Allusion, Homage, and Plagiarism

I just recently learned that The Matrix was plagiarized. You can Google the details, but basically this woman wrote a book called The Third Eye. She wrote a film treatment and sent it to Fox. There was interest in it, but they died out when the executive showing interest went to another company. The Third Eye is about earth after the machines rise up and take over. So years later Fox releases The Terminator, and this lady says to herself, “This sounds familiar.” She claimed plagiarism but nothing came of it until something around a decade later when The Matrix was released. She watched that one and said, “This is my book!” After eyewitnesses confirmed that the directors had copies of the book on set with them, a judge agreed that both The Terminator and The Matrix stole large elements from her book illegally. Fox, WB, and AOL Time-Warner were ordered to pay her back money for the original films, the sequels, and every other form of media the franchises were involved in including video games, books, toys, etc. She is now getting a slice of an estimated $5 billion dollar pie. This all actually happened years ago. The news story got suppressed by, well…Fox, WB, and AOL Time-Warner.

I’ve actually been thinking about where we draw the line between homage and stealing for a while now. With this subject Quentin Tarantino comes to mind. He has consumed so much film that he can’t help put spit it back out into his work. But does that count as stealing? Is it borrowing? Wouldn’t the St. George paper we read make It’s a Wonderful Life a sort of plagiarism? Can you actually say that there are rules to this sort of thing? Posted are a number of videos by Rotten Tomatoes that further explore this subject.

So what do you think? Where do you draw the line? Doesn’t that Lion King one tarnish your childhood a bit?