Former Toledoan Brett Leonard is raising money to produce a movie,
Perfect Season, that has a plot revolving around the Toledo Troopers. They were
a successful team in a women’s professional football league that many people
never knew existed — or have long forgotten.
The Toledo Troopers won seven consecutive national championships from
1971 through 1977 and often shut out its opponents, winning games by 30 to
40-point margins. Mr. Leonard said he is assembling a cast and is eager
to begin filming on location in Toledo within a year, with a projected release
of fall, 2014. Several residents are
likely to be offered temporary jobs, he said.
Leonard and the two writers want people to understand how the team’s success
gave more relevance to Title IX, the 1972 federal civil rights act which
outlawed sex discrimination in education, including sports. Title IX wasn’t fully implemented until the
end of the 1970s, when colleges and universities were ordered to provide equal
opportunities for athletic scholarships. But the film makes a case for the Toledo
Troopers setting an example through football, they said. The Troopers
began play on Aug. 6, 1971, as a rag-tag collection of women in a league that
some people thought would be more entertainment than sport. The team was originally affiliated with the
Women’s Professional Football League, established in 1965 and operated by
Cleveland talent agent Sid Friedman. Bill
Stout had a falling out with Mr. Friedman after he learned he was interested in
making it more of a gimmick, like women’s mud-wrestling. Records show professional women’s football
was played as far back as 1926, but for halftime entertainment purposes of
men’s games. http://www.toledoblade.com/Movies/2013/06/16/Remembering-Toledo-s-Troopers.html
Toledo Troopers 1:22 video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTMRnqSZ4v0
DAVID GOODIS vs. THE FUGITIVE by Francis M. Nevins
In the last few years of
David Goodis’ life, one of the most popular TV series was ABC’s The Fugitive,
the saga of Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen) who was wrongly convicted of his
wife’s murder, escaped from the wreck of a prison-bound train, and spent the
next several years on the run, criss-crossing the country, changing identities
constantly, being stalked relentlessly by the Javert-like Lt. Gerard (Barry
Morse) as he searched for the one-armed man who was the real murderer. The series was produced by United Artists
Television and ran on ABC for four seasons (1963-67) and 120 hour-long
episodes. A year or so into its run,
Goodis became convinced that the series was a rip-off of his own first
crime-suspense novel, Dark Passage (1946), which had been serialized in
the Saturday Evening Post before book publication and, a year later,
became the basis of a Warner Brothers movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren
Bacall. Both the novel and the movie
told the story of Vincent Parry, who was not a doctor but did escape from
prison after being wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder and, although never
stalked by a cop, did set out to clear himself and find the real killer, who
was not a one-armed man. The first of
the two legal arguments they offered was based on the 1945 contract by which
Goodis for $25,000 sold Warner Bros. the movie rights in his novel. Like most such contracts in Hollywood’s golden
age, this one included language permitting the studio not only to make a movie
based on the novel but to remake it as often as the studio chose. United Artists TV claimed that The Fugitive
was legal on the basis of those remake rights, which it had bought from
Warners. Could the contractual language
have been broad enough to justify such a claim? Could a clause primarily
intended to authorize one or at most a handful of theatrical remakes be
stretched to justify the making of a TV series that lasted for 120 hour-long
episodes? The federal district court
hearing the case ruled that it not only could be but was, and on January 2,
1968, almost a year after Goodis’ death, granted summary judgment to the
defendants on that basis, quoting from the 1945 contract at great length. Anyone who wants to go to a law library and
read the decision will find it in Volume 278 of the Federal Supplement,
beginning at page 120.
The defendants’ second
legal argument grew out of the Goodis deposition. Apparently the UA TV attorneys hadn’t
previously realized that the Saturday Evening Post had paid Goodis
$12,000 for the right to publish Dark Passage in six weekly installments
before its publication in book form. Unfortunately
the only copyright notice in those six issues of the Post was the
general notice on the table of contents page in the name of the Curtis
Publishing Company. But Curtis wasn’t
the copyright owner of Dark Passage; it was merely the licensee of
magazine serialization rights from Goodis, the real copyright owner. Therefore, the defendants argued, Dark
Passage had been published serially without a proper copyright notice, with
the consequence that it had been in the public domain ever since and anyone
could make any use of it that they pleased.
The case moved through the legal system like a frozen snail. It took more than two years for the Second
Circuit Court of Appeals to hand down its decision, but from the viewpoint of
Goodis’ successors it was worth waiting for. In Goodis v. United Artists Television, which
was dated March 9, 1970 and can be found in Volume 425 of the Federal Reporter,
Second Series, beginning at page 397, the appeals court reversed the trial
judge on both grounds. All three
appellate judges sitting on the panel — Kaufman, Lumbard and Waterman — agreed,
in Chief Judge Lumbard’s words, that “where a magazine has purchased the right
of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no
intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine’s
name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial
owner, the author or proprietor.” The
court’s refusal to impose Draconian consequences on an author because of a
minor defect in a copyright notice constituted a landmark decision at the time,
and the law has continued to evolve in the same direction ever since. Indeed under our present Copyright Act no
notice at all is necessary in order for a work to be protected. A lawsuit is like a horse race: anything can
happen. One of the great lawyerly
virtues is prudence. It was prudent of
UA TV to offer a settlement and prudent of the Goodis successors to accept it. We also cannot know whether Goodis himself
would have accepted a settlement had he lived. But if there’s an afterlife and they serve
liquor, he no doubt would have toasted the wisdom of the Second Circuit Court
of Appeals in using his case to strike two blows on behalf of all authors
living and dead.
Read extensive article
at: http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=17106
Did you know? All 50 states make wine. There are 25 cases in a standard barrel. The grape harvest generally starts in
February in the Southern Hemisphere and in September in the Northern
Hemisphere. Wine glasses should always
be held by the stem and not the bowl, because the heat of the hand will raise
the temperature of the wine.
Source: Vino Volo ("wine
flight"), with wine and food bars in close to 20 airports in North America
The Enhanced Fujita scale (EF scale) rates the strength of tornadoes in the
United States and Canada based on the damage they cause. Implemented in place of the Fujita
scale introduced in 1971 by Tetsuya
Theodore Fujita, it began operational use in the United
States on February 1, 2007, followed by Canada on April 1,
2013. The scale has the same basic
design as the original Fujita scale—six categories from zero to five,
representing increasing degrees of damage. It was revised to reflect better examinations
of tornado damage surveys, so as to align wind speeds more closely with
associated storm damage. Better
standardizing and elucidating what was previously subjective and ambiguous, it
also adds more types of structures and vegetation, expands degrees of damage,
and better accounts for variables such as differences in construction quality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Fujita_scale
See details of EF scale at: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/ef-scale.html
Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) was an American novelist and short story
writer, most widely known for her psychological thrillers, which led to more
than two dozen film adaptations. Her
first novel, Strangers on a Train, has been
adapted for stage and screen numerous times, notably by Alfred
Hitchcock in 1951. The protagonists
in many of Highsmith's novels are either morally compromised by circumstance or
actively flouting the law. Many of her antiheroes,
often emotionally unstable young men, commit murder in fits of passion, or
simply to extricate themselves from a bad situation. They are just as likely to escape justice as
to receive it. The works of Franz Kafka
and Fyodor Dostoevsky played a significant part in
her own novels. Her recurring character Tom Ripley
– an amoral,
sexually ambiguous con artist and occasional murderer – was featured in a
total of five novels, popularly known as the Ripliad,
written between 1955 and 1991. He was
introduced in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
After a 9 January 1956 TV adaptation on Studio One, it was filmed by René
Clément as Plein Soleil (1960, aka Purple Noon
and Blazing Sun) with Alain Delon, whom Highsmith praised as the ideal
Ripley. The novel was adapted under its
original title in the 1999 film directed by Anthony
Minghella, starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth
Paltrow, Jude
Law and Cate Blanchett.
A later Ripley novel, Ripley's
Game, was filmed by Wim Wenders as The American Friend (1977). Under its original title, it was filmed again in 2002, directed by Liliana
Cavani with John Malkovich in the title role. Ripley Under Ground (2005), starring
Barry
Pepper as Ripley, was shown at the 2005 AFI Film Festival but has not had a general
release. In 2009, BBC Radio 4
adapted all five Ripley books with Ian Hart as
Ripley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Highsmith
