Any employers of a film columnist who goes by Lisa R (LisaLR1 on Twitter), be warned. She may very well be selling you things that do not actually belong to her. She certainly did with a recent column she turned in to Westwood One America which she plagiarized directly from the pages of Twitch.
Here's how Lisa describes herself on her blog:
Selections from a weekly film column I publish for Westwood One America (the largest producers and distributors of entertainment TV, radio and print media in the USA). These include: Interviews with actors, directors, writers, producers, film reviews, and events within the film industry. I am also currently the Co-Owner of the 3-person team of WDK Film Productions, Inc. (we produce Independant Films and Documentaries). *{For over 10 yrs., Lisa's articles for Westwood One have appeared, been used or featured in such publications as: EW (Entertainment Weekly), Total Film, Premiere, Film Review, Cinescape, MovieMaker Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Dark Horizons and FilmInk; TV programs including: Access Hollywood, E! Entertainment News, ReelzChannel Spotlight and ReelzChannel Hollywood Dailies, Good Day NY, Good Day L.A., Channel Nine AU; Radio programs including: The Billy Bush Show, BET Radio Network, CBS Radio News, and the BBC Radio 1 Network}.
Good for you, Lisa! You're keeping busy! Too bad you're not actually writing the stuff you're selling. What do I base this on? Here's an excerpt from an interview supposedly conducted by Lisa with David Michôd at Sundance for Westwood One and subsequently republished by Lisa on her blog as her own work on January 26th, 2010:
And now here's an excerpt from an interview actually conducted with David Michôd by our own Simon de Bruyn and published here on Twitch December 8th, 2009:Director David Michôd (Crossbow, Netherland Dwarf), the man with the most famous circumflex in Australian filmmaking, finds himself back in the headlines with the debut of his two new feature films, Animal Kingdom and Hesher, both up for competition this week at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
Both Michôd feature directorial debuts, Animal Kingdom, a gangland film set in the Melbourne, Australia criminal underworld (Guy Pearce, Joel Edgerton), and Hesher, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt-starring independent U.S. feature he co-wrote with director Spencer Susser (Roughing up the Witness), screened this week at Sundance.
The man with the most famous circumflex in Australian filmmaking - and the bane of sub-editors everywhere - David Michôd, bounced back into headlines again last week with the news that not one - but two - of his feature films have been accepted into Official Competition at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.Yes, that's right - both Michôd's feature directorial debut Animal Kingdom, a gangland movie set in the Melbourne criminal underworld, and Hesher, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt-starring independent US feature he co-wrote with director Spencer Susser, will screen at the Park City alpine festival in January.
Sound familiar? And it just continues on from there, Lisa clearly just copying and pasting de Bruyn's work while changing a word or two here and there to make it harder to catch via Google.
To be clear: Twitch is happy to have people cite and republish our work, provided people ask permission first and correctly credit the source. But to simply copy our work, label it your own and then sell it to someone else is clear copyright infringement and outright theft. Editors: do not hire this woman. If you're going to pay someone, pay someone who will actually do the work they have been hired to do.
UPDATE:
My thanks to reader RQ Dale for the following. Below are two complete emails just sent in detailing widespread plagiarism by Lisa R. with links included to compare the pieces she claims as her own with the sources she took them from.
Hey, FolksatTwitch.
Longtime reader -- Twitch is always among my first online stops every day. You're fighting the good fight, with original specific content one can't find anywhere else. That's why it probably stings a whole hell of a lot more when someone decides to abscond with that information and pass it off as their own.
Anyway, on the matter of one 'Lisa R.' -- she apparently doesn't realise that her computer, which she clearly uses to source all of "her" reviews, isn't the only computer in the world with access to Google.
I suspect she's an amateur, too. As a writer myself, one who's always wary of just this sort of nonsense, that's the only way I can rationalise this kind of wholesale theivery -- every single "article" I looked at on her blog is taken from somewhere else.
EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.
I had a half-hour to kill and came up with these:
Her review of Almodovar's Broken Embraces http://tinyurl.com/yflyx3o is lifted from the blog Identity Theory:
Her profile of European workshop Cosprop http://tinyurl.com/ylcopgu is taken from this article in the Islington Gazette:
Portions of "her" 10 best of 2009 list http://tinyurl.com/yzb95ps are taken from:
-Colin Covert\'s piece on Sin Nombre in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:
-Carrie Rickey's review of A Serious Man in The Philadelphia Inquirer http://tinyurl.com/yjawaxx
-A review of The Road from Fangoria (not sure of the author -- Fango's been down for a while)
-This 500 days of Summer review from David Wiegand on SFGate:
http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-07-17/movies/17219381_1_tom-and-summer-marc-webb-true-love
Her NINE review
is stolen from Chris Knight's review on DOSE:
Her LOVELY BONES review
is from Allan Dart's review on STARLOG:
Her AVATAR review
is from Peter Bradshaw's(!) take in The Guardian(!!!):
Her BROTHERS review
from Your Movie Stuff
Her UP IN THE AIR review
from The Celebrity Cafe
Her ANTICHRIST review
from a post on the blog Thought Shower:
And her INGLORIOUS BASTERDS review
from Kirk Honeycutt's in The Hollywood Reporter.
And those are just the ones I CHECKED.
So it's gotta be a case of someone simply trying to impress her family and friends, no? Little Girl trying to make a go of it in the cruel, cruel world of entertainment journalism. Et cetera, et. cetera. At least you'd hope so. Not that it excuses the reprehensibility of any of it, but ...
Well, there it is. I'd be surprised if she'd actually SEEN a goodly portion of these movies. In many cases, she's also stealing the original writers' assertions of having previously caught them at festivals!
Yeah, I bet you did, lady!
Browsing quickly over her Twitter feed, I found this chucklenugget:
http://twitter.com/LisaLR1/status/7084351692
where she says:
"Just saw "Nine" ... On the fence ... Needs 2 sleep on it :-/\"
Of course, she needed to sleep on it. To awake refreshed and google an opinion she could liberate to pass off as her own!
Kids these days.
Am I right, or am I right?!
Anyway, keep up the good work. Regardless of how all this plays out, I'm always glad Twitch is around.
Yours,
-RQD.
What a See You Next Tuesday...this "journalist" should be strung up by her heels.
Bitch.
had the same thing happen on my old site, High Impact, back when I ran it. Found out a site called ShawScope had lifted stuff from my old site and I had major support from people...eventually the site itself shut down if I remember right. So I know how you feel...it stinks when people don't care...at least eventually we bust them :)
The amazing thing about this is that she presents herself as a professional, serious writer. I kind of expect it from hobbyists and things - that happens all the time and I don't make a big deal of it when it does - but this is someone who claims to be a professional. Wonder how she'd feel if we just started copying and pasting her reviews and presenting them as our own. Which we won't, but still.
Though, of course, on the professionalism front, I know one of the people she claims to have written for decently well and he says he's never heard of her.
Here's another one she ripped off. Can probably google any random sentence from all of her articles and find the originals.
fake: http://lisarweeklyfilmcolumn.blogspot.com/2010/01/film-review-imaginarium-of-doctor.html
original: http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/reviews/fantastic-fest-review-the-imaginarium-of-doctor-parnassus-bjsal.php
Honestly, in this day and age, to expect that you will not get caught for journalistic plagiarism is 10,000 degrees of stupid.
If someone more Twitter savvy than I would like to get this out that way, she's LisaLR1 there.
"Wonder how she'd feel if we just started copying and pasting her reviews and presenting them as our own. Which we won't, but still."
Of course if anyone did so it would probably be a type of second order plagarism, copying and pasting an article that she had copied and pasted from another source.
Here's more bullshit -
From her blog:
"I am also currently the Co-Owner of the 3-person team of WDK Film Productions, Inc. (we produce Independant Films and Documentaries)"
Then, I go to the site -
http://www.wdkfilms.com/who_we_are.htm
See her? I sure as fuck don't.
WHO IS THIS WHACK JOB?
Not to be leading a lynch mob but, it might be a good idea to find a picture of this woman (I dont believe its her on her blog) if possible so she cant just kind of wait it out and start anew with another name.
i'd love to see her thoroughly embarrassed.
I like that she considers herself "an all round team player" on her Twitter bio! Spreading the word via Twitter.
Do we actually know that she actually provides content for Westwood One as she claims? So far all I've been able to find is her blog and Twitter account (although "Lisa R." isn't a whole lot to go on). That image header on her blog bugs me - it looks very stretched pixelly and isn't even their correct tag line. In fact, it looks like someone with rudimentary Photoshop skills may have excised the word "audio" from it.
Republishing some else's work like this is never acceptable, but maybe it's just someone who has delusions of grandeur rather than someone who is actually making money off of the ideas and words of others.
I agree with brianruh, I doubt she actually has anything to do with Westwood One in the first place. Seems to be a pathological liar. Ah the internet, full of "interesting" people.
As the actual writer of that Imanginarium review, I just want to say thank you Todd and everybody at Twitch for bringing this shameless hack to everyone's attention, including my own. I'm also a writer for Horror Squad so I know your site well. I've only been a "professional" writer for a short time, but I always try to be overly above board about everything and to have somebody rip me off and possibly be getting paid for it is sickening. You guys have demonstrated a committment to professionalism and I applaud you. Thanks sincerely.
I might very well feel differently if I ever discovered her plagiarizing one of my own articles, but as this story has developed over the past couple days, I found myself moving from anger towards this woman for trying to get away with that kind of theft, to actually feeling kind of sorry for whoever this person is, because now her theft is SO widespread and outrageous, that it seems kind of pathological and disturbed more than merely lazy and dishonest (don't get me wrong: the inexcusable end result is still the same). I don't know how this person thought that she could get away with stealing material from such a large array of major media outlets, and apparently lying on her resume to boot, but for her to take it this far shows that she's clearly pretty delusional. And I don't think her primary motivation is financial here (for one thing, if she was making a decent living out of all of this, she would be more well-known and this would have all come out before now), so it's clearly something more...unbalanced. But anyway, good for you for catching this and shining some light on it.
I honestly wonder if she has even seen the majority of these films. It wouldn't surprise me if she hasn't see any of them.
Like @TravisCrawford points out, it seems like her plagiarism might be less about seeing the movies and more about a compulsion to collect reviews as her own.
Take a look at the question asked to Yahoo Answers six months ago by a user calling themselves 'Lisa R':
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090807160216AAU8Yzg
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so shameful.
I just compared some of the reviews in the update. Wow. What an utter bitch. With such a complete lack of shame in her fibre, she should have gone for a career in porn instead of ripping off other people's work. That, at least, is HONEST work.
Looks like the attention has had the desired effect - her blog is down, presumeably pulled by LisaR herself...