MANOA VALLEY THEATRE
Joe Moore starred with Sherry Chock-Wong and Matthew Pederson in "Dirty Laundry."
Joe comes clean on
‘Dirty Laundry’ criticismsThe KHON anchor answers
accusations of plagiarism
Life is imitating art in uncomfortable ways this week for KHON news anchor Joe Moore. Anonymous calls to local media resulted in front-page allegations that Moore's latest play, "Dirty Laundry," an indictment of contemporary television news programming, contained characters and situations similar to those seen in "News at Eleven," a made-for-television movie that aired in 1986.
"It was a hell of a way to start the day," Moore said late Wednesday as he tried to make sense of the sudden brouhaha and find something in the story that would make it front-page news.
Moore wrote "Dirty Laundry" as a way of encouraging public discussion about the quality and content of local television news programming. "Dirty Laundry" was recently produced by Manoa Valley Theatre, and directed by MVT staff member Karen Bumatai, as the theater group's spring fund-raiser in a three-night run at the Hawaii Theatre.
"I was proud of ("Dirty Laundry"), and this leaves such a bitter taste. It's always going to be tainted," Moore said.
"There's a line in my play that I gave to MacArthur: 'No matter what you say or do, or I say or do, the doubt is always going to be there.' How little did I know that it would come true for me."
Moore acknowledges that there are similarities between his "Dirty Laundry" and director Mike Robe's 1986 film. Both address the issue of TV news programming with the agenda of promoting serious news coverage over puff pieces and sensationalism, and both make the case with a story in which a top TV news anchorman committed to serious news battles a news director who believes that straight news is outdated and sensationalism is the way to go.
In "News at Eleven" a teacher is charged with statutory rape; in "Dirty Laundry" a priest is accused of improper conduct with prepubescent boys. And both stories end with the anchorman successfully exploiting the news director's lust for sensationalism.
Moore says that he used ideas from "several dozen sources -- mainly real-life sources" but also considered "News at Eleven" and other fictional treatments of the subject when he started working on the script.
"I told members of our cast and crew at a very early table reading that my memories of seeing that film on TV 15 or more years ago provided one of the primary inspirations for me when I starting fitting my ideas into some kind of structure," Moore says.
"I flashed back on several of these different films and things, but (my script) is so stamped with my signature, I don't see how anybody who saw the play could think it was anything but my work. If you've got a guy who's into ratings and revenue vs. a guy who's into the news, there's your conflict right there. How many different ways can you stage their arguments and their issues?"
The issues are universal in any newsroom, including any print medium.
THERE ARE VERY few plots that are original, and the "recycling" of ideas -- not specific characters -- has been common since authors and playwrights began making their stories public. "West Side Story" took the plot and character relationships of "Romeo & Juliet" and recycled them as a tale of ethnic gang warfare in 1950s New York. The plots and character types of "A Fistful of Dollars" and "The Magnificent Seven" were seen earlier in two classic Japanese samurai films. The climactic scene in "Star Wars," in which the good guys must attack in a straight line into heavy enemy fire in order to hit the target, is straight out of James Michener's book "The Bridges of Toko-Ri."
There are also obvious similarities between the plot and story line of "The Enemy Below," a late-1950s film about a battle of wits between an American destroyer captain and German submarine commander, and a popular early "Star Trek" episode in which Captain Kirk battled an invisible Romulan space craft.
Fans of the late John Wayne know that he made two films in which an aging hero and an ambitious young gunman come to the aid of a alcoholic sheriff.
"Similarities and borrowing is a common thing in the history of theater," says theater historian Lurana Donnels O'Malley, associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, noting that William Shakespeare recycled the basic plot and character relationships found in Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy" when he wrote "Hamlet."
"It's an interesting quandary in a way because there's a great history of that kind of thing, (and) at the same time we're getting much more concerned about intellectual property and the rights of writers. It's very hard to say (when infringement occurs) because we have certain expectations of what a play is, and what kinds of characters we find, and the genre. To be completely original in writing a play about any setting is very difficult."
"The difficulty with intellectual properties is that you can't copyright an idea, you can only copyright a reality," says Daniel Kelin II, director of drama education at Honolulu Theatre for Youth, adding that it was what Shakespeare did with other writers' ideas that made his plays unique.
"People say Shakespeare never had an original idea, but he'd take an idea and make it entirely his own," said Kelin, who notes there is always a degree of risk involved when a writer is inspired by another work and wants to create something similar but more personal "or more local."
"Theoretically, any play or a good story has a universality to it. You don't need to make it more local, you've got that piece there and people should be able to see it for what it is. ... On the other hand, if a good French movie comes out, there's bound to be an American version of it within the following five years. That seems to be kind of an accepted practice on that level. What it comes down to, really, is giving a fair shake to what it is that someone has done."
EVEN MOORE'S critics appear to have stopped short of charging him with plagiarism, merely pointing out similarities, and while the overall excitement that surrounded "Dirty Laundry" may have been dulled a bit, his position as an outspoken critic of local TV news programming remains unchallenged.
At the moment, Moore finds small comfort in that.
"I think it was sad that somebody ... felt they needed to try to make a case that I plagiarized somebody else's work. That didn't happen, but you can never take this (story) back now. It's always going to be there.
"I'm sure I'll be in a restaurant five years from now and somebody will say something. It's always going to be there. There's no evidence, but it was out there on the front page (of the Honolulu Advertiser), so it must be true."
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