The first motion picture appearances of Bing Crosby and Betty Boop, the first film from future Universal monsters director James Whale and silent comic Buster Keaton’s first speaking role, as well as the first appearances of literary sleuths Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple are all entering the public domain today.
January 1 always notes the date that numerous works of art, specifically, any work that was published 96 years ago, in this case 1930 – be it literature, music or film – will become part of the public domain as their copyright protection expires under United States law.
In terms of landmark films, Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the third film to win the Best Picture at the Academy Awards, Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel and Marlene Dietrich’s Hollywood debut, Morocco, directed by Josef von Sternberg all entered the public domain today. The Fleischer Studios cartoons Dizzy Dishes and Hot Dog, featuring the debuts of Betty Boop and Bimbo respectively, have also entered into the public domain today.
Joining them will be the Marx Brothers second film, Animal Crackers, Howard Hughes’ aviation epic Hell’s Angles, the comedy Soup to Nuts, featuring an early iteration of what would become the Three Stooges, and Journey’s End, the directorial debut of James Whale, who would go on to direct the classic Frankenstein for Universal just a few years later.
Many of the greats of Hollywood’s Golden Age also got their starts in films entering the public domain today including Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart in director John Ford’s Up The River and King Of Jazz, the first film appearance of singer Bing Crosby.
As the late 1920s and early ’30s saw the motion picture industry transition from silents film to talkies, a number of films important films from that era enter the public domain today including Lon Chaney’s only speaking role in Jack Conway’s The Unholy Three, Buster Keaton in Free And Easy and Greta Garbo’s in Anna Christie.
But films aren’t the only works of art from 1930 having their copyright protection ending today. All the short stories, novellas, novels and plays that were published in 1929 are now available to filmmakers to adapt freely. That would include such titles as William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying, Agatha Christie’s first Miss Marple novel The Murder at the Vicarage, the first Nancy Drew mystery story The Secret of the Old Clock, John Dickson Carr’s first detective novel It Walks By Night, the original serialized version of Max Brand’s classic western novel Destry Rides Again.
The practicality of allowing copyrighted works to expire is that it frees the works up to used in by new generations of creators and artists in new and various ways. It was intended by the Founding Fathers to move a work from benefiting just its creators and their heirs to benefiting a new generation of artists and academics.
Now there is a potential for trouble that comes with using now public domain works if one forgets to factor in the uniqueness of the iteration of the public domain character. Certain characteristics attributable to a specific public domain character, but which were added later in successive works, may still fall under copyright. For example, while the character of Popeye entered into the public domain last January 1 – thanks to his first appearing in the January 17, 1929 installment of the newspaper comic strip Thimble Theatre – he didn’t acquire his iconic love for spinach until June 1931. Meaning that for the next year, anyone who uses Popeye in a new manner has to do so in a way that does not see him resorting to his leafy power boost.
This is similar to a situation that exists for any filmmaker wanting to adapt L Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz books. All of the original series of children’s books that Baum wrote have been in the public domain for several years, with his last, Glinda Of Oz, published in 1920, entering in 1996. They can adapt the stories as freely as they want; however, they can not incorporate certain elements that are specific to other versions of the story such as the classic 1939 MGM film The Wizard Of Oz. Elements unique to that version would include Dorothy’s blue and white check dress and the magical ruby slippers. The magical footwear was silver in the book, with MGM changing them to ruby-encrusted because the red would look better in Technicolor. For Disney’s 1985 film Return To Oz, the studio reportedly paid a hefty sum to MGM in order to use ruby slippers instead of the more book accurate silver ones, such was the public’s perception of how the slippers were supposed to look.
But Wicked, from Gregory Maguire’s original novel through to its Broadway musical adaptation and its subsequent film version, chose to stay with Baum’s original silver slippers. The legal ability to copyright certain presentations based off of public domain source material looks to have its origins in a 2011 court case involving the MGM Wizard Of Oz film. If there are no future revisions to the US copyright law, MGM’s version of The Wizard Of Oz will go into the public domain at the start of 2035, in which case those elements unique to the film like the ruby slippers will become fair game.
Copyright expiration is an important part of the life cycle of culture. There are many forgotten works that online resources like The Guttenberg Project, Google Books or the Internet Archives will be able to make available to everyone free of charge as this new year begins. How will scholars and those who create online use this new material? Who can say, but it should be interesting to find out.
