Attribution the ScreenplayDear Friends,

It’s bound to happen. Collective consciousness means when an idea hatches, it hatches in the minds of many. Orville and Wilbur were hardly the only ones inventing and testing flying machines; they are just the most famous. Thomas Edison wildly succeeded in wiping Nikola Tesla from our history books . . . for a while. And Harry Potter has been called Star Wars redux.

I recently saw the new Captain Marvel in the theater and couldn’t believe it when . . .

In the opening scenes, a woman falls out of the sky, her “other worldly” mentor appearing, both working for the government. Landing in the middle of the story, she has flashbacks to a woman and her child. Two countries (alien races) battle over a rare mineral, the protagonist undergoing a big identity reveal. Then, there’s this cat in the end with its own unusual identity, my story ending with “wolves.”

Sound familiar???

I will see the movie again to match up story line similarities, but it’s really hard to just call it just a coincidence when the sequence of the scenes follow so well. How could this happen? Yes, I did publish the screenplay and novel recently, but it takes movies a few years, at least a couple if fast-tracked, for a script to go through the studio machine.

I originally submitted Attribution to the Nicholl Fellowship screenwriting contest under the working title T.Ruby in 2016, resubmitting the script in 2017 as Attribution. You submit the screenplay without your personal information on the pdf document. It’s then assigned a control number. It would be easy enough for a script to get circulated without “attribution.”

Of course, this is purely fun speculation. For me, it feels like vindication that I can and did write something worthy of “copying.”

Wishful thinking? Maybe . . .

If you’ve ready my book/screenplay and seen the movie, what do you think?