‘Tis the season to smear. You can always expect smear campaigns to arise every Oscar season, after all the nasty feuding for awards love is nothing new in Hollywood. “Saving Private Ryan” dealt with it in 1998 when it was accused of erasing British presence in the opening D-Day combat, there was the complete scrub of homosexuality in “A Beautiful Mind,” “Slumdog Millionaire” severely underpaying its Indian child actors, “Zero Dark Thirty,” supposedly, promoting torture and how can we forget last year’s “La La Land,” which was accused of not being an authentic enough portrayal of Jazz oh, and for being “too-white.” You understand the gist of it, smear campaigns are Hollywood traditions that date back many years. People will find something to nitpick about and hate on, especially if you’re the front runner.
With all that being said, this year is surely no exception. Not many big studio films have had to deal with the amount of accusations Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” has had these last few months. It all started with students from the Netherlands Film Academy claiming that the premise of their short film “The Space Between Us,” was ripped off by del Toro. Both films were about women falling for fish men at a laboratory. Meanwhile director Jean-Pierre Jeunet called plagiarism when he pointed out similarities between a dance scene in his 1991 classic “Delicatessen” which took place in a sofa but slowly delved into musically moving body rhythms. And now a third accusation. Late playwright Paul Zindel’s representatives have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in which they claim del Toro lifted elements from Zindel's play "Let Me Hear Your Whisper," which dealt with a woman falling for a dolphin a top-secret laboratory. Fox Searchlight immediately fired back in a statement saying: “Guillermo del Toro has never read nor seen Mr Zindel’s play in any form.”
Del Toro’s romantic fantasy is nominated for 13 Oscars and currently the front-runner to win Best Picture come March 4th, so it is not surprising that these attacks are occurring precisely at this moment in time. However, given the fact that they all have to do with plagiarism, it must be quite disheartening for del Toro whose film does deal with familiar cinematic tropes but still feels like something we've never seen before. It's a testament to his filmmaking talent that he managed to bring freshness to a story as old as time. We all know there can only be so many creative plots to go around in storytelling, which would explain why a fairy tale such as "The Shape of Water" is being attacked for stealing ideas. The film feels familiar but, at the same time, incredible original and fresh. Suffice to say, different people having the same idea is not necessarily a rare occurrence in TV's, movies and books. Hell, even in music there are only so many chord progressions you can come up with.