The Black Informant

The Ma-Tricks

If you been around the Internet as much as I have, you should have heard of the story of a young black woman who claims that the successful movie series The Matrix was actually an idea stolen from her book entitled “The Third Eye“.

Like most stories like this that come my way, instead of jumping on the emotional bandwagon that always makes the assumption that all big white owned companies are evil, I still try to take into account that I am only hearing one side of the story. Call me what you will, but personal experience has showed me what happens when this type of assumption is made.

The article below gives us the rest of the story:

Not long after that, her story began to take a strange turn. Stewart produced and circulated a news release, trying to rally support for her copyright case by recounting her claims and request for damages. The mainstream media response was tepid, at best. However, one newspaper did find her story quite interesting.

On Oct. 28, the Salt Lake Community College’s Globe ran an article on its website with the audacious headline ” ‘Mother of the Matrix’ Victorious.” Written by a second-year communications student, the article was among the first on the Web to reveal aspects of Stewart’s story. Unfortunately, it also was rife with errors, stating among other things that Stewart had won her case (she hadn’t) and that she was about to receive one of the biggest payoffs in Hollywood history (she wasn’t). The story also questioned why the case had received no media coverage, and quoted Stewart’s claim on a website that Warner Bros. had been suppressing coverage of her case for years because AOL Time Warner “owns 95 percent of the media … They are not going to report on themselves.” Among the publications and businesses she claimed the company owned: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek magazine and DreamWorks. In fact, AOL Time Warner doesn’t own any of them.

It didn’t take long for some mistakes to get the attention of Quentin Wells, the manager of the SLCC Student Media Center, which produces the Globe. “My son, who is a copyright attorney, read the article and said, ‘This can’t be right,’ ” Wells says. After approaching Stewart and checking the information in the piece, Wells discovered that Stewart’s supposed “victory” was nothing more than a successful defense against an early motion to have her case dismissed. “It was an error [by] the writer,” says Wells. “She had misinterpreted what Stewart had said.” (more…)

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Hey, maybe Time Warner did rig all the court cases to rule in their favor. Maybe the Wachowskis (the brothers who “wrote” The Matrix” secretly devised a plan to steal her ideas for profit (it wouldn’t be the first time that something like that has happened in Hollywood)–who really knows? One thing is for certain, most of us don’t know.

There was also another writer, Art Buchwald (Caucasian) who also made the claim that his idea was stolen by the Hollywood machine. The title of his book–King For A Day. The name of the movie–Coming to America. Yet when news of this reached our ‘hood, we quickly dismissed it as an example of how whites don’t like to see us succeed in Hollywood.

The lesson: Assumption ain’t truth.