Ok, so, as you all know the new episode of my podcast An Awakening of Horror was pulled by both Facebook and Youtube because a certain person named Eric Hyde complained about it and said it was harassment focused on him. But here is the truth, horror fans. The truth is that Eric wanted to mute the fact that I proved him and his buddies wrong on a supposed wrong they accused me of. That being that I stole the idea for my short story Robert Diablo from a treatment the Soskas sisters wrote for a screenplay they had intended to do after American Mary. Well, the Soskas didn’t do their story, which was simply called Bob, after American Mary. Nope. They sold out to Vince McMann and all thoughts of Bob disappeared. Yep, They had See No Evil 2 that they were doing and they had bigger projects in their heads than the quirky tale of a morose person and their friend who was a demon from hell.
Honestly, I think they made a mistake doing American Mary
over Bob. American Mary is humorless and negative, where Bob would have been a
nice multi-layered dark comedy.
So, honestly when I thought about throwing together and
writing a bunch of my old horror treatments I thought I’d take that idea I
thought had merit and shouldn’t be wasted. So, I decided to develop it myself.
But here is the point, people. I did nothing wrong. In fact
stuff like this happens all the time in the entertainment industry.
What Eric and his buddies want to ignore is that treatments
and ideas can’t be copyrighted. Scripts and completed movies can, but not
ideas.
Here is a prime example that you people may remember. It is
the case of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5. Creator of Babylon 5, J. Michael
Straczynski, went to Paramount Studios to try and sell them the idea for Babylon 5. Paramount wasn’t interested, but a couple years later Paramount used Stracznski’s idea for Babylon 5 to create Deep Space Nine. Of
course, just after Paramount launched Deep Space
Nine Straczynski got the backing to develop and put Babylon 5 on TV. Well, there you have it. You
have two TV series based on the same idea and no one is suing anybody. Also, we
have two unique and individual series.
It is the same with Robert Diablo. I took the Soskas idea
and developed it. I added a lot to it. In Bob the morose was not the heir to a
billion dollar business. Also the morose character wasn’t being held in jail
having been accused of a murder. Also, and more importantly my story is told
from the perspective of the psychiatrist the family lawyer hires to evaluate
the morose character and prove his friend Robert is a figment of his
imagination. My story is only on the most basic level like the Soskas’ Bob and
that’s it. I breathed life into it. I gave it substance.
And, to make a long explanation short (right) another thing
that blows away the haters is that Robert Diablo is a book, not a screenplay.
If eventually it does it won’t matter either because it will be a screenplay
based on the story I developed, not the Soskas.
So, there you have it. This is the real truth that Eric Hyde
didn’t want put out, but now it is.
It is the same with my work on the treatments for Star Trek
II and III. The treatments don’t really matter. They are the beginning. It is
the finished script and who writes that that matters. But Eric and the haters
want to make mountains out of mole hills. No one really cares, except them so
they can paint me in a negative light. Don’t believe the bullshit. These people
lie so much they wouldn’t know the truth if it fell on them like a tone of
bricks. Enough said on this….
