The scandalous origins of Martin Scorsese's After Hours

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Andrew Hearst of Panopticist has a great post about the surprising origins of a movie I love, Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985)

Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese's excellent 1985 film After Hours–a significant portion of the movie's first 30 minutes, in fact–were brazenly lifted from "Lies," a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who's gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It's possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film's release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I've found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was "paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won't name) that plagiarized his dialogue."

Hearst includes a link to Frank's entire 11 minute monologue. Link