TVSquad

Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 is nothing but drivel. Last week's episode was the first not to end with "and everything's gonna be alright...."

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If these bits are common knowledge, good luck labelling them as intellectual property...

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Quick, somebody call Joe Rogan!

http://popculturejunk.blogspot.com

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You're a little off base. There's such a thing as doing research. Facts about another late-night sketch show are not intellectual property...

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Maybe Sorkin will break into the feed this week, announce the score to some soccer game, and then issue a live apology to Jay Mohr.

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It's probably not copyright infringement, but it's definitely lazy writing. Yet another reason I'm glad to have given this show up at Christmas.

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You know what's interesting about this show? That these people who claim to hate it spend so much time reminding us of the fact. I mean, I don't like Cheaters, but you don't find me looking for blog posts about it to tell everyone how stupid of a show it is.

Seriously... We get you don't like it. Now, you don't EVER have to say it again.

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Well, it isn't as if jay mohr is unfamiliar with joke theft himself.

great article the recently revamped Radar has on the history of joke stealing:
http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/02/take_the_funny_and_run_1.php

"Unfortunately, there's generally no accountability for comic larceny—even when the culprit cops to the crime. In his book Gasping for Airtime, Jay Mohr owns up to an unusually high-risk robbery: When he was a cast member on Saturday Night Live, Mohr watched popular New York comedian Rick Shapiro do a set in a local club, transcribed it word for word, and submitted it as his own work for a sketch that made it to air. Several weeks later, after Shapiro sued Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels showed Mohr a tape of Shapiro doing the bit and asked if he had seen it before. Though Mohr denied it, the show settled with Shapiro for an undisclosed sum. Mohr, however, suffered no repercussions at all."

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That's not stealing, it's research. If Mohr's book was fictional, Sorkin's appropriation of the anecdotes might arguably be "stealing" (though there's a distinction between plagarism and influence). But incorporating real-life events of a sketch comedy show into a show about skech comedy is just an effective way for a writer to inject realism into their fiction.

I'd be curious to know what percentage of West Wing Seasons 1-4 wasn't ripped off from something Dee Dee Myers experienced.

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Not to be a pain, but the book is Gasping For Airtime, not Grasping.

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I'd think that there's a difference between incorporating "facts about another late-night sketch show " and stealing the phrases used to describe those facts. The fact: comedy writers on late night sketch shows have tiny/crappy offices. The phrases: well, mentioned above. Sure, a lot of the West Wing used events from the Clinton administration as inspiration (one of the most obvious was the episode where government shut down due to arugments over the budget), although Sorkin tended to "fix" the events the way he probably wished Clinton had. But to my knowledge, he did not use phrases from the memoirs of the members of the Clinton administration to do so.

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That story about a stand-up comedian's sketch being stolen by an "SNL" writer also appeared, with a few changes, as a plot on "Studio 60." Now, that's stealing with irony!

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Which phrases were used? I don't see any direct quote in the post, and I'm pretty sure "write on the walls" and "in the middle of the floor" (if those are direct quotes from both works) isn't copyrightable language; they're plain english.

I'm sure the West Wing episode on the government shutdown over the budget dispute used the phrases "government shutdown" and "budget dispute" which would be how any Clinton staffer would describe the situation in writing.

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I would also hazard a guess that it's a scenario that might have happened to a lot of other people (or at least one) at SNL over the years.

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IIRC the government shutdown in TWW was written/aired *after* Sorkin left the show.

As for this quote thing....come on!

Call it research or whatever but one will hardly convince me that before Mohr, no one - in and out of the entertainment business in the world- has been, seen, heard about, said the same story using the same words about working on the floor or ridiculously small offices.

Come on!!

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to copyright that and sue people using it without written authorization because it is that freaking unique.

*eyeroll*

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Mohr should be thanking Aaron Sorkin, because now he's at least getting a tiny bit of press. :)

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Sorkin is already ripping off Kristin Chenowith's whole life; why not take stories from others, too?

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Oh, come on; I have never heard the phrase "so small that he could take a pencil in each hand, stretch his arms out, and write on the walls" or "office in the middle of the floor" used before; they're hardly idioms. I can see the latter being, maybe, just being an anecdote, but the first one is a turn of phrase to describe what others would just say was a tiny office, an office you couldn't lie down in, etc. That's what I meant by phrases being stolen.

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I thought it was fairly obvious that Sorkin was patterning much of the show after real-life incidents. After all, the story about the ex-writer filing a sexual harassment lawsuit over salty talk in the writers' room seems pretty obviously based on the similar real-world case involving a writer's assistant on "Friends" a couple of years ago.

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Mark McKinney is a writer on "Studio 60".

Mark McKinney was on Saturday Night Live at the same time that Jay Mohr was on Saturday Night Live.

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