R.E.M. vs. Improv Everywhere = Copyfight Nonsense

By Scott Thill

A bloggy brouhaha erupted Tuesday after R.E.M. posted a video called "The Big Still" that some called a rip-off of a famous Improv Everywhere stunt.

The band quickly removed the clip from its site and apologized for what Laughing Squid called a "blatant rip-off" of the improv troupe's "Frozen Grand Central" stunt from January, in which hundreds of participants suddenly stood stock-still in the New York station, drawing shocked and amused responses from passersby (see video, right).

Geek Gestalt quickly followed up with a post watering down the language -- calling the R.E.M. video a "take-off" (and confusing R.E.M.'s video "Supernatural Superserious" with "The Big Still" by calling it "Everybody here comes from somewhere").

To confuse matters further, Gestalt quoted Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd as saying R.E.M. "edited the YouTube description to give us credit, which is enough to satisfy me." Which would be cool, except that Todd complained on Improv Everywhere's site: "It's sort of shocking to see this video which gives absolutely no credit to us and presents the concept of 'getting a mob of people to freeze in place in a public area' as their own original idea."

Got all that?

Here's the problem: It has been done before, differently and similarly, which is to say that the frozen-in-time routine is hardly an "original idea." As James7777777 commented on Geek Gestalt, the U.K. spoof Just for Laughs pulled the same trick almost a decade earlier, albeit in a convenience store rather than Grand Central Station.

And if it's Grand Central Station crowd high jinks you're looking for, check out this poignant scene from Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (right), which employed both extras and passengers in the New York station to waltz around lovestruck Robin Williams and Amanda Plummer for a memorable sequence way back in 1991.

In other words, R.E.M. bit Improv Everywhere's riff for sure. The band is currently redesigning the video to give the troupe credit, which is nice. But did R.E.M. rip off Improv Everywhere's so-called original idea? Hardly.

Which begs the question: What exactly is a rip-off, and what exactly is inspiration (or, as one of my profs used to say, interextuality)? There's hardly a purely original idea out there, especially within the oft-poached realms of art and entertainment. Even Shakespeare, as critic Harold Bloom once noted, was as good a borrower as he was a poet. This is an argument that goes back for centuries, so if I was Laughing Squid and Improv Everywhere, I'd chill on the copyfight terminology. (And if I was Geek Gestalt, I'd get the name of the video right.)