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THE GUARDIAN |
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COMMENT
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Whose life
is it anyway?
A new French lawsuit has shaken television documentary makers Mark
Lawson Say it ain't so, Monsieur Lopez. Georges Lopez was the star of one of the most moving and amusing documentaries of recent years: the French film Etre et Avoir. He teaches at one of the single-teacher schools - a dozen children, aged three to 11, in one classroom - in the Auvergne. The film of a year in his life was seen by 2 million people in France and was praised by the French prime minister. In England, former education secretary Estelle Morris said that every teacher in the country should be sent a DVD. Bespectacled, grey-goateed, M Lopez seemed to represent the old values of dedication, modesty and non-careerism in teaching: Goodbye, Mr Chips; Hello, Mr French Fries. Yesterday, it was reported that the teacher is suing the producers for a fat share of the profits. His lawyers are arguing that his classroom lessons are an original intellectual creation and should have the status of a book adapted for the movies. Because viewers of Etre et Avoir tend to view Lopez as an antidote to ambition and capitalism, this news seems depressing. But the teacher may be exploring an important - and influential - area of law. Someone who wrote a book about their life would need to be paid if their story became a basis for a film. The same rule has come to apply to fictional movies - for example, the current hit Calendar Girls - for which people (in that case, the Women's Institute strippers) have sold the simple details of their life rather than published memoirs. However, documentary - in television and cinema - has traditionally used the public as fodder for either no reward or a token payment under euphemisms such as "disturbance fee". The justification would be that documentarians are reporting rather than adapting someone's life, and journalism should not be paid for. It could also be argued that, while the author of a memoir is the primary storyteller, that role is filled in films by the director. But, however traditional, this convention often feels like a kind of theft. Anyone who has been on either side of the camera during filming for a documentary knows the uncomfortable moment when the assistant with a clipboard casually asks the interviewee to sign "the release form" which authorises broadcast. A common trick is to imply that this is a minor bureaucratic irrelevance imposed by the director general or the European Union. In fact, the piece of paper permits the broadcaster to exploit your contribution for nothing in all existing media and those yet to be invented. If the Martian DVD market suddenly takes off, you'll find that you handed over those inter-planetary rights for the original fee. The cutting-room buzz is that, in recent years, interviewees have become more reluctant to sign. This partly reflects a general suspicion of officialdom, but must also come from a culture in which celebrities such as David Beckham claim and sell their "image rights". A teacher who became a celebrity in France, Georges Lopez can be seen as someone who is simply claiming for his wagging finger and chiding voice the copyright Beckham has established in his face and feet. Yet, if the Etre et Avoir case establishes a precedent, the media are in trouble. The teacher protests that the film could not have been made without him but - to play devil's attorney - neither could it have been achieved without his pupils. If the matter were under US rather than French jurisdiction, then the dozen pupils would already have joined together in one of the few literal examples of a class-action suit to claim their own share of the documentary's profits. BBC TV has just begun a series called One Life, featuring documentaries about moving human stories. (There's a Radio 4 equivalent called It's My Story.) The participants will have received some small recompense for their time, but what if the films about them win awards and sell around the world. Could they - should they - do a Lopez? With book-publishers offering buy-a-house amounts for life stories, how much longer can documentarians get away with parking-meter fees? With TV so dependent on people for material, the French case could significantly change film-making. Imagine the court case in which Mr R Perrin of Wordsworth Avenue sues for an appearance fee, arguing that Newsroom South East's award-winning report on Virgin Trains' new rolling stock could not have been completed without his unique contribution. There's no doubt that broadcasters and film-makers in the past have exploited the public. But any suggestion of an equality of effort and reward between the teller of a story and the subject of it would have dramatic consequences for culture. It's ironic that M Lopez, celebrated by lovers of the film as a representative of old-fashioned values, has become a prominent advocate of the new-fashioned ones.
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