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From: Jasper
Date: 5/23/03
Time: 4:31:38 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.195.70
What does a guy Like Mark Fuhrman with no capacity for creative thought do to make it appear that he has an imagination? He borrows proven formulas and old tricks from the movies….
The Magnificent Seven, for instance, is a retelling of the Japanese classic The Seven Samurai with cowboy gunslingers and Mexican bandits instead of Samurai warriors and Japanese bandits. Different location, names, costumes and dialogue. Different language. Same story. Shakespier’s MacBeth has been told as a modern gangster movie at least three times. Two segments of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) with Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams were intentionally borrowed from Rod Serling’s “Twenty Two.” ELIZABETH POWELL, a blonde hospital patient in “Twenty Two” is a brunette Health Department technician named ELIZABETH Driscall in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Her boyfriend is a dentist named Jeffery HOWELL. The morgue in “Twenty Two” is a garbage truck filled with human remains in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Moviemakers take an apple from someone else’s movie and make it a pear in theirs. They take a thirst for water and make it a thirst for alcohol. They take a killer's message in blood and make it a detective's note or signature in red ink. They make men into women and women into men. They make one character out of two and play anagrams with names. Erwin Allen turned a burning high-rise in The Towering Inferno into a capsized luxury liner in The Poseidon Adventure. How many times have you seen Die Hard in various incarnations?
Alfred Hitchcock uses Eva Mari Saint’s cigarette as a phallic symbol in a scene aboard a train to Chicago in North by Northwest (’58) with Carry Grant who has been falsely accused of murder. His character’s name is Roger but the bad guys who are after him think that his name is GEORGE. You see the same sexual innuendo with Jill Clayburgh’s language (a cigarette would be too obvious) as Hilly Burns aboard a train to Chicago in Silver Steak (’76). She tells Gene Wilder’s character GEORGE that she is a secretary who can’t type and can’t do shorthand. She explains, suggestively, that she does “give good phone.” You know that the sexual innuendo goes back to the train scene in North by Northwest when George is falsely accused of murder and reunites with Hilly.
Mark Fuhrman uses all of these tricks and more in Murder in Brentwood and Murder in Greenwich. So did the Bundy killer. You don’t have to create anything from whole cloth to make it appear that you have or that something happened that way accidentally. You just have to move things around a little, give one character another character’s name, add or delete a letter or two in a name, turn corn on a plate into corn on a cob, a bullet into a blade, a metaphor into the real thing or vice versa. If you simply "put someone in someone else's shoes," most people never catch on. –Jasper