Amber Benson

So, I’ve spent all Saturday afternoon on twitter because apparently the SyFy Channel is doing a pilot for a new television show called HUMAN RELATIONS that VERY MUCH resembles the film that Adam Busch & I made called DRONES. Now I can’t say that they ripped our film off because we all know that people do think up similar, competing ideas at the same time (think VOLCANO vs. DANTE’S PEAK or not...they’re both pretty terrible), but it just seems rather odd that our trailer premiered exclusively on the SyFy channel’s website in January and now, six-ish months later, they’re making a TV show with an intriguingly similar plot:

"The Office meets Men In Black in this project featuring an office Temp who slowly discovers that his off-kilter and odd-ball bosses at the strange hi-tech "ad agency" where he works are really aliens working on plan to destroy the Earth."

That’s the plot summary from SyFy.

Our film:

"The Office meets The Day The Earth Stood Still...is about a guy who works in an office with a kooky, off-kilter boss/co-workers, who then discovers that he’s really working with aliens who are plotting to blow-up the Earth."

Crazy, huh? And if there’s as much PowerPoint action in Human Relations as there is in Drones...well, that would just be an amazing cowinky-dink! I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

The whole thing kinda sucks for Adam and I because we poured two and half years of our life (and a little blood and gray matter, too) into Drones. But I feel exceedingly bad for our writers, Ben Acker and Ben Blacker, because this was their baby, ripped from their own brains and transplanted onto celluloid––and now they get to see someone else take their idea and run with it. Not that I’m saying anyone stole their idea – I’m just postulating a possibility, a conspiracy theory conjecture, if you will. I don’t know the guys writing/producing HUMAN RELATIONS and I have not read the script, so I can’t say there is any wrong doing. I just think it’s a bit...coincidental.

So, here’s what I want: I want peeps to check out DRONES when it comes out in Theaters/on DVD in March 2011 from Phase Four Films. Support real indie/alien film-making.

And if SyFy wants, they can air Drones on their channel whenever they want. It’s theirs.

Then you can be the judge.