SO SORRY, MR. HOBERMAN

RESPONSE TO SLATE ARTICLE: DOES PLAGIARISM MATTER?

Dear Megan O’Rourke,
Cc Jack Shafer, Mickey Kaus

You ask does plagiarism matter. What if I said to you that it was a plain act of a writer’s plagiarism that led to the world as we know it today, the Bush presidency, Iraq war, loss of habeas corpus and castration of U.S. Civil Rights.

A while back I read a column by Village Voice critic J. Hoberman that set me to wondering if it was “The American President” that fired up a conservative electorate that and put G. W. into office, the only U.S. president to wage a foreign war after a direct conversation, as he put it, with Jesus Christ.

Sorkin was awarded credit as the sole writer on the Michael Douglas movie after a phony Writer’s Guild of America arbitration concealed the existence of a letter wherein Sorkin told about meeting his producer Robert Redford and hearing my original story, which triggers automatic “Story by” credit under the WGA constitution.

The leaders of the WGA arbitration board, in secret meetings, accepted Sorkin’s lawyers statement to the Guild as truth when they all knew it was a lie.

The screenplays written by my collaborator and me were never read by other WGA writers, by any "jury of our peers" as the studio claimed.

I include my producer Robert Redford as an accomplice in this theft because he sold the screenplay I wrote with Kyle Morris for Disney in 1981, along with my subsequent scripts, to Castle Rock Pictures for 5 million dollars, then refused to disclose that these screenplays, which I wrote for him and his company and Universal pictures from 1984-1991, were the basis for just about every aspect of “The American President” and “The West Wing,” which used my own script “The Executive Wing” as its template.

Think I’m exaggerating? Read the scripts, they are on the Internet at www.williamrichert.com.

Not only Mr. Redford, but Julia Bingham, Rob Reiner, Alan Horn and others connected by greed and staggering amounts of money were aware of this theft of credit and their “critical failure to act can only be described as collusion.”

So Aaron Sorkin plagiarized my original screenplay and my subsequent draft entitled THE EXECUTIVE WING, which is the basis of THE WEST WING. Does this matter except to squabbling writers?

If THE WEST WING led to millions of avid, devoted, fanatical and slavish fans thinking this was a “real” president when this president was actually filtered through the brain of Aaron Sorkin, the plagiarized hit show could have shifted the evangelicals or other conservative catholic voters (like my mother) away from the Democrats by a small percent – enough to elect George W. Bush – and then, of course, the rest is history.

My president, like Sorkin’s in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, was a widower, with a young child studying music, who falls in love with an politically “unacceptable” woman, sends her flowers, diverts a motorcade, asks her to dance at a state dinner, speaks to his child about wardrobe – the similarities go on and on – not a coincidence, since it was my screenlay Sorkin was re-writing up until shortly before Redford quit.

Even so the men differ in fundamental ways, like Abel and Cain. What if Abel had survived? Would the world be different?

Sorkin’s President was a secret prescription drug user who hired a pot smoking secretary and was fine with it. Nothing against prescription drugs or pot, but I have plenty of issues with a President who keeps secrets of a certain sordid (Sorkin) kind.

My President was honest to his core, a fundamental difference between these Presidents and these screenwriters.

In the Biblical metaphor, Cain won again. Aaron Sorkin is the God of the Beltway for Millions, THE WEST WING is his Bible. Laurence O’Donnell nominated Sorklin’s President for TIME’S Person of the Year. But he is a false god. Sorkin plagiarized many things (with the help of 17 other writers) but he left out a kind of character with decency, a quality we now see almost wholly gone from the current White House, where they also “think outside the box.”

Along with other serious financial crimes and misdemeanors by WGA officials, the scope of this deceit, and its chilling effect on other writers as well as on our times, is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the distinguished screenwriter Eric Hughes (“AGAINST ALL ODDS,” “WHITE KNIGHTS,” who has been conducting a tireless investigation into the conduct of the WGA in hiding foreign levies from its own members, as well as falsifying credit arbitrations. His findings are due out momentarily. Presently I am leading a class action lawsuit on the guild’s malfeasance in RICHERT V. WGA.

To examine the evidence for yourself, please go to my website at www.williamrichert.com and click on WEST WING UNAUTHORIZED.

Like all forgers and high-class counterfeiters, plagiarists are smart and facile.

Jason Blair fooled a lot of intelligent readers at the NY TIMES, but nowhere near the number of TV viewers bamboozled by Aaron Sorkin, who stands to earn half a billion dollars off the deal.

Aaron Sorkin lifted the story, characters and plot from my original THE PRESIDENT ELOPES while re-writing my screenplay for Robert Redford at a Beverly Hills hotel in 1994 while having sex with Julia Bingham of Castle Rock, smoking crack cocaine, and waiting for Rob Reiner to get him into rehab.

When Redford quit in disgust, Bingham, Castle Rock’s head of business affairs – who Sorkin dutifully married then divorced – put forth Aaron Sorkin as sole writer, and the Writer’s guild accepted this based on contracts that said Sorkin was hired to write a separate script, but no such script was ever shown to exist.

One of the producers of THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, Barbara Maltby, writing in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, says she never heard of such a screenplay until Sorkin showed up when the movie was made “to claim the inheritance.”

Your piece is perhaps the only article I’ve examined about plagiarism these past fifteen years that has aptly applied the word “labor” to describe the act of writing.

Many people think that writing like drawing is a talent and thus a gift and not a real job or a basic right, something unnecessary to the “real” world, which therefore can pass from one person or another with no real loss or harm, even if stolen.

“My kid can do that,” says the gallery goer about modern art. “When I get the den finished, I’m going to write my screenplay,” says the movie writer.

How hard it is to justify screaming about the loss of anything as common as an idea or sequence of words, or characters, or story lines, or philosophies, when everybody has one he/she isn’t using.

Outsiders view plagiarism in Hollywood as a kind of mercenary political act, with money grabbing and opportunism and exaggeration on all sides, with the wronged and wounded writer cast as a whining wannabe, as if he/she were the true plagiarist, instead of the accused.

This changes when the aspect of actual “labor” is introduced, as it was introduced in your Slate essay, directing attention to the labor of writing as actual “work,” with a factual effort involved, meaning hours or days or years, as a writer labors over a sequence of words that portray a character or evoke a certain, specific situation. This writing is as labor-intensive as any that put forth in any kind of patentable invention. The “Eureka” factor comes from science, not literature.

Paradoxically, the thieves and plagiarists in my were protected by “labor” laws, letting them get away with it (until now.)

And yet, as J. Hoberman seemed to suggest, the damage has already been done.

I am so sorry, Mr. Hoberman.

In response to the question “does plagiarism matter?” one can say that it does, and to all the world.