I personally dig Kevin's work and I've always thought of him as a pretty resonable fellow. I think he was pretty upset that Tim Burton said "...I especially wouldn't read anything that was created by Kevin Smith." Also I like how Tim contradicts himself when he says he doesn't read comics even though he worked on Batman 1 & 2, the new Superman, and Monkey Bone which is about a comic book character.

Oh well, judge lest not you be judged (I don't know if that's a real quote, but it sounds pretty good).

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Kyle Abel
General Manager
Plano Movies 10

My father is a writer and has a few military novels to his credit. One novel, "Marine Sniper", a non-fiction biography about legendary marksman Carlos Hathcock, has had parts of it ripped off by several movies. The films "Sniper" and "Saving Private Ryan" both lift an action element where the good guy sniper shoots the bad guy in the eye through his rifle scope. The sad thing is neither movie could lift the action point correctly. They just turn it into a piece of macho bullshit.

Hathcock did this for real against a very formidable NVA sniper in Vietnam. The enemy sniper had shot several Marines in Hathcock's Hill 55 post, one of those killed was a senior officer. Hathcock and his spotter, Burke, played cat and mouse in the woods with this sniper for three days. And it was only by accident that Hathcock killed this bad guy. Burke saw a flickering object down in a shrubed up ravine. Hathcock took a shot at the reflecting piece of light. Boom, and the enemy sniper was suddenly down there dead on his back. The two Marines crept down there and found the guy with a bullet wound to the eye. Burke picked up the dead NVA sniper's rifle, noticing glass fragments falling out of the scope. "What's the only way you can make a shot like this," Hathcock asked. Both guys got scared shitless when they realized the NVA Sniper had been aiming dead on at them. Hathcock said, "the only difference between him and me was I got on the trigger first."

If the sun hadn't reflected off that enemy sniper's scope glass in the right way, Hathcock would likely have been killed right there. Not only that, there would have been no "Marine Sniper" novel. The scout-sniper school in Quantico, VA would never have been established. And you probably would not have had the scene in "Saving Private Ryan" where Barry Pepper shoots the German sniper through his rifle scope up in that bell tower.

My father thought about suing Sony Pictures when "Sniper" had been made. The producers of that film approached him about making a Marine Sniper movie back in 1988, but nothing came of it. Then the movie got released with some striking similarities to "Marine Sniper". The incident soured the friendship my father had with military-technical-adviser-to-the-stars, Dale Dye (a former public affairs officer in the Marines just like my father). The thought of filing suit was tempting since my father had already sucessfully sued the publisher of the original hardcover for all rights due to Stein and Day having a policy of not paying their authors. But Sony (and all other movies studios) is a different animal. You can take 10 or 20 years trying to get your pound of flesh from that studio for that one copyright infringement. But you have to consider just how many bridges you will burn with your efforts, not to mention how much money you will lose by pursuing something on a matter of principal.