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 year I received an email from writer and film-maker John Walsh. He told me that, with the backing of Studiocanal who own The Third Man, he was writing the “official” story of the film for Titan Books. He asked, “Do you have anything you could share with me from the research for your book? In particular, any memos between Korda and Selznick?” I told him that he should visit the David Selznick Archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, which has not only the original Korda/Selznick memos that I quoted from in my book but also a huge amount of other information. (As the American co-producer of the film, Selznick had meticulously archived documents relating to the production of The Third Man in a way that Korda hadn’t.)
The situation reminded me of the making of the film itself. The American writer Jerome Chodorov, who Korda hired in September 1948 to rewrite some of the dialogue of the Third Man script, told me how, during his brief visit to London, he had bumped into Graham Greene: “We just said hello and he looked at me suspiciously. Nobody likes another writer to come in on his stuff.” The making of The Third Man – emotionally, but of course not officially – had once been “my stuff”. So being human, I certainly felt suspicious of the arrival of a new writer, but if Walsh had truly written a first-class book, then that suspicion would instantly have disappeared.
Hoping that such might be the outcome, I offered to review the book. The review copy I eventually received was a very attractive-looking, coffee-table book. It deserves credit for unearthing many pictures that I had never seen before. Such is the great advantage of an “official” book: it allows access to material which is either locked away or otherwise difficult to use because of expensive licence fees. But it contained very few new stories about the making of the film that I hadn’t already told in my book twenty-five years ago. Ignoring my advice, Walsh hadn’t visited the one place where he was most likely to find some new stories, the David Selznick Archive. It was showing off pictures that most mattered to him. As far as words were concerned, he seemed happy to recycle old stories.
That would have been fair enough. But what annoyed me was his heavy use of my book without proper attribution. Here is an example in black and white. First the black, “his” account of the difficulty of dealing with Orson Welles (p.106 in his book); and then my account, which is where he got it from (pp.72–3 in my book). Not only does the structure of his text follow my structure, but every quote he uses is taken without attribution from my interviews.
The irony of this example is that the chapter he took the material from is called Stealing the Limelight. “The world doesn’t make any heroes...” Harry Lime tells us, but I like to believe that, had I said nothing at all, someone else would sooner or later, like Holly Martins, have pointed out that something was aslant.
I would probably have put up with the heavy borrowing, if Walsh had been open about his sources, making it clear where he had taken material from. But he wasn’t. Although he mentions my book a couple of times, he conceals his heavy reliance on it through the lack of any specific references. Of the 8 interviews he lists in his bibliography (see below), 5 of them – those featuring Guy Hamilton, John Hawkesworth, Elizabeth Montagu, Bob Dunbar and Norman Spencer – were interviews that had actually been conducted by me when I was researching my book in the late 1990s, but nowhere am I credited as the source.
I could give several other examples of the use of my book without due credit if I didn’t think that the detail would quickly become boring.
Naturally I lost any appetite for reviewing a book that I felt had ripped me off. For the sake of good relations I told John Walsh (who had helped me to get the review copy from the publisher) that I had decided not to review his book because its approach seemed to me “much more to offer a visual treat than a new take on the film”. Determined to be civil, I even congratulated him on on how attractive it looked, which it really does, and wished him the very best for it.
What prompts me to raise my objections now is the publicity for its publication. It emphasises the new material that the book contains but conceals the degree to which it has borrowed old material. So, for example, in an interview for Forbidden Planet TV, which I noticed for the first time on 18 September, Walsh claims: “My book is the first official book looking at the making of the film – all aspects of it, the fights that went on, the internal politics, and of course I had a deep access to all areas in terms of documents, stills, some sketches...”
The specious nature of this advertising puff infuriated me: the way Walsh uses the phrase “first official book” in such a way as to ignore an earlier, much more authoritative book; the way he claims “deep access” to documents when he appears to have made no effort to visit the one archive that has the depth of original documentation about the film that Studiocanal itself does not possess.
Equally irritating was the trailer that Studiocanal put out for the book at about the same time. Using clips and music from the original film, it claims: “After 75 years, ‘the best British film ever made’ reveals its final secrets in a new book from John Walsh with new interviews, unpublished artwork, newly discovered photography.”
But most of the interviews it relied on were my old ones! And the secret it doesn’t reveal is its heavy use of my book. I don’t think you can ever say when any film reveals its “final secrets”, but certainly many of the “secrets” that I didn’t have the time to uncover when I researched The Third Man at the David Selznick Archive back in 1999 probably still remain buried in the files there. If Studiocanal really wants to reveal the final secrets, then they should send somebody over to Texas to get them.
The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film may be the official story – if having the backing of a copyright holder is enough to make a story official – but it certainly is not the authoritative story. The closest you will get to that is still my book, which I was pleased to see the Financial Times recently call (3 September) “surely the best book about the film”. I have no fear of this latest book changing that verdict. I do hope, however, that Studiocanal, which owns its copyright, will take note of my comments and ensure that any future edition gives proper acknowledgement to my work.
Update 26 September:
After posting this entry nearly a week ago, I contacted Studiocanal directly to report the plagiarism of my work. They are now investigating what has happened, and I hope they will soon take appropriate action.
They told me that they had not made the trailer advertising Walsh's book. It was created by John Walsh as part of his own direct promotion, but only permitted on the understanding that any quotation from my work had been properly credited.
Over the weekend I received an email from John Walsh, in which he apologized for not having given me due credit. He offered as a remedy, on the reprint of his book, to credit my interviews and to add the following sentence in his introduction: “Research material for this book came from many sources, but I would like to highlight one in particular, In Search of the Third Man by Charles Drazin, published by Methuen (2000), which is the first to investigate this cinematic classic in detail, and it is still in publication, and I would urge readers to seek it out.” He even offered to make a short video promoting my book.
What a nerve, I thought: "Many sources!" He had ransacked my work so heavily that the only acceptable remedy for me was that his publishers should withdraw the book. On Monday morning, I replied to his email, telling him so, and I copied in his publishers, Titan Books.
Although they have had three days now to respond and John Walsh’s book was published on Tuesday 24 September, I still have not heard from them. As they seemed to be actively selling the book on Amazon, I wrote to them again yesterday to warn them that if the The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film was not removed from the Amazon website by the end of this week, I would submit to Amazon a copyright infringement report on the title.
Even one of the sample pages I saw posted on the Amazon website was a heavy plagiarism of my work. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but plagiarism is theft!
Update 1 October:
During the afternoon of Thursday 26 September I received an email from Titan Books, which said that they were trying to get a full picture of what had happened from John Walsh. They asked if I could bear with them. The following morning, Friday 27 September, I answered that I would delay by a week complaining to Amazon about John Walsh’s infringement of my copyright, so that Titan had more time to figure out what went wrong and what to do about it. I stressed that I wanted to find an amicable resolution.
Then, at the end of the day, Titan emailed again to apologize for any upset that the situation had caused and to express their readiness to give acknowledgement to my book. Their email included a summary of John Walsh’s response to my allegations of plagiarism, and they proposed that we set up a call to discuss it.
I agreed but expressed my concern that John Walsh’s response was to deny that any plagiarism had taken place at all. I told Titan that if we were to have a productive conversation, then it was important that they sought to gauge the scale of plagiarism that had taken place independently of John Walsh.
Walsh’s response to my allegations included the specific denial that the sample page on Amazon was plagiarism. I decided, therefore, that it was important to argue why it was plagiarism, making my case as clearly as possible, paragraph by paragraph, with specific detail, and I have posted that explanation on my website today. If the Amazon sample is still up on the Amazon website by the end of this week, then I shall use it as evidence when I submit my copyright infringement report.
Meanwhile, the first reviews of The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film are beginning to be posted on the Amazon site. So far, all five star. Should I be pleased or cross?!
Update 7 October:
On Tuesday 1 October I spoke with a director at Titan Books. I was told that Titan had asked Amazon to remove the Amazon sample page that I had complained about. When, I checked the site on Saturday 5 October, I was pleased to find that the sample had been removed. But as the book is still on sale on the site, I have today submitted an Amazon copyright infringement report.
Titan are now examining the examples of plagiarism I’ve pointed out so far and will make a response as soon as possible. I said that I would provide more examples if necessary.
Over the weekend I listened to an episode of a podcast series called “Spyhards”, which is dedicated to spy films. Posted on 16 September, it featured John Walsh plugging his book. He made great play of the fact that he had written the “official” story with the backing of the rights holder of the film: “The reason why that makes a difference is because I can delve into all sorts of paperwork.” Because actually he stole my research instead, such a statement seems to me to be misrepresentation, which I think it is as important for Studiocanal and Titan to correct as the original plagiarism.
I could not resist a wry smile when one of the two presenters of the show said to Walsh, “What we try to do is set the record straight, with people who were there and hear their stories about a film and try and get that into the public record. It’s a thing I have a lot of pride in doing, and it’s nice to see that you do too. Getting a story straight and putting it out there. And fact-checking as well I think is a very important part of all this.” So I then contacted the Spyhards show to help them set the record straight.
Watch this space for further developments.
Comments