Pseudodoxum: Big Trouble in Little China
Sep. 15th, 2003 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaBack in the longago days, Sir Thomas Browne wrote a book entitled Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a wonderful title meaning, more or less, "Widespread Misinformation" (though it has also appeared under the title "Vulgar Errors"). I find the term tremendously useful.
I've just discovered--or perhaps discovered again--that something that I have "known" for nearly 20 years has turned out to be false. It is not the case that John Carpenter's film Big Trouble in Little China began life as a screenplay for the proposed second Buckaroo Banzai film, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League.
It appears that this rumor began life via a fairly straightforward path. The screenplay for BTiLC was written by two Hollywood newcomers, Gary Goldman and David Weinstein. It was then massaged by a more senior writer, W. D. Richter. Richter was the producer of the first BB movie, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. He also wrote, with BB inventor Earl Mac Rauch, a treatment for a second BB movie, which would have featured Buckaroo and his pals fighting an ancient Chinese criminal mastermind ("Hanoi Xian").
So it's relatively easy to see why people, like me, would think that Big Trouble in Little China, which was partially written by the producer of Buckaroo Banzai and featuring plot elements vaguely similar to a rumored BB sequel, started out as an adaptation of the BB sequel. But it didn't. I was wrong.
I've just discovered--or perhaps discovered again--that something that I have "known" for nearly 20 years has turned out to be false. It is not the case that John Carpenter's film Big Trouble in Little China began life as a screenplay for the proposed second Buckaroo Banzai film, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League.
It appears that this rumor began life via a fairly straightforward path. The screenplay for BTiLC was written by two Hollywood newcomers, Gary Goldman and David Weinstein. It was then massaged by a more senior writer, W. D. Richter. Richter was the producer of the first BB movie, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. He also wrote, with BB inventor Earl Mac Rauch, a treatment for a second BB movie, which would have featured Buckaroo and his pals fighting an ancient Chinese criminal mastermind ("Hanoi Xian").
So it's relatively easy to see why people, like me, would think that Big Trouble in Little China, which was partially written by the producer of Buckaroo Banzai and featuring plot elements vaguely similar to a rumored BB sequel, started out as an adaptation of the BB sequel. But it didn't. I was wrong.
