Posted on 06/19/2009 8:57:07 AM PDT by Scarpetta
HUNTINGTON BEACH – Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old with a rare form of cancer, was staying alive for one thing – a movie.
From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film.
After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.
The company flew an employee with a DVD of Up, which is only in theaters, to the Curtins’ Huntington Beach home on June 10 for a private viewing of the movie.
The animated movie begins with scenes showing the evolution of a relationship between a husband and wife. After losing his wife in old age, the now grumpy man deals with his loss by attaching thousands of balloons to his house, flying into the sky, and going on an adventure with a little boy.
Colby died about seven hours after seeing the film.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
Good job, Pixar.( BTW, the movie is one of the finest I’ve seen in a long time-the first 10 minutes would make an excellent standalone short.)
Hat’s off to Pixar. Kudos.
Hat’s off to Pixar. Kudos.
Agreed! Good on them!
I agree. It was a great movie, and the first 10 minutes was the best.
Nice move by Pixar to do this.
Why would they make a dieing girl wait for a dvd to be flown in? UP has been available online since the day it was released. Luckily it got there in time (she died only hours later???-sad. Are the studios that obsessed with fighting online copies that they couldn’t just give them the website?
Because they have an obligation to protect their copyrighted materials and IP.
This one got me going WITT.
It was a dieing girls last wish. Telling her family the movie website that already has multiple copies of “UP” certainly would not have hurt the company. Protecting their IP? Not sure how sending them to a site that has nothing to do with the studio, that already has multiple copies of the movie, will hurt their IP.
I understand the studio wanting to protect its copyrights, but cmon...the girl is going to die any moment and them the site that millions of people already know about?
I took my 10-year old daughter to see this movie last week. This sad, sad story makes me count my blessings.
Proof that angels do exist.
Well said, frf. The copies that the other Freeper mentioned are cam versions and not even an R5’ nor a screener’ which is the earliest pre-DVD versions available. Not worth to “hide the IP”. This is akin to knowing you 24 hours to live and you rob a bank.
I am not surprised that Pixar would allow this event to happen but what sad timing that the child died 7 hours later.
Up (1976, co-written by Roger Ebert)
Think of it this way. Rather than having a cheap bootleg internet copy they HAND-delivered a professional DVD copy for her to watch.
I give them kudos for personal attention they gave her wish.
It's one thing to redirect someone to a web page, it's much more personal to deliver it to their hands by a guy flying cross country.
Typically pathetic propaganda flourish. The girl died anyway.
Maybe she went out with a smile and some nice thoughts.
Sigh. So young, and the movie meant so much to her.
At least Pixar did it.
I agree with you that sending the DVD copy is better than a poor quality online version, but time was the issue here-she was going to die at any moment and it was her last wish. She was desperate to see the movie, not desperate to have dolby surround sound.
Pixar did the right thing. Kudos.
Agreed that its the only way to see a quality version but as time was the issue here they could have done both. Glad it worked out.
Folks, could we please give Pixar some credit for doing a very nice thing in a timely manner?
It is about 50 miles from Burbank to Huntington Beach, and they FLEW someone up with a bunch of stuffed characters and the DVD.
Pixar has declined comment, they did NOT do this for gain.
I know they are a bunch of liberals (with the exception of John Ratzenberger) and I cannot bear to think I paid money to see a movie that had Ed Asner in it in any role, but come on.
This wasn’t going to save her life. They didn’t make money off of it. It was a nice thing to do.
Please give it a break.
I make a lot of joke comments on threads, but don’t you think you could hold off on the jokes for this one?
What Pixar did was kind and decent, and much more personal than emailing an IP address to the family.
In addition to not knowing how to spell “dying” you also don’t understand intellectual property law.
Keeping it short...Pixar did exactly what they should have done in order to accommodate the little girl and to retain their rights to demand payment from customers who see their property.
Pixar did a good thing here. They’ve also done rotten things in the past (like denying film rentals of their shorts, before they’d ever made a feature, to someone in a state, who didn’t even work in the government, because of legislation restricting abortions in that state).
Ouch, the spelling police.
I agree that what Pixar did was great, but the girl was about to die at any moment. I’m sure a link to a copy of the movie could have “found” its way to the family (in addition to the mailed DVD quality copy) just in case she died before the mail arrived.
That said - I saw the movie yesterday. Will not take the grandkids. The movie - IMO - is basiclly an adult movie and only parts are for ‘kids’. The violence is something I have come to expect from Disney.... The Incredibles suffered from the same problem - OK for adults, questionable for 3 & 4 Y/Os.
I’m with you on this....good for PIXAR! I hope I can go see it this weekend...
My son had a liver transplant when he was an infant. Over the course of a few years he had multiple long stays at a hospital in San Francisco.
During one of our stays some of the artists from Pixar came through and visited every child’s room for a short period of time - talking with the kids and drawing for them. We have the 4 cartoons of “Finding Nemo” characters that they drew for us.
They also arranged for “Finding Nemo” to be played on the the televisions in all the rooms. This was when the movie was only playing in theaters. Very nice of them!
Unfortunately, if they did that then Pixar would have officially forfeited their copyright rights. Anyone could make a claim on the property then. Pixar would be stupid to have done that.
It's the same thing if I decide I want to print out some Coca-Cola t-shirts for myself. If Coke finds out and they do nothing about it, then they have de facto given up their rights to their trademark. It's just how this stuff works.
the spelling police.
Not really...but some incorrect words are just painful to look at. Dieing is one of those words. Plus since dieing is a real word I figure your browser didn't give you the hint that it was wrong.
I loved that movie...its cartoon cgaracters had more depth, lova and sincerity that 99.99 % of non-cartoons made in the last ten years.
Whenever I see that a movie is made by Pixar, inevitably it turns out to be wonderful...
Ed
My husband took my 10 yo to see it last week. They both came home exhausted and red-eyed from all the crying they did during the movie. My husband couldn’t even retell the story line without tearing up again.
I second what you said.
“It is about 50 miles from Burbank to Huntington Beach, and they FLEW someone up with a bunch of stuffed characters and the DVD.”
They were probably able to do that faster than it would take me to figure out out to play the movie off the internet. (Okay - but now where to I plug it into the TV so I can see it? Do I have to disconnect the rabbit ears?)
There were so many nice touches to the film : The way the old man left ‘her chair’, ‘her side of the bed’ , ‘her end of the table’, inviolate, the way he touched the faded outline of her hand on the mailbox and you just know he did that every time he got the mail, the way the nurse’s tag stuck up out of the back of his shirt, the scene at the end when he finally brought himself to look at the rest of the pages in her adventure book...Just a lovely film. Touching, exciting, and funny by turns. I never thought Pixar could top The Incredibles, but I think they may have-and I don’t think they’ll ever top Up (but they’re certainly welcome to try).
I think the girl got her wish and finally let herself go.
You're confusing copyright and trademark. You can lose trademark (Coke T-shirts) due to non-enforcement, but copyright (Up!) remains until it expires even if you don't enforce it equally.
Cool, thanks for the clarification.
Right...that was what I was thinking. If you don’t have everything set up to watch on your PC (assuming they had a PC that could even handle watching a movie off the Internet...) it could be really be problematic.
Especially for a family under stress with a dying child.
Normally, I would never support a movie with Ed Asner.
But in this case I make an exception.
You’re welcome. An addendum though, I believe if you don’t enforce your copyrights, when you finally do you may be looking a less money you can get from the infringer since you have in the past shown your copyright isn’t very valuable to you. But Disney enforces its copyrights, so that’s not an issue here.
The story or the movie?
The story—haven’t seen the movie yet.
Well there’s no video to watch, but it’s a sad event nonetheless, thanks for the ping, now I’m interested in the movie.
Me too—I’ve heard good reviews from a couple of people.
I could have done without reading this. Poor little kid.
Amazing that someone could spin the story this way.
It is about 50 miles from Burbank to Huntington Beach, and they FLEW someone up with a bunch of stuffed characters and the DVD.
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