the sources "The Terminator" 1984 borrowed from

After making a thread on the sources Ridley Scott borrowed from for Alien (1979) I was thinking about The Terminator. Let's discuss James Cameron's first film and it's story inspiration origins.

Wikipedia on The Terminator states

I came across a little more detail:

source

Eventually all was decided in court and Cameron added Ellison's name to the credits of the movie

Please keep your Harlan Ellison opinions out of this thread.
Okay so let's discuss the TV & literature that Cameron was inspired by/borrowed from.

I haven't seen either episode from The Outer Limits but yes it's pretty obvious Cameron borrowed some ideas. What do you guys think?

 

Cameron explicitly stated that he "ripped off a couple of Harlan Ellison stories," so I don't know that there is really much up for debate on that point.

 

As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun.

 

Westworld.

 

Which is why at La Tene, in France, there are cave paintings of robotic supersoldiers sent back in time to kill people.

...or you know maybe stories do change and some people do have copyright over their ideas.

 

Found this on Wikipedia:

Many mainstream media outlets report that Demon with a Glass Hand was the basis of a settlement that Ellison received after it was allegedly plagiarized for The Terminator. These claims were disputed by the argument that the claim and subsequent settlement were exclusively premised upon the argument that the opening moments of The Terminator had plagiarized the other Ellison script produced by The Outer Limits, "Soldier". Harlan Ellison himself clarified this in a 2001 exchange with a fan at his website: "'Terminator' was not stolen from 'Demon with a Glass Hand,' it was a ripoff of my OTHER Outer Limits script, 'Soldier.'")[3] According to The Los Angeles Times, the parties settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount, and an acknowledgement of Ellison's work in the credits of Terminator.[4]

 

Impossible for this thread to exist without debate of Harlan Ellison. I have a fairly low opinion of both Ellison and Cameron, but the only "proof" that Cameron was stupid enough to say "I basically ripped off a couple of Outer Limits episodes" is the testimony of Ellison's friends.

 

No.

And that is why Cameron paid, and credited, Harlan Ellison.

Bingo.

This stupid argument is kept alive only by people who for some reason refuse to acknowledge what was so blindingly obvious from a legal POV that a substantial settlement was agreed to on the condition - imposed by the defendants - that no one discuss its terms.

An agreement that Ellison held to, BTW, until Cameron did not - though Cameron was somewhat misled (perhaps inadvertently) by a reporter who contacted him and suggested that he was also talking to Ellison.

 

Also an interview Cameron gave to Starlog magazine which either he or Gale Anne Hurd (or both) had edited to remove an incriminating remark similar to the above.

Cameron was his own worst enemy, by talking about the inspiration for the story in public, by not crediting Ellison since he acknowledged that inspiration (which is all Ellison initially would have wanted), and by either Cameron or Hurd or both trying to cover up the quote in Starlog after the fact because they knew it could result in a lawsuit.

 

^Thus the testimony of Ellison's friends. I really don't buy the whole "I had no suspicions until I got a phone call," story because he also said that he was suspicious because he wasn't invited to the premiere.

 

What? You said there was no evidence in favor of Ellison except for the testimony of Ellison's friends, by which I assume you mean Tracy Torme being allegedly told by Cameron that he borrowed from two of Ellison's Outer Limits stories. I then showed you two descriptions from James Cameron-friendly websites of a completely different piece of actual hard evidence, not from one of Ellison's friends, but from an original unedited article in Starlog that Cameron and Hurd asked to be edited after the fact, and you act like that's no different from a friend of his relaying something he overheard. It was apparently a damning enough piece of evidence for the production company to settle.

I like both Ellison's and Cameron's work, so I don't have a dog in this fight, but if Cameron openly admitted to people and a magazine that he borrowed elements of Ellison's stories to make Terminator, then the bottom line is that he owed the guy a story credit. And after failing to give credit (which is all Ellison initially says he wanted) and trying to cover it up, thus escalating things, he owed him compensation. If Cameron had said nothing about borrowing from Ellison, he probably could have won any legal challenge since the similarities are relatively few and fairly broad in scope and one could reasonably conclude that two writers could arrive at the same rough idea independently. But he shot himself in the foot.

 

And the whole "robot infiltrator in war with post-holocaust humans, in human vs machines war" thing owes far more to PKD's story "Second Variety". But Dick was dead before Terminator went into production...

 

This was my first thought on seeing the thread title. Terminator could only have been made better by Arnie running about with a teady bear.

 

Second Variety was itself filmed as Screamers, with Peter Weller. But my favourite reference to it is in The Living Daylights...

 

IIRC (I've only seen it the once on late night ITV) Screamers suffers from being so desperate not to seem a Terminator knock off despite the source material pre-dating it the film jumps through all sorts of slightly odd hoops that lose a lot of what makes the story fun (lets set it on another planet!). Despite not being robots I think the ending of the first Robert Patrick New Outer Limits episode owes a tad to the end of the short story as well.

Was The Living Daylights reference intentional? It's always made me think of the story (I read it at a very young age so even though a lot of the ideas in it had been done to death even by that point elsewhere it got me at just the right time to be genuinely surprising and has always been a favourite) I just assumed it was a coincidence.

 

Westworld.

 

It's way too specific to be coincidental, IMO

 

l see Frank Herbert's Dune series in everything, from Terminator to Star Wars, The Matrix, etc. As far as l know Herbert was the first to pit man vs. machine, though the six Dune novels take place well after this war (The Butlerian Jihad).

 

Harry Harrison's War With The Robots anthology predates Dune by three years, and the stories in it predate Dune by up to nine years...

And there are older ones than that, mainly non-English stories, though.

 

Gonna have to read some Harrison. l love Soylent Green (the movie).