Andrew Hearst at the invaluable Panopticist recalls one of the lesser-known Hollywood scandals of the 1980s, the aspiring screenwriter Joseph Minion mining Joe Frank's radio monologue Lies for a script that would become the 1985 Martin Scorsese movie After Hours. Frank, a God in the highly specialized field of contemporary radio drama and performance art, wrote Lies back in 1982, one of eighteen original works he created for NPR Playhouse in the early 1990s. In the opening section of the monologue, which you can listen to at Hearst's site, the hero describes visiting a diner and meeting a woman who seems to flirt with him and mentions that her roommate is a sculptor who's looking to sell some of her work as paperweights. The hero goes home, starts thinking about the woman, calls her and receives an invitation to come over, and takes a cab to her building. In the course of the cab ride, he loses the only money he has on him when the bill goes flying out the window. When he finally arrives, he discovers that the woman's roommate is a sultry type who "sleeps around" and that the two of them live in a space filled with "leaden art droppings." Alone in the bedroom, the hero observes that the woman seems unstable and possibly nuts, and that "she seemed interested and indifferent at the same time;" eventually she tells him that she's still trying to come to term with having been raped. All these details turn up transposed in the first half hour of After Hours, along with other small, strange bits that may have been indirectly influenced by Lies. (In the movie, the woman, played by Rosanna Arquette, introduces herself to the hero--Griffin Dunne--by reciting a passage from the Henry Miller paperback he's reading; in Lies, the woman tells the hero that he "sounds like someone in a paperback book.") There's also a brief appearance by Larry Block, an actor known for his association with Joe Frank, as the cab driver. This is such a weird coincidence that Andrew Hearst is moved to speculate that it might have been part of a payoff to Frank, but in his own comments on the affair, Frank says that he didn't know Block at the time and was unaware that he'd been ripped off until someone told him that he ought to see the movie. It was just one of those fluky things.
The After Hours screenplay, which also includes a scene built around dialogue lifted from Kafka's "Before the Law"--a steal obvious enough that anyone who noticed it probably assumed it was a deliberate homage--was written by Minion when he was a kid in Columbia's Graduate Film Writing Program. (He was twenty-eight when the movie got made.) Whatever he was thinking when he wrote it, he probably didn't guess that a production team that included Dunne and Amy Robinson (who played Harvey Keitel's girlfriend in Mean Streets would get the script to Scorsese, and that Scorsese would latch onto it when he was looking for a small project he could make fast and on the cheap after his plans to film The Last Temptation of Christ with Robert De Niro collapsed. In a 2000 profile in Salon, Frank declined to name the "Hollywood film" whose producers had "paid him handsomely" for the theft of his material. In discussing the matter in the relative safety of his own web site, Frank took a pretty conciliatory tone towards Minion, pointing out that he took the story in a different direction after using Frank's monologue to achieve liftoff. The film industry may be less forgiving about the whole thing; Minion hasn't been drummed out of the business, but after achieving some whiz-kid renown on the basis of After Hours, his career failed to catch fire. His best-known screenplay credit since then was for the Nicolas Cage picture Vampire's Kiss; he also wrote the Scorses-directed episode of the TV series Amazing Stories and directed a couple of pictures, Daddy's Boys and Trafficking, neither of which got a theatrical release. Maybe he should spend a few weekends taking notes while listening to Car Talk.