#abe epperson

The facts are these: Swaim claims that he and Abe Epperson were asked by Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films (now MoviePass Films) to write a ‘revenge-based’ screenplay featuring an ‘ex-Marine or ex-police officer’. They turned out a screenplay titled ‘Force of Nature’, a Die Hard-esque piece taking place in the aftermath of a hurricane. Shortly thereafter, Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films announced they had greenlit a film called ‘Force of Nature’, a Die Hard-esque piece taking place in the aftermath of a hurricane, with Cory Miller’s name attached as screenwriter.

Swaim responded with a Youtube video (since taken down due to legal threats, but mirrored elsewhere), in which he claimed that it’s Emmett/Furla/Oasis’s “MO to rip ideas off of young writers, and hand them to cheaper writers”, and went on to rag on them for casting Mel Gibson in the lead role instead of Nicholas Cage, which he considers “the greatest insult”.

As Swaim noted in his video, punch Emmett/Furla into Google, and one of the autocomplete options is ‘lawsuit’ - the company has a fairly colourful history, including a $6 million lawsuit in 2016 where they were accused of, of all things, racketeering and violation of the RICO act (a statute introduced for the prosecution of high-ranking Mafiosi). While that case was ultimately settled, at the time the opposing attorney stated that their “unlawful and intentionally unethical conduct follows a pattern that they have established over the past few years with numerous independent producers, whom they have swindled into doing business with them” - a summation which appears to tally with Swaim’s impression of the outfit.

Their phoenix-like transformation into MoviePass Films hardly covers them with glory either, considering they’re nailing their colours to the profoundly ill-regarded MoviePass film ticketing service. A swift browse of their social media reveals that even the lightest of puff pieces (‘looking forward to the weekend?’) receives a response almost entirely composed of customer service complaints. Like their new child company, they too have been targeted for legal action, the complaint being that, having been promised they could watch a film a day, customers were only able to view three films over ten months. In other words, MoviePass was unable to provide equivalent service to living opposite a drive-in theatre.

Plagiarism is a tough nut to prove, particularly in the media. Not too long ago there was a story going round that Netflix darling Stranger Things was plagiarised from Charlie Kessler’s 2012 film Montauk. Uniquely, this accusation was set to actually go to court, whereas the vast majority don’t even make it that far – so a judge felt there were enough similarities between Montauk and Stranger Things to hear it out. Nonetheless, Kessler ended up dropping the case and subsequently rescinding his accusation, insisting it was all the brothers’ own work, like the defendant at a Soviet show-trial praising the premier before they are shot and bulldozed into a mass grave.

An even more egregious example came with Joe Quirk’s novel The Ultimate Rush, about a rollerblade courier being chased by a corrupt policeman, which Quirk alleged was ripped off to create the forgettable Joseph Gordon-Levitt vehicle Premium Rush, a film about a bike courier being chased by a corrupt policeman. Quirk’s novel had been optioned for a film adaptation by Warner Bros., only for Columbia pictures to go ahead with Premium Rush shortly after that option expired. This, too, ultimately never made it anywhere in court, with the presiding judge noting that by having publicly published a novel, Quirk couldn’t claim that anyone was “impliedly bound to pay for using the ideas” found therein.

But Swaim did not publicly publish his screenplay. By his own account, he and Epperson wrote it at the request of Emmett/Furla, and sent it directly to them, so if one were to wonder just where the studio got the idea for their film ‘Force of Nature’ there is one very obvious option. This is not necessarily conclusive, there is the occasional strange coincidence where two similar projects come to be completely independently. There are unrelated comic strips in Britain and America called ‘Dennis the Menace’, both of which first appeared on the 12th of March in 1951. However, nobody’s ever accused either strip of plagiarising the other, possibly because America’s white-picket-fence Dennis couldn’t be more different from Britain’s surly, proto-punk Dennis. MoviePass Films’s iteration of ‘Force of Nature’ doesn’t come close to passing that sniff test.

Quirk’s case could at least be put down to it being a similar project with a similar name – rather than, in Swaim’s case, an identical project with an identical name. To stave off MoviePass Films’s presumably bloodthirsty lawyers, I will note that their treatment of ‘Force of Nature’ has significant differences from Swaim’s ‘Force of Nature’ - for instance, the lovable animal companion is a large dog instead of a horse. I leave it to the studio to point out any significant differences in narrative and tone, if indeed they can.