So Far

I didn’t agree with Michael Winner about very much, but when he said the following about The Third Man, he was spot on. “If people tell me: I want to be a film director, I say, You don’t need to go to film school. Just watch The Third Man 100 times.” The Third Man contains so many lessons that it’s hard to know where to begin, but this is the lesson – as told by Guy Hamilton –that I try to remember the most, because it’s a key not only to good film-making but good writing t

A good story tells itself. The job of the writer or director is then to recognise what the story is and to coax it into the world. The extraordinary skill with which Carol Reed accomplished this feat is, I think, the main reason why The Third Man was so successful. He got the very best out of a good story just as he got the very best out of a good zither player. Of all the interviews I did when I wrote my book about The Third Man, the most complete and informative was that

The tendency of a very famous film like The Third Man is to gather layer upon layer of apocryphal stories so that it becomes increasingly hard with the passing years to unravel what really happened. So I was pleased a few days ago to hear an intelligent, reasonably accurate discussion of the film on David Runciman’s Past Present Future podcast. But a notable lapse was its account of David Selznick, who was the American co-producer of the film. The show’s guest, Misha Glenny,

I was pleased a few weeks ago to be able finally to reach a settlement with Titan Books over John Walsh’s The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film. Published in September last year, it used large amounts of material from my book In Search of the Third Man without crediting me or seeking my permission. Titan agreed to insert an errata slip into the first print run of the book to credit its use of my work, and to pay me a small fee. It also agreed that corrections would be

The Third Man had its US premiere on Wednesday 1 February 1950 at the Victoria Theatre in Times Square, New York. The charity showing...

This is the 10th example of how John Walsh’s The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film steals from my book In Search of the Third Man . Not the least of my objections is its title, since a copyright infringement of my work surely cannot be “official”. Two months after publication, I am still waiting for Studiocanal, which owns the copyright in Walsh’s book, to address this issue. What follows is the last example of copyright infringement that I shall examine in detail.

Below I’m posting a ninth example of how John Walsh’s book The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film steals from my book In Search of The Third Man . But first it’s time briefly to take stock. A good starting-point is a Samuel Johnson quotation which I’ve already quoted: “Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.” By far the best chapter in The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film

This is the eighth example I’ve posted of John Walsh’s copyright infringement of my work. Page 104 of his book The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film plagiarizes pp.61–3 of my book In Search of The Third Man. First his plagiarizing text: And here is the passage from my book that he plagiarizes: Following the same approach that I ’ve analysed already in so many previous examples , Walsh uses mostly his own words, but paraphrases my content: his choice of what details t

The saga continues. This is now the seventh example of John Walsh ’s copyright theft that I have posted to date. I dislike having to give such sustained negative analysis of somebody else’s work in order to make a case. I feel the evidence of copyright infringement is so strong that it shouldn’t be necessary. It would be much better if Titan Books and John Walsh now acknowledged what has been long obvious, so that we can settle the issue at last, learn whatever lessons need t

To anyone who has followed the saga of how John Walsh has ripped off my book In Search of the Third Man , the routine will be very familiar now. It has become a boring story. The only reason why I continue to tell it is that, although I am now giving the sixth detailed example of Walsh’s theft, the publishers, Titan Books, have still to acknowledge the enormity of the copyright infringement that has taken place. So until they do, I feel I have to continue to provide yet more

This blog entry is now the fifth example of John Walsh’s heavy plagiarism of my book In Search of the Third Man that I have posted online. Although there are much more rewarding things that I would prefer to do with my time, I have been advised that it is important to set out the extent of the plagiarism in as much detail as possible. This latest example shows how p.103 of Walsh’s book The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film steals from pp.59–60 of In Search of the Thi

Last week the Society of Authors gave me some advice concerning the copyright infringement of my book In Search of the Third Man . They told me that it was important to clarify the extent of the copying in as much detail as possible. So what follows is yet another example of how John Walsh ’s The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film steals from my book. And although I have now put online four examples of Walsh ’s heavy plagiarism, I shall go on, page by page, to prov

Among several pages of heavily plagiarized text to be found in The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film is the above sample, which is being used to sell the book on Amazon. It is stolen from In Search of the Third Man , a book I wrote twenty-five years ago. When last Thursday I heard from Titan, the book’s publishers, I agreed that I would give them another week to sort out what had gone wrong before submitting a copyright infringment report to Amazon. They shared with

What follows is an effort to establish with as much precision as I can the extent to which Titan Books’ publication of The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film plagiarizes my book In Search of The Third Man . I have already given one detailed example in a recent blog post: https://www.charlesdrazin.com/post/the-third-man-stealing-the-limelight Here is a second example, and I shall provide other examples if it turns out to be necessary. Below is the opening page of a chap

In 1999 I wrote a book on The Third Man to celebrate the film’s 50th anniversary. I relied on thorough original research and interviewed several people who had been involved in the making of the film. I was pleased when it received several warm reviews, including this praise from the movie magazine Empire : ‘Writing with the lean, incisive tone of a Greene novel, Drazin has really put the work in... Delivers the definitive history and evaluation of a true great.” Then last y

September 1949. A small, box-like, stringed instrument had taken London by storm. A headline in Time magazine called the craze that...

In returning to The Third Man on the occasion of its 75th anniverary, it is difficult to resist the pull of Orson Welles – the...

Guy Hamilton, who was Assistant Director on The Third Man , spent quite possibly as much time playing Harry Lime as Orson Welles did....

With a film as prone to inaccurate hearsay as The Third Man , I find myself these days increasingly looking for the incontrovertible...