Falling and Nightcrawler

Last week, the Utah-based independent filmmaker Richard Dutcher filed a lawsuit against the makers of the movie Nightcrawler saying, in essence that it was a rip-off of Dutcher’s own movie, Falling which came out in 2008. When I read this news online, I was immediately intrigued. Of course, lawsuits and accusations of plagiarism are as common in Hollywood as an actor waiting tables. But this particular case is unique for me. I wrote my dissertation about Richard Dutcher and his films, including an entire chapter devoted to Falling. I’ve watched it dozens of times and feel like I know it as well as I know any film I’ve ever seen. If Falling is being plagiarized, I figured I had to investigate. 

 Falling is the story of Eric Boyle, a lapsed Mormon living in Los Angeles trying to make it as a filmmaker with his aspiring actress wife, Davey. To pay the bills, Boyle works as a stringer – a cameraman who trolls the streets of La La Land filming car crashes, house fires, suicides, and homicides. He then sells the footage to local news broadcasts. The bloodier and more dramatic the footage, the more he gets paid. Spending all night filming tragedy and all day getting told his screenplays aren’t violent enough takes its toll on Eric and we see him fraying at the edges even as the film begins. Things really go south for him when he stumbles upon and films gang members killing a man. Boyle makes big bucks selling the footage, but then the killers, unhappy with the publicity, slowly and methodically track him down, brutally attacking everyone in their way. The film ends with an excruciatingly visceral face-off between Boyle and the men he filmed.

Nightcrawler came out last fall and was written and directed by Dan Gilroy. It stars Jake Gyllenhall as Louis Bloom, a sociopathic small-time thief who becomes a stringer. He spends his nights listening to police scanners and filming accidents, fires, and homicides, but unlike Boyle, Bloom crosses the line and begins altering crime scenes in order to get better footage. He does literally whatever it takes to get the best, bloodiest, most dramatic shots possible, even when it means invading crime scenes, breaking and entering, or in some cases actually causing things to happen so he can be on hand to film them. Things begin to go south for Louis when he stumbles across a murder in progress and films it. The climax of the movie is an intense confrontation with the murderers.

Despite the obvious similarities, Falling and Nightcrawler are not the same. Falling is a spiritual film in the tradition of Robert Bresson. It’s bleak and unforgiving. It attacks its viewers with Old Testament vengeance. It is a film of spiritual, emotional, and physical consequences for both its characters and its viewers. It is about the loss of one man’s soul.

Nightcrawler is a glossed-up commentary on the American dream. It suggests that as long as you are a successful self-made man, it doesn’t matter what sort of man you’ve made yourself into. Louis Bloom stands in for every successful politician, media figure, or power player who was willing to step on the necks of those around them to achieve a goal. Unlike Eric Boyle, Louis Bloom has no soul to lose. And despite the high body count in the film, there’s no sense of real consequences anywhere.

So the films are not the same, but that’s not what the lawsuit alleges. It claims that Nightcrawler is a derivative work which means it takes obvious, identifiable elements of an already existing work and uses them without permission. While Nightcrawler is good movie – suspenseful, well-shot, well-acted – I doubt it would exist if Falling hadn’t existed first. The whole thing feels as though Dan Gilroy watched Falling and said, “You know what would be really cool in this movie? If the main guy was a sociopath!” Nightcrawler is essentially really well-made Falling fan fiction.

Of course, I have no idea what will come of the lawsuit. Cases like this can go on for ages, and the makers of Nightcrawler are powerful and well-funded.  But I have high hopes because, having seen both films, it seems obvious that Falling came first.