Canadian Journalist Uncomfortable With How Closely Apatow Blockbuster Mirrors Own Knocking-Up
All too often in Hollywood, the price of success is finding oneself named on a lawsuit by an aggrieved individual who feels that his or her own hard work on a story about, say, the dehumanizing effects of suburban Christmas-lighting competitions or about the so-deep-undercover-we-don't-know-which-way-is-up adventures of whitefaced African-American FBI agents has been unfairly appropriated by a studio hellbent on enriching themselves with ill-gotten material. According to a CBC report, Knocked Up's Judd Apatow could soon find himself sued by a Canadian journalist who feels that her personal tale of an unplanned pregnancy (detailed in the book Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-be—a match!) was too closely mimicked by Seth Rogen's wacky, yet human-condition-illuminating, insemination of Katherine Heigl:
[Rebecca] Eckler said if the similarities ended there, she could let the matter go — but they continue, right down to the religion of the father (Jewish) and the career choice of the film's main character, Alison.
"Both my book and the movie feature one night of passion and the nine months that follow. Fine. Whatever," she wrote.
"But what got me was the fact that 'Alison' was an up-and-coming television reporter; in my book, I was an up-and-coming newspaper reporter."
Eckler admitted that it's difficult to prove that any other woman who became pregnant by accident wouldn't go through the same things she did in her book, but she said she feels she must speak up.
Historically, such claims prove difficult—if not impossible—to prove, and Eckler will probably just have to live with the possibility that she and Heigl's character merely experienced parallel knocking-up experiences. Perhaps she'll feel better after wading through all 15,000* words of last weekend's NY Times Magazine story on the movie, in which at least the scene where star/executive producer Rogen, surrounded by his real-life-buddy castmates, smokes a joint while wearing a fishbowl on his head is accounted for.
[*Not an accurate count.]
