Names and faces

A federal judge in Mississippi has dismissed a lawsuit claiming that Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris improperly used one of William Faulkner’s most famous lines. Faulkner Literary Rights LLC sued Sony Pictures Classics Inc. in October in U.S. District Court in Oxford, Miss., Faulkner’s hometown. The lawsuit said a character in the movie took a line from Faulkner’s book, Requiem for a Nun. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,”Faulkner wrote in the book. In the movie, Owen Wilson’s character says: “The past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party.” U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills, himself the author of a book called Twice Told Tombigbee Tales, dismissed the lawsuit in a written ruling Thursday. “The court has viewed Woody Allen’s movie, ‘Midnight in Paris,’ read the book, ‘Requiem for a Nun,’ and is thankful that the parties did not ask the court to compare ‘The Sound and the Fury’ with ‘Sharknado,’” the judge wrote. The Sound and the Fury is a Faulkner classic. Sharknado is a recent television movie about tornadoes that fling sharks from the ocean onto land, with deadly consequences. “At issue in this case is whether a single line from a full-length novel singly paraphrased and attributed to the original author in a full-length Hollywood film can be considered a copyright infringement. In this case, it cannot,” the judge wrote.

Laura Prepon felt intimidated by her role on the new Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. But that turned out to be a good thing. “When I read it, it was so good, but I was like, ‘Wow, [the character] Alex scares me a little bit,’ which is exactly why I needed to do it and I’m so glad that I did,” she said in a recent interview. “I feel like every actress is always looking to [push the envelope] because the minute you get complacent, hang it up.”

Front Section, Pages 2 on 07/20/2013

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