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How a Plagiarist was Found Out
The devil is in the detail.
Nobody likes a plagiarist. Copying the work of other people, and then trying to pass it off as your own is a deadly sin for most in the writing community, but there are always those who seek the rewards without putting in the effort.
These days, online plagiarism checks are readily available, so work can be scrutinised for its authenticity at a keystroke. In pre-Internet days, however, disputes of ownership of written work weren’t so easy to resolve, especially as it often came down to one party’s word against another.
Script Thief
But, here’s a true, and I have to say satisfying, story about one occasion when a script thief became unstuck.
In 1957, United Artists released the movie Baby Face Nelson, based on the exploits of the notorious hoodlum. Before a scene had been shot, however, an Arbitration Board in Hollywood had to deal with a case in which two screenwriters each claimed to have written the script for the film. The scripts were almost identical, so clearly one writer had plagiarised the other’s work. But, as the saying goes, whodunnit?
On one side, there was Irving Schulman, and on the other, Daniel Mainwaring. Schulman’s script appeared to pre-date Mainwarings, and if it came down to one man’s word…
