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R E C E N T L Y
No irony please -- we're leftists R.I.P., Buzz Oklahomans to Tom Tomorrow: Your porn is as high as an elephant's eye! No glitz please -- we're British Under the Covers BROWSE THE
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the unauthorized godzilla
Two writers confront the mighty media giants and discover that size does matter. BY MATTHEW FLAMM | Maybe he was naive. Maybe he was reckless. But right now, Frank Lovece, who spent the last year and a half working on "Godzilla! The Complete Guide to Moviedom's Mightiest Monster," is exhausted. Possibly it's from staying up nights pondering the recent federal court ruling that granted a preliminary injunction against his book. Or maybe the veteran entertainment writer is just worn out from lugging around photocopies of his 200-plus-page reader's edition, his publisher (William Morrow) having canceled the title rather than battle a copyright suit that the judge's ruling told them they would probably lose. Lovece isn't the only writer out there right now who feels as if he's been trampled by a 10-ton lizard. He may have lost his fight with Godzilla's trademark holder, the Japanese behemoth Toho Co. Ltd., which is poised for a licensing bonanza with the May 20 release of Tri-Star's "Godzilla" remake, but he certainly isn't alone. Citing copyright infringement, film studios and entertainment companies are increasingly putting the squeeze on "unauthorized" books -- a practice that some worry may curb free speech. Last year, Castle Rock Entertainment succeeded in putting the kibosh on "The Seinfeld Aptitude Test" trivia book, and that victory apparently encouraged Paramount Pictures to demand recently that Carol Publishing take its "Cheers" and "Frasier" books off the market. And after nearly 30 years of keeping hands off the "Star Trek" phenomenon, Paramount has just filed its first suit against a Trekker, charging author Sam Ramer with copyright infringement over "The Joy of Trek," which commits the apparently unpardonable sin of explaining the series for the nonfan. Even ASCAP got into the act for a while, demanding -- unsuccessfully -- that Girl Scouts pay royalties on the songs they sing around the campfire. Like many another author in his shoes, Lovece, sitting in a greasy spoon on the Upper West Side, a pile of legal briefs at his elbow, wants to explain how his book is a work of "commentary." His "Godzilla!" should therefore be allowed to quote from the monster, as it were, under the fair use provisions of copyright law. It's hard not to feel sorry for underdogs like Lovece; it's also hard not to feel sorry for consumers, particularly after perusing the hapless "authorized" material we're getting about "Godzilla." Random House has just published "The Official Godzilla Compendium," and it's a book that may make longtime fans run in fright. OK, the Random House volume has nice pictures and well-informed background segments on "Godzilla" and its many sequels. But at a slim, lavishly illustrated 144 pages, it can hardly afford padding like the "Godzilla as a Parenting Tool" chapter, not to mention "Godzilla Invades Random House" -- an embarrassingly dull promo for the licensee's publishing program. The book also contains the bare minimum on the monster's beloved-by-fans creators, and no synopsis of the original film -- 1954's "Gojira," from which the Americanized "Godzilla," starring Raymond Burr, was cobbled together. Even more disturbingly, while acknowledging Godzilla's origins in Hiroshima and the H-bomb tests, the book tries to soft-pedal the idea of the monster as nuclear metaphor. "Born in the burning heart of a nuclear blast?" asks critic John J. Pierce in a "guest essay" titled "Godzilla Beyond the Atomic Age: A Monster for All Seasons." He adds: "Well, that may be the official line ..." "The reality is that books of commentary are permissible," argues Charles Shepard, Toho's chief lawyer, when I call up to complain about the Random House book. The problem with Lovece's title (which, no, he doesn't think is better than Random's) is that "even though it had some commentary, there were many other component parts -- its pictures, the detailed plot histories -- that crossed the line." You might be tempted to believe Shepard. I am, until I meet Steve Ryfle, another hard-luck case enjoying a meal in another low-rent West Side diner. The author of what was originally to be called "Godzilla: The Unauthorized Biography" had his book dropped by Dell last July because of what the publisher described as "potential legal problems." According to Ryfle, Toho had recently won a suit against tiny Fantasma Books in Key West, Fla., over the use of unauthorized Godzilla photos, and Dell realized that it, too, would face a battle over pictures. "Without pictures, it was a lost cause," says the author, who traveled to Japan twice during his research and interviewed some of the last surviving veterans of the monster's heyday. Ryfle did find another publisher, albeit a small one, ECW Press in Toronto, and has negotiated for months with Toho in the hope of avoiding a lawsuit. He has shortened synopses, excised photos, changed the title (it's now "Japan's Favorite Monster: The Unauthorized Biography of Godzilla") and removed all traces of the monster's image from the cover. Toho, however, has still not signed off on the book, forcing the publisher to miss its original publication date (which was to coincide with the movie's opening) by at least a month. Each of these unauthorized volumes is more informative than the official "Godzilla" we'll be getting. Lovece, making use of those "detailed plot histories" Shepard found actionable, compares "Godzilla" with "Gojira," and notes several key scenes that never made it into the popular, dubbed version. Among them is this dialogue from a streetcar exchange: "First the radioactive rain. Then the evacuation ... I don't want to live through Nagasaki again!" Lovece also gives the necessary background on the monster's creators, such as director Ishiro Honda, who would work closely with Akira Kurosawa on the "Seven Samurai" director's later films, and special-effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya, who had been banned from Toho for a while by the U.S. Occupation government for his work on propaganda films during the war. Ryfle, in a book particularly rich with detail, shows how the war experience was key to those haunting, documentarylike scenes in which Godzilla devastates Tokyo: It was, ironically, by working on films like "The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya" (1942) that Tsuburaya perfected the art of creating realistic miniatures. Ryfle also includes an entire section on the scenes edited out of "Godzilla" -- scenes that help account for why "Gojira" is considered to be among the best Japanese films ever made. "There needs to be a shelf in the public library with 10 or 20 Godzilla books," enthuses Ryfle, "but thus far, Toho doesn't seem very interested in educating the public." "I've really been through hell this last year," he adds with a sigh. "Tell
anyone you meet not to write about Godzilla." Matthew Flamm writes regularly about cultural issues. |
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