Westwood One Columnist Lisa R Confirmed Plagiarizing From ScreenAnarchy, Film School Rejects, Identity Theory, The Islington Gazette, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, Fangoria And Many, Many Mo
Any employers of a film columnist who goes by Lisa R (LisaLR1 on Twitter), be warned. She may very well be selling you things that do not actually belong to her. She certainly did with a recent column she turned in to Westwood One America which she plagiarized directly from the pages of ScreenAnarchy.
Here's how Lisa describes herself on her blog:
Selections from a weekly film column I publish for Westwood One America (the largest producers and distributors of entertainment TV, radio and print media in the USA). These include: Interviews with actors, directors, writers, producers, film reviews, and events within the film industry. I am also currently the Co-Owner of the 3-person team of WDK Film Productions, Inc. (we produce Independant Films and Documentaries). *{For over 10 yrs., Lisa's articles for Westwood One have appeared, been used or featured in such publications as: EW (Entertainment Weekly), Total Film, Premiere, Film Review, Cinescape, MovieMaker Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Dark Horizons and FilmInk; TV programs including: Access Hollywood, E! Entertainment News, ReelzChannel Spotlight and ReelzChannel Hollywood Dailies, Good Day NY, Good Day L.A., Channel Nine AU; Radio programs including: The Billy Bush Show, BET Radio Network, CBS Radio News, and the BBC Radio 1 Network}.
Good for you, Lisa! You're keeping busy! Too bad you're not actually writing the stuff you're selling. What do I base this on? Here's an excerpt from an interview supposedly conducted by Lisa with David Michôd at Sundance for Westwood One and subsequently republished by Lisa on her blog as her own work on January 26th, 2010:
And now here's an excerpt from an interview actually conducted with David Michôd by our own Simon de Bruyn and published here on Twitch December 8th, 2009:Director David Michôd (Crossbow, Netherland Dwarf), the man with the most famous circumflex in Australian filmmaking, finds himself back in the headlines with the debut of his two new feature films, Animal Kingdom and Hesher, both up for competition this week at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
Both Michôd feature directorial debuts, Animal Kingdom, a gangland film set in the Melbourne, Australia criminal underworld (Guy Pearce, Joel Edgerton), and Hesher, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt-starring independent U.S. feature he co-wrote with director Spencer Susser (Roughing up the Witness), screened this week at Sundance.
The man with the most famous circumflex in Australian filmmaking - and the bane of sub-editors everywhere - David Michôd, bounced back into headlines again last week with the news that not one - but two - of his feature films have been accepted into Official Competition at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.Yes, that's right - both Michôd's feature directorial debut Animal Kingdom, a gangland movie set in the Melbourne criminal underworld, and Hesher, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt-starring independent US feature he co-wrote with director Spencer Susser, will screen at the Park City alpine festival in January.
Sound familiar? And it just continues on from there, Lisa clearly just copying and pasting de Bruyn's work while changing a word or two here and there to make it harder to catch via Google.
To be clear: ScreenAnarchy is happy to have people cite and republish our work, provided people ask permission first and correctly credit the source. But to simply copy our work, label it your own and then sell it to someone else is clear copyright infringement and outright theft. Editors: do not hire this woman. If you're going to pay someone, pay someone who will actually do the work they have been hired to do.
UPDATE:
My thanks to reader RQ Dale for the following. Below are two complete emails just sent in detailing widespread plagiarism by Lisa R. with links included to compare the pieces she claims as her own with the sources she took them from.
Hey, FolksatTwitch.
Longtime reader -- ScreenAnarchy is always among my first online stops every day. You're fighting the good fight, with original specific content one can't find anywhere else. That's why it probably stings a whole hell of a lot more when someone decides to abscond with that information and pass it off as their own.
Anyway, on the matter of one 'Lisa R.' -- she apparently doesn't realise that her computer, which she clearly uses to source all of "her" reviews, isn't the only computer in the world with access to Google.
I suspect she's an amateur, too. As a writer myself, one who's always wary of just this sort of nonsense, that's the only way I can rationalise this kind of wholesale theivery -- every single "article" I looked at on her blog is taken from somewhere else.
EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.
I had a half-hour to kill and came up with these:
Her review of Almodovar's Broken Embraces http://tinyurl.com/yflyx3o is lifted from the blog Identity Theory:
Her profile of European workshop Cosprop http://tinyurl.com/ylcopgu is taken from this article in the Islington Gazette:
Portions of "her" 10 best of 2009 list http://tinyurl.com/yzb95ps are taken from:
-Colin Covert\'s piece on Sin Nombre in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:
-Carrie Rickey's review of A Serious Man in The Philadelphia Inquirer http://tinyurl.com/yjawaxx
-A review of The Road from Fangoria (not sure of the author -- Fango's been down for a while)
-This 500 days of Summer review from David Wiegand on SFGate:
http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-07-17/movies/17219381_1_tom-and-summer-marc-webb-true-love
Her NINE review
is stolen from Chris Knight's review on DOSE:
Her LOVELY BONES review
is from Allan Dart's review on STARLOG:
Her AVATAR review
is from Peter Bradshaw's(!) take in The Guardian(!!!):
Her BROTHERS review
from Your Movie Stuff
Her UP IN THE AIR review
from The Celebrity Cafe
Her ANTICHRIST review
from a post on the blog Thought Shower:
And her INGLORIOUS BASTERDS review
from Kirk Honeycutt's in The Hollywood Reporter.
And those are just the ones I CHECKED.
So it's gotta be a case of someone simply trying to impress her family and friends, no? Little Girl trying to make a go of it in the cruel, cruel world of entertainment journalism. Et cetera, et. cetera. At least you'd hope so. Not that it excuses the reprehensibility of any of it, but ...
Well, there it is. I'd be surprised if she'd actually SEEN a goodly portion of these movies. In many cases, she's also stealing the original writers' assertions of having previously caught them at festivals!
Yeah, I bet you did, lady!
Browsing quickly over her Twitter feed, I found this chucklenugget:
http://twitter.com/LisaLR1/status/7084351692
where she says:
"Just saw "Nine" ... On the fence ... Needs 2 sleep on it :-/\"
Of course, she needed to sleep on it. To awake refreshed and google an opinion she could liberate to pass off as her own!
Kids these days.
Am I right, or am I right?!
Anyway, keep up the good work. Regardless of how all this plays out, I'm always glad ScreenAnarchy is around.
Yours,
-RQD.
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