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