Cinematical

Yet another plagiarism scandal is screwing up a studio's movie plan. Last time, it was James Frey's largely made up "memoir" A Million Little Pieces, the film adaptation of which is being "reevaluated" (studio speak for "has been drawn and quarter with much malice, and is now rotting in the basement") by Warner Brothers, and now it's DreamWorks that has been screwed over by a writer to whom they gave a lot of money.

The writer in question is Harvard sophomore (Yes, she's disgustingly accomplished. Or least she was.) Kaavya Viswanathan who didn't copy anything, exactly, she just "read Megan McCafferty's books [so] voraciously in high school" that she "unintentionally mimicked them" in her debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, which features dozens of passage that are virtually identical to those found in McCafferty's works. (Don't you hate when that happens? While trying to write posts, I often find myself accidentally typing exact passages from Middlemarch -- it's just so hard to control these things.)

Despite that whole "it was an accident!" thing, Viswanathan's book has been pulled from stores, and DreamWorks, which has already received the first draft of the film version's screenplay, has reportedly decided to cut their loses and bury the project.