuld any of you care to hunt up Paul's book
and do your own comparison?
db
=
Comparing Core, a 1993 novel by Paul Preuss, with The Core, a
Paramount picture released in April 2003, Directed by Jon Amiel,
Produced by David Foster, screenplay by Cooper Layne et al.
In both the novel and the movie, Earth faces sudden peril because of
an extraordinarily quick collapse of the planet's magnetic field.
In both book and film, plucky scientists propose to penetrate deep
into Earth's core, setting off bombs in the core to restart the
field-generating dynamo.
In both book and film, a hermit-like innovator works alone to invent
the superhard, refractory material essential to withstand the heat
and pressure of the deep Earth.
In both the novel and the movie, nefarious government agencies spy on
these efforts because of their schemes to use earthquakes as weapons.
The producers of the film chose to make the delivery system of their
nuclear bombs a deep-diving ship carrying a human crew. While this
makes for colorful drama onscreen, the utter impossibility of the
approach is a groaner that may have helped defeat the film at the box
office. Preuss's novel is intended as plausible fiction and does not
use a crewed vessel. Nevertheless the extrapolation from his deep
drilling project is blatant.
Some specific points:
The unnaturally rapid collapse of the Earth's magnetic field is
original to the novel and copyrighted.
A specific kind of hard, refractory material is original to the
novel and copyrighted. The screenplay uses terms from the novel
relating to this material, but takes them out of context and renders
them senseless, indicating that the idea did not have a common,
independent origin.
The entire sequence of a dive into a deep trench in the Western
Pacific, including underwater earthquakes, whale sightings, etc., was
taken from the novel in a way that cannot plausibly have had a
common, independent origin.
The proposition that the Earth's collapsed magnetic field can be
restored by setting off bombs in the liquid core is original to the
novel and copyrighted.
Both novel and screenplay have as subplots the military use of
earthquakes as weapons; in both cases spies for the military are part
of the drilling operations. (In both, the spies are even of Slavic
origin!) This strains coincidence.
The producers of The Core appear to have attempted to spread out
their borrowings in order to take the best ideas wherever they lie,
and possibly to disperse any actionable similarities. Another blatant
source of appropriated copyrighted material is described below.
Comparing Earth, a 1991 novel by David Brin, with The Core, a
screenplay by Cooper Layne et al.
This novel and the movie share the notion of the planet's core
becoming a threat because of human meddling.
In the Preuss novel, the initial calamity was natural. In the Brin
novel, and in the movie The Core, catastrophe was triggered by a
human-made object dropped deep into the Earth, requiring human
intervention to correct and eliminate the first cause.
There are variances in The Core between the initial script, the
released version of the film, and the story told by publicity
previews, but all three are relevant. Previews tell of a mission to
eliminate the deep manmade object object causing disaster on the
surface.
The most blatant borrowing from Earth is a pivotal dramatic sequence,
early in both the book and the movie, in which a woman space-shuttle
pilot, pondering her failed marriage, must suddenly turn her
attention to saving her ship after the vessel is crippled by the beam
or field of influence of some human-triggered calamity in the core of
the planet. Every last detail mentioned in the previous sentence is
specific to the novel and copyrighted. Every detail appears
miraculously in the script of The Core.
Also overlapping is the shuttle pilot's subsequent role as the
co-protagonist, co-survivor, and love interest of the male scientist
lead.
The novel Earth partly involves the unprecedented and innovative idea
of interacting with the planet on the level of software. In
publicity for The Core - though not in the released version of the
film - a character relates that he is going to