I read "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," just because I can't believe a Harvard student was stupid enough to plagiarize from numerous currently popular sources to create this bestseller, that has now been pulled off the shelves for that very reason. The author, Kaavya Viswanathan, now a sophomore at Harvard, stole entire paragraphs- changing only the name of the characters or small details- from Megan McCaffrey's coming of age series. Unfortunately for this student, it was the Harvard newspaper that broke this story, and it was picked up everywhere else.
Anyway the similarities to a few different written works have been extensively discussed, but I haven't heard much of anything about the fact that she stole scenes and plot points from Tina Fey's movie, Mean Girls. In the book, just like the movie, a clueless but pretty girl enters the upper echelon of high school society, by joining into a false friendship with 3 mean (2 blondes, 1 other) but ever so popular girls with their own set of grooming rules- you can only wear your hair down, etc (the girls are called the Haute Bitchez, in the plagiarized version, the Plastics in Mean Girls). The scene in which one of the mean girls complements a wannabe on an item of clothing, then disses it when it she walks away, is in both the movie and the book, as is the clueless girl wearing a tight dress at her own party. Also, the idea that the clueless girl messes up things with her true crush by becoming popular is a major part of the plot in both, and the link between one of the other popular girls and that crush. So anyway, it's quite obvious that the author stole from the movie, and she even mentions the movie itself and Lindsey Lohan in her book. So why isn't this such an issue as are all the instances of taking the scenes from books? Are movies not respected as creative property in the same way as novels, or are they not subject to the same copyright laws?
1 comment:
In my pre-Opal scandal I pointed out this same thing on Amazon. Other similiarities include the fact that the nice clueless girl as an "exotic" background, that she trips the first time she comes into school all togged out, that her "secret book" is stolen at a party, that she makes a speech about values, that the party she gives at her parents house gets WAY out of control, hey, other reviewers besides me were calling this a "clone" too. It's a shame that Tina Fey who wrote it probably can't take legal action the way the book authors that were plagiarized from did.
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