O is a movie starring Mekhi Phifer and Julia Stiles about an inner city youth starring on a prep school basketball team. Watch it and you immediately recognize that Othello was repackaged. Our screenplay Freedom shares the same characteristic with Django: Unchained. The underpinnings of both stories are very similar. Our screenplay was re-packaged by Quentin Tarantino.
Whether we win or lose the lawsuit, three individuals will die knowing Django: Unchained was derived from Freedom. The troll’s question will be why would an acclaimed screenwriter/director steal from two unknowns. Three quotes might start to answer the troll’s question.
First up is Tarantino himself. “I steal from every single movie ever made,” Tarantino once told Empire magazine. “If my work has anything, it’s that I’m taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together.”
This source yielded a previously undiscovered explanation of what inspired Django: Unchained. Tarantino has offered different explanations about his inspiration for his greatest grossing film. I only have one inspirational recollection for Freedom.
Next up is Samuel L. Jackson, frequent star of Tarantino movies, who said in an LA Times interview , “All of Quentin’s stuff has to do with some other movie…Lots of times he’d explain a scene to us like ‘We’re going to start with the opening shot of “Casablanca,” then go into something Sergio Leone did in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” and then finish up with kind of Wile E. Coyote thing.’ It’s not so much that Quentin steals but he’s paying homage with his shots.”
Homage is a word frequently associated with Tarantino. I wonder if he thought he was paying homage by keeping the same surname for the ex-slave who would be a rescuer?
Let’s close with another opinion. “Don Murphy, Natural Born Killers producer and longtime Tarantino nemesis, voiced his opinion on the matter bluntly: “Quentin doesn’t have a single bone of originality in his body.”
Freedom, if nothing else, was an original, creative piece. The screenplay’s craftsmanship was unpolished but the story was sublime. The 1994 LA Times article on Pulp Fiction hinted Tarantino might have a photographic memory. There is substantial commentary about his encyclopedic knowledge regarding movies. What if all this knowledge prevents him from developing creative material?
Is Django: Unchained a western? If it isn’t a western, then it is a period piece with heavy western undertones. One Tarantino proffered inspiration for the movie was to pay homage to a spaghetti western. That reason does not jibe with “[h]e has an uncanny ability to zero in on the unique merits of a movie that looks to others like pure junk, and incorporate details into his own pics: a look, a shot, a line, or the entire plot (the little-known Ken Norton starrer “Drum” inspired “Django Unchained”).
In this instance, my supposition is that he had the “uncanny ability” to recognize the magical love story of Freedom and turn it into his highest grossing movie. The ironic situation is that existing copyright law provides a substantial deterrent against infringement. One just can’t get into that arena, it seems. The odds are that Tarantino has successfully paid homage to our creative work with impunity.
Part 3 will deal with prior instances of Tarantino homages.