FAN FILM FRIDAY (Now Available On Mondays!): How Original Are You Allowed To Be?

I checked out the Wiki entry on "50 Shades of Gray" and yeah, it said it started out as "Twilight" fan fiction. Considering the plot of "50 Shades" I'd've been creeped out if I was the author of "Twilight" and this person was writing bondage fanfic of my characters!

I'm a bit creeped out that a book about bondage/S&M has become so popular with women. The plot summary said that the heroine was this virginal college student who gets involved with an amoral, fabulously wealthy guy who's into S&M and wants her to sign a very detailed contract about what she will and will not do, but in no way is their relationship to be construed as "romantic." He's buying her as a real-live sex toy, basically, and she strings him along by delaying signing the contract.

That all just seems really icky to my sensibilities. Yet it's a mega-best seller. Critics say it's very badly written drivel. Yet it's a mega best-seller. Six or eight movie studios were fighting over the rights.

I'm losing faith in the goodness of human beings, I am.

>>As for being derivative in creating stories with over 150 years of science fiction and thousands of years of story making original stories are hard to come by odds are you will be covering ground well trod on.<<

My friend Miguel had that problem. He wanted to write SF, but he really didn't know it beyond Trek and Star Wars and vague memories of Lost in Space. So he'd write stories, and give 'em to me, and I'd say "Not bad, this is kinda' like blah blah blah." and then he'd get depressed and throw it out because 'it's not original.'

I'd say *nothing* is original, and you should be impressed that you came up with the same idea so-and-so did by yourself, because he's really smart, so parallel evolution...

"Yeah, but it's not original."

Dude, NOTHING is original. NOTHING you will EVER do is original. So what? How original is original anyway? I mean, you're writing in English. Did you INVENT English? No? So your story can't be wholly original. It's not like you're ripping stuff off, you never knew this other story existed. Just freakin' write!

"But it's not original."

NOTHING is original. You tell your story, and the original part is your own voice, the piece of your soul that gets caught on the page. The way you tell it. Because there really aren't all that many plots or plot complications out there...

Needless to say, he doesn't write anymore.

As a kid I and a group of friends made films with the hope of entering them into Kodak's Movie on a Shoestring Contest. We never finished one but the one that came closest was a Frankenstein film half Universal half Christopher Lee influenced. Looking back I wonder if it was a fan flic or an amateur project or possibly both.

I also have written fan fic, while I was in High School I wrote Conan the Barbarian stores some of which I turned in as an English fiction asignment. ( I received a C). I would think most writers and film makes started out writing or making fan flic/fic. Once getting positive feedback on a familiar subject most will move on to more original works. Their are on the other hand people who never make the leap of faith to write in there own voice.

As for being derivative in creating stories with over 150 years of science fiction and thousands of years of story making original stories are hard to come by odds are you will be covering ground well trod on.

The Romulan ship idea you mentioned intrigues me. I think it would be pretty interesting to see how these B-side Vulcans conduct themselves in their day-to-day operations. You could even re-do some of the adventures the Enterprise had with Romulans, but from the other perspective.

Of course, there already have been fan fictions of Romulans, like the "Rihannsu" series, and even more than I can count, as I scan the Wikipedia article (I really need to send those guys money, I use their site so much!)

>>Stargate spinoff? Oh, please share! :-)<<

The idea is to play to Stargate's strengths (Earth-based present-day space adventure), but to do it in a way we haven't already seen done to death. And it needs to be cheap. And ideally it needs to keep flying the flag like "Phase 2" did, keeping people's interest in the series. I came up with "Stargate" meets "NCIS."

Here's the deal: There's (By conservative estimate) 60,000 people from a dozen countries and a few other planets involved in the Stargate Program. Realistically, they're going to get in trouble ("Oh, the ambassador from PX329 was found dead in a brothel in Tennessee" or "Cameron Mitchell has managed to get himself arrested for murder again.") There has GOT to be an organization that takes care of these kinds of things, since the organization is secret, and such investigations cant' be handled by normal cops.

So: "Stargate: Investigations" ("SGI") which would be an NCIS-like team who have jurisdiction in all criminal cases involving Stargate personnel. The cast:

Pete Shanahan in the "Gibs" role
Dr. Lam in the "Ducky" role
some new character in the "Tony" role
Some other new character in the "McGee" role
Some established scientist of the week in the "Abby" role
General Landry in the "Leon" role.

Half the episodes would take place on earth, half would take place on other planets. Differences: The "Tony" character would have a different personality. He'd be a reporter, and a foreigner (I'm thinking a black German descended from Gastarbeiters) who's uncovered the program on his own. Pete is impressed enough with his investigative skills to put him on the team.

The "Abby" role would rotate through scientists we know from the show - Lee, Radik (sp), McKay, etc - episode to episode. We'd discover that SGI doesn't have it's own dedicated science team, so whomever's available gets stuck with the job. Nobody likes it, and it's generally seen as punitive for some screw up somewhere else.

Whereas SGI goes out of its way to be all intense and grim, though, this would be happy-go-lucky and swashbuckling. Pete is happily married to Dr. Lam, and they have a couple kids. General Landry, who'd come in every 2 or 3 episodes to yell at Pete, is his father-in-law, and they actually get along well. It's open-ended, it's easy to write, you can clean up a lot of dangling threads from the other gate shows, and meet old friends.

From a production standpoint, it's cheap as heck. You can film it ANYWHERE, you don't really need the SGC sets, you just need the gate, and you can CGI that.

>>A b5 show that takes place on Centauri Prime? I'd love to watch that. The episodes that did take place there in later seasons were great, and the Centauri have heaps of dramatic potential.<<

Agreed. But it's not the potential or depth of storytelling, it's whether or not anyone will watch it.

I keep wondering why people put so much time and effort into projects that won't bring them a return on their investment. In the Days Before Internet, if you had an idea, you jealously guarded it and hoped you'd get your money back on it. Now, people splash buckets of their own cash into ego trips that go up for free on YouTube.

I don't understand that economy.

I know a guy who worked on an indie film, a slasher pic with a Yuletide theme (please don't ask, I tried to ignore him while he kept shoving clips under my nose.) He also writes a lot of fan-fiction, very detailed fan-fiction, which could be great if only he'd use his own original characters. When I suggested this concept to him, he looked at me indignantly and said:

"Nobody would read it, then."

So there you go, Kevin. People make up stories about Other People's Popular Franchises because it's the only way they can be assured of finding an audience. Some people do write fan fiction because they're enamoured of the story (or a character in the story) but there are those who hang their own work on the peg of a known quantity, just so they'll get it in front of eager eyeballs.

Conversely, fan fiction can only ever be fan fiction. Unless you're very good, or very lucky, all your effort will always only be relegated to the "amateur" pile. And much of fan fiction--even fan fiction written by the guy who came up with the original story, and twenty years later decides to write a sequel--is...not very good.

Having myself written fan fiction (I think everybody has, at some point), I now try to distance myself from the genre, simply because I prefer to stick with the original source material. For example, I like Sherlock Holmes, but I won't bother with anything that was not written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Everyone brings their own ideas to the table, and some of those ideas might be good, but by and large, they use the source material as a means of getting their own divergent concepts placed before a ready audience.

This is not to say ALL fan-based material is bad. Some is quite professional. You could argue that most of Mel Brooks' comedies are essentially fan films. A lot of remakes can be considered fan films, like the recent "Dark Shadows"--from a young age, Johnny Depp was dying to play Barnabas Collins, no pun intended.

But the vast, vast, vast sea of fan fiction is full of terrible garbage that would make the Pacific Gyre seem pristine by comparison. I wince just to think about it.

I'm sure there are others in this community who have differing viewpoints.