Early in my career, I found out that a respected New York film critic had plagiarized part of one of his reviews.
I discovered it completely by chance. I was reading a review in the New York Times Magazine of a lengthy collection of reviews by a legendary playwright and critic. Out of all the writing in this very long book—which I never would have read in a million years—the reviewer chose to quote two sentences. I recognized those two sentences immediately as they had appeared verbatim on the ads for a film I’d worked on. I had personally underlined those words off the critic’s review, typed them up and presented them to the client. They ran regularly at the top of the newspaper ads.
It was hard to believe that anybody would pull such a brazen stunt, least of all this brilliant writer. I couldn’t figure out why. And then I thought a bit more and realized he’d been going through some hard times. It was hard not to see that he had a drinking problem. I decided it was unintentional. Perhaps he had read the playwright’s review at some point, the words stuck in his mind and he just used them again without knowing. It would be crazy otherwise to choose lines that were penned by one of the most renowned playwrights of the twentieth century. I imagined the critic would be horrified if he found out about it. Of course, it was conceivable that he did it on purpose. If that was the case, it was very sad.
Aside from a few close friends, I didn’t tell anybody. It never occurred to me to do anything else. What possible good would it have done to reveal this unfortunate action? The critic wasn’t a fraud; he was the real deal, with decades of accomplishment. Was the deceased playwright going to feel ripped off? It’s a secret and it will stay a secret. I pray that everyone else who knows will refrain from divulging it.
Nowadays it’s doubtful that a publicist would keep a story like this quiet. After all, plagiarism is a terrible crime! We must all decry it! And of course, it’s great fun to see a person of achievement humiliated. It would sell a lot of newpapers, fire up countless blog posts and make great fodder for TV shows. What fun!
It’s a cliché to say that malicious joy people take in the pain of others is part of human nature. That’s why there are so many words for it, including schadenfreude (German), Greek (epikhairekakia) and in our mother tongue, snarky blogger.*
Still, I think most people would agree with me that schadenfreude has never been as brazen and crowd-pleasing a pastime as it is today. There’s a previously unknown mode of cruelty, unleashed by the anonymity the internet provides. Anybody who’s well-known is fair game. It’s the foundation for a high percentage of pointlessly cruel blog comments, Tweets and Facebook posts. I’m not saying that the pre-internet days were a Golden Age of civility and kindness—there has always been backstabbing gossip--but the internet has sunk things deeper into the sewer. And I think we are all diminished by this ugly trend in our culture.
I know I am going to get emails after this from friends wanting to know the name of the critic. I suppose that says it all.
*I plagiarized much of this sentence from Dictionary.com and Richard C. Trench’s On the Study of Words.
