What the Dog Saw [94]
“I can’t say that I do,” he said. He paused again, then added, “The only thing I’m sorry about is that it’s not legal.”
“What’s not legal?”
Franklin answered as if he’d been asked the time of day: “Killing Jews.”
That exchange, almost to the word, was reproduced in Frozen.
Lewis, the article continued, didn’t feel that Franklin was fully responsible for his actions. She viewed him as a victim of neurological dysfunction and childhood physical abuse. “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness,” I wrote, “is the difference between a sin and a symptom.” That line was in Frozen, too — not once but twice. I faxed Bryony Lavery a letter:
I am happy to be the source of inspiration for other writers, and had you asked for my permission to quote — even liberally — from my piece, I would have been delighted to oblige. But to lift material, without my approval, is theft.
Almost as soon as I’d sent the letter, though, I began to have second thoughts. The truth was that, although I said I’d been robbed, I didn’t feel that way. Nor did I feel particularly angry. One of the first things I had said to a friend after hearing about the echoes of my article in Frozen was that this was the only way I was ever going to get to Broadway — and I was only half joking. On some level, I considered Lavery’s borrowing to be a compliment. A savvier writer would have changed all those references to Lewis, and rewritten the quotes from me, so that their origin was no longer recognizable. But how would I have been better off if Lavery had disguised the source of her inspiration?
Dorothy Lewis, for her part, was understandably upset. She was considering a lawsuit. And, to increase her odds of success, she asked me to assign her the copyright to my article. I agreed, but then I changed my mind. Lewis had told me that she “wanted her life back.” Yet in order to get her life back, it appeared, she first had to acquire it from me. That seemed a little strange.
Then I got a copy of the script for Frozen. I found it breathtaking. I realize that this isn’t supposed to be a relevant consideration. And yet it was: instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause. In late September, the story broke. The Times, the Observer in England, and the Associated Press all ran stories about Lavery’s alleged plagiarism, and the articles were picked up by newspapers around the world. Bryony Lavery had seen one of my articles, responded to what she read, and used it as she constructed a work of art. And now her reputation was in tatters. Something about that didn’t seem right.
3.
In 1992, the Beastie Boys released a song called “Pass the Mic,” which begins with a six-second sample taken from the 1976 composition “Choir” by the jazz flutist James Newton. The sample was an exercise in what is called multiphonics, where the flutist “overblows” into the instrument while simultaneously singing in a falsetto. In the case of “Choir,” Newton played a C on the flute, then sang C, D-flat, C — and the distortion of the overblown C combined with his vocalizing created a surprisingly complex and haunting sound. In “Pass the Mic,” the Beastie Boys repeated the Newton sample more than forty times. The effect was riveting.
In the world of music, copyrighted works fall into two categories — the recorded performance and the composition underlying that performance. If you write a rap song, and you want to sample the chorus from Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” you have to first get permission from the record label to use the “Piano Man” recording, and then get permission from Billy Joel (or whoever owns his music) to use the underlying composition. In the case of “Pass the Mic,” the Beastie Boys got the first kind of permission — the rights to use the recording of “Choir