remake?...or nod?

[wingfold]

Just wondering what makes a screenplay a remake (with rights issues) - or how to know if it just contains a "nod" to an old movie...?

Is there a way of determining percentage of similarity? Or what/how?

Thanks

[Blackheart]

If you, say, wrote a remake of Casablanca, followed the original closely but with alterations, stuck with all the same characters, and called it 'Casablanca', you'd probably come up against a wall of lawyers at some point. But if you took the basic story structure of Casablanca, twisted and turned it, changed all the characters, set it in the future somewhere not related to Morocco, and made the protagonist a female instead of a male...

...you'd probably still run up against a wall of lawyers because you would have written a remake of 'Barb Wire'.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/images/smilies/wink.gif

but you get my point. You can steal - er - pay homage - to a degree, but you can't blatantly copy without rights issues

[emjen]

If you take the original writers take on the story, so in the case of casablanca that means you have the somewhat odd relationship set in a post war period (or during the war, can't really remember). Remaking it would mean your take on that story is different, but as soon as it is YOUR take on THEIR story, even though it is entirely different, it is a remake.

[zeprosnepsid]

You have to be careful these days because now sometimes if you are using the high concept of a movie, it's considered a remake (I'm not sure this was always true in the past).

You can definitely homage a scene or a line and no one will care.

And you can get away with lifting certain character types and plot elements if it's genre.

It's sort of a complicated issue. I guess a good down and dirty test would be if someone would easily be able to tell where it came from after reading it or when you give them the summary. "There's a bomb on a bus which will explode if the bus goes after 50 miles an hour" may be too much but "A guy and girl fall in love when put in a life or death situation over the span of one day where the guy must also out think a psychotic mastermind" is probably fine. Supposing there's no bus.