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Hollywood Lawsuits
It’s known as a “sue-crazy town.” Hollywood has long been famous for it. People here have a long history of threatening legal action. It generally amounts to the application of lawyer-induced financial pain to coerce or punish business counterparts, rivals and competitors.
Showbiz lawsuits seldom make it to court. The threat of an expensive suit usually results in a financial settlement, often with non-disclosure, and non-disparagement clauses all around. The Godfather cliché, “It’s business, not personal,” applies. But then there are times when it doesn’t apply. The juiciest cases, journalistically and financially, are the ones where one or both of the parties to the suit have come to hate each other so much that they no longer care how much money this is costing them. Two of the cases in this post concern Ian Fleming, James Bond’s haughty creator. Another is about the time that Mike Myers so utterly, totally pissed off a major studio that it cost him $20 million. Sometimes it’s the principle of the thing. More often, it’s the money.
In the Fifties, the James Bond series achieved moderate success, but they weren’t yet celebrated bestsellers, at least in the USA, until the JFK era. In 1958 Ian Fleming formed a brief partnership with Anglo-Irish film producer Kevin McClory to bring James Bond to the screen. The first film would be called Thunderball.
McClory hired Jack Whittingham as co-writer of the script. Today Whittingham is all but unknown, but it was he who came up with SPECTRE, as well as a more high-tech tone. Fleming’s idea of romance was rather brusque, to say the least. McClory and Whittingham improved on him. Fleming assumed his readers were male; his collaborators knew that, handled right, Bond’s masculine edginess could appeal to female as well as male cinema audiences.
But the deal gradually came apart. One of McClory’s other films died at the box office, hobbling his ability to get Bond financed. There was a brief-lived hope of getting Alfred Hitchcock involved with Thunderball, but he declined. McClory’s binding option had run out. Ian Fleming was free to make the deal with Al Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli that would result in more than half a century of James Bond.
Fleming owned Bond, all right; but he didn’t have sole rights to any of the work done in 1958 and ’59 on that one specific screenplay, so it was a shock to Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham, when, in March 1961, Thunderball the novel was published solely under Ian Fleming’s name. It was little more than Fleming’s own quick novelization of the script the three men had worked on for a year. McClory and Whittingham promptly sued the famous author on the bare-knuckle grounds of plagiarism. (Whittingham eventually withdrew, unable to afford enough of the lawyer bill to stay in the game.)
The case went to the UK courts in 1963, and there’s no other way to put it; the Queen’s bench royally handed Fleming’s rear end to him. He permanently lost the film and television rights to Thunderball, including remake rights. Fleming retained the publishing rights and income from the book, provided that each subsequent edition co-credited McClory and Whittingham for the original story.
Why did Fleming think he could get away with it? We’ll never know for sure, but Occam’s razor points to sheer lazy arrogance. Everyone knows he’s the author of Bond, dear boy. But what counted was, he wasn’t the sole author of Thunderball. As with comic caricatures like Arrested Development’s Lucile Bluth, like Will and Grace’s Karen Walker, Fleming radiated a blithe assumption that the laws are for little people. It was his costliest mistake.
Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli bore no grudge; the suit was Fleming’s problem, not theirs. They let Kevin McClory take the producer credit when Thunderball was finally brought to the screen in 1965. Adjusted for inflation, it was the highest box office Bond until 2012’s Skyfall, 47 years later. What didn’t make Cubby happy was that remake clause, activated with some acrimony with McClory’s independent production of Never Say Never Again in 1983. After McClory’s death in 2006, EON Productions bought out the remaining rights, unifying ownership of the series and at last ending the vestiges of the Thunderball legal dispute.
In 1963, MGM startled the entertainment industry when they announced they were developing an original project with Ian Fleming called Solo, “a James Bond for television” that would air on NBC in fall ’64. Most startled of all, indeed dismayed, were Bond’s producers in London, who wasted no time indignantly calling in lawyers. The American studio and network hastily withdrew, revising their build-up for what was now called The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
When the show aired, it turned into a real moneymaker for Leo the Lion. Hence, the cover story, the publicity version of how it came to be: Metro producer Norman Felton was sent to approach Fleming while he was in New York, reasoning that the British-born Felton would hit it off with him. They met for dinner at the hotel, discussed concepts, and, over the following months, the two would meet sporadically. Fleming’s ideas about a new spy show were written down in ink. Then, (in MGM’s telling), regrettably, the Bond producers were so jealous that Fleming withdrew, gallantly accepting only a single dollar in payment for his work.
I believed it at the time; everyone accepted it. I’ll say upfront that I don’t have any secret info to undercut Normal Felton’s studio-approved version of the story. But now, long after it matters to anybody, with a couple of decades of better understanding of how Hollywood does things, I’m going to gently debunk the accepted story of U.N.C.L.E.
Let’s start with what seems indisputably true: the two men were seen dining together at a New York hotel. Fleming had worked with American networks before, and although he was snobbish, he was also money-hungry. He was known to be looking for other “franchises” besides James Bond. Felton’s starting ideas may have appealed to Fleming because of the many ways he wasn’t looking for Bond. The hero would be American and work in New York City; he’d be part of a multinational law enforcement agency that would include Russians, maybe linked to the United Nations. The atmosphere would be high-tech and corporate.
The name Napoleon Solo was apparently Fleming’s idea; he’d forgotten that a minor villain in Goldfinger was called Solo (he’s the gangster whose life ended in a memorably crushed Lincoln Continental). He is also said to have suggested April Dancer as Solo’s female counterpart, and that does sound like Fleming.
But after that the story hits several snags. Those handwritten notes? Written in Felton’s handwriting, not Fleming’s, on a handful of blank telegram forms. Okay, Felton wrote them himself, right after each meeting with Fleming. It could happen. But except for that initial dinner, according to Felton, every one of their subsequent face-to-face meetings was done via long late-night walks in Manhattan. To me, that’s an improbable “tell.”
Ian Fleming died in August 1964, a month before the first episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. would air, so we have only Norman Felton’s word. My own theory is he may simply have gotten in over his head. He tried and ultimately failed to land a commitment from Fleming but nervously hoped for the best, not tipping off the studio that the prize had slipped off the hook.
Looking into the threatened lawsuit now, it wasn’t that EON Productions was suing to prevent Ian Fleming’s valuable ideas from being stolen; no, EON and Fleming’s own estate sued to prevent MGM from even claiming that the show was ever based on his ideas, other than a few informal suggestions of character names. In 1963 he accepted one dollar as legal formal payment for those suggestions, allowing him to sever any other connection to Metro’s TV project.
We’ve gone from James Bond’s courtroom adventures to Napoleon Solo’s. Now, how about Austin Powers? Or at least his actor? At the turn of the century, Mike Myers was at his box office peak with the Powers films, so Universal, through Ron Howard and Brian Glazer’s company, hired him to write and direct a movie based on his SNL sketch, Sprockets. It would film in 2000 for release in summer 2001. Austin Powers: The Spy that Shagged Me, the second film in the series, outperformed the first, unusual for a sequel, so Myers and his agent managed to double his price to $20 million. Stars never had such financial clout, before or since. But trouble was brewing in showbiz paradise.
Now, after 14 script drafts, Mike Myers claimed he needed more time before cameras rolled. With pre-production in its late stages, getting ready to shoot the film was already costing a million dollars a week. Imagine Productions (Ron Howard and Brian Glazer) was fed up with the stalling. They felt like they were negotiating with a financial gun to their heads. Myers claimed he was a filmmaker with too much integrity to insult his fans with an inferior script. The other side retorted, “And who wrote the script? Myers.” Suits and countersuits flew back and forth.
Industry disputes are generally taken care of quietly, sensibly, out of view of the press. But once in a while, both parties in a legal wrangle get so emotional about it that they don’t give a damn how many billable law hours they’re ringing up. This can be a self-destructive impulse, but not necessarily a totally irrational one if you’re the aggrieved party in a suit. Imagine’s lawyer Bert Fields said, “Brian and Ron wanted a movie, not a lawsuit, but Mr. Myers left them no choice. Now we just want to get the case to trial and let the jury and the public learn what Mike Myers is really all about.” In the end, both sides settled. Myers missed out on his payday. The movies all but gave up on him.
Usually, though, Hollywood doesn’t like to burn its bridges. You never know who you’ll be working with tomorrow. Rob Long says, “In show business, the term ‘friends’ is so expansive it encompasses the term ‘enemies.’” When brittle egos are involved, that line can be a thin one, and when it’s crossed, things get personal fast. Top agent Mike Ovitz once said, “I always conducted myself knowing that Hollywood is a dog-eat-dog town. I forgot that the other dogs have livid scars and long memories.”
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Another fascinating peek into a world that holds both glamor and illusion.
When illusion begins to look like deception, lawsuits arrive.
Also, I’ve heard that among the Hollywood crowd, lawyer jokes are few and far between. But agent jokes are plentiful.
I saw the last Austin Powers movie for free, and it made ME want to sue Mike Myers.
I expected the Mike Myers end of the story to lead to him in a big stupid cat suit. Didn’t that one also involve legal action?
And if Ian Fleming wanted another franchise, why not pursue the lucrative opportunities of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bangiverse? With a little imagination, it could have led all the way through to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Another worthy read, as always, Gary.
Thanks Gary! It’s amazing that any movie gets made.
And yes, I want to write, direct, and act in movies, and beat up bad guys with my movie karate, like every red-blooded American kid who would be pretty odd if he didn’t have red blood.
What a terrible foundation for a movie. I like some of Mike Meyers’s work (and loved the first Austin Powers movie), but thought the Sprockets sketches were just dumb and weird.
The plagiarism case against Fleming seems pretty clear, but it must be hard sometimes to figure out who really should get to claim ownership of an idea.
There’s a current case that I find somewhat intriguing. As I understand it, John Wells, executive producer of ER, started developing an ER reboot for Max a few years ago. Attached was Noah Wyle, who would return to the role of Dr. John Carter. However, Wells was unable to make a deal with the estate of Michael Crichton (who created ER), and the reboot idea died.
So Wells and Wyle changed course and have instead started developing a new medical drama called The Pitt, in which Wyle will star as a doctor at an urban hospital in Pittsburgh. So now the Crichton estate is suing Wells, Wyle, and Warner Brothers, alleging that The Pitt is just ER with the serial number filed off. Warner Brothers denies the charge, saying that any similarities to ER are “generic” and would exist with any medical drama.
Who’s right? I can see why the Crichton estate might feel wronged here; it seems beyond dispute that the origins of The Pitt can be traced back to the abandoned ER reboot idea. But is that enough to make the new show a derivative work, as the plaintiffs claim? Suppose Wells and Wyle had called their project The Pitt from the beginning and had never pitched it as an ER reboot. Surely Warner Brothers is not legally barred from ever producing a show set at an urban hospital, nor is Noah Wyle forbidden to ever play a doctor again.
It’s impossible to judge without seeing plot and character details for The Pitt, which are not public. Hopefully the two sides will come to some kind of settlement, because otherwise I guess the jury will have to study both works and decide which ideas are derivative and which aren’t. That doesn’t strike me as something a jury is necessarily equipped to do.
Warner Bros might want to look back through their catalog of old shows, because they might just find they can make the same argument, that ER was derivative of Medical Center, or Dr. Kildare, or whatever show they owned. ER wasn’t exactly groundbreaking stuff.
Sony Pictures would bend over backwards to avoid a lawsuit. I recall some issues with their Bond films, but don’t remember the details.
Is there something about spy films and lawsuits?
Great post!
What a fascinating post. Thank you, Gary!
Great post, Gary.
It seems that much of these Hollywood legal inspirations have been adopted for political Washington.
It just has the feel of a Hollywood thing.
I think Rob has also covered the old adage about being careful how you treat people on your way up the ladder because you will probably pass them as you later head down the ladder.
I have the impression that negotiations in that business must be especially difficult in that the costs can’t be clearly fixed and the project returns almost entirely a wild guess and those with an institutional or reputational advantage have very strong incentives to push. The TV and movie images of agents and studio execs verbally abusing each other as a routine matter may or may be representative but it seems consonant with the perception of a tough business.
I recall in one of the many funny scenes in the vastly underappreciated State and Main (2000) in which the troubled production’s fixer/producer played by the gifted David Paymer is on a phone confrontation and concludes his tirade with
As if this level of abuse was an expected ritual.
There was speculation that Myers appearing in The Cat and the Hat was punishment for being such a pain on Sprockets. However, it appears it was merely a lousy choice.
But there was threatened legal action about a cat–Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s white cat. It wasn’t in the Fleming books; McClory put it in the Thunderball screenplay. He later sued when Eon used it in Diamonds Are Forever.
Think back to Dick O’Neill in The Buddy Holly Story, playing the manager of the Apollo, on the phone yelling at somebody with colorful remarks about character and ancestry. It ends with, “Say hi to Mom.”
In Hollywood, lawyers are like bodyguards. Agents are like unfaithful lovers.
He’s an expert at self-sabotage. I heard a story from the late Brandon Tartikoff, longtime NBC chief, about his stint running Paramount Pictures. He said that Mike Myers was the most entitled, pretentious person he’d ever met in media.
I recall when Myers was on Letterman promoting one of the Austin Powers movies which must have had a large promotion budget. Letterman said something like “It is always heartwarming when a little picture with no major support just comes out of nowhere to succeed” which was a reasonably funny commentary on the scope of the buildup. Myers gave him a dirty look and was off his game for a full two minutes as if it had been a deeply offensive thing to say. An artiste and a star.
There’s always stuff you leave out of a post to right-size it. One of the stories is not as clear cut, and it’s poignant. It involves Steven Spielberg. No, he’s not the villain…it’s hard to explain…It’s usually called something like “the lunch stand guy”.
Hollywood is full of instances where a greedy or simply sadly deluded person is convinced that they wrote Harry Potter, but they called it “Larry Rotter” until that thieving woman got ahold of it. The stories seldom make the papers. When they do, they get appropriate skepticism. 99.999% are complete BS. That’s the way it looked when the owner of a lunch stand claimed that as a film student, Steven Spielberg signed over a hefty percent of his future income to him in return for some cash to finish a student film. Sad, funny, right?
But oddly, The Los Angeles Times wasn’t laughing. They looked into it. The claim certainly seemed ridiculous. But then it emerged that Spielberg had, in fact, given the man a lot of money over the years. Not millions, but tens of thousands. Spielberg had made a reckless promise and written an agreement.
On review, the deal was incompetently written and was judged not to be legally binding from the beginning.
That’s where the matter rested. Spielberg wasn’t under any obligation to pay a cent. But he did anyway, on the QT, as if he had an awareness of some guilt in the matter.
Now ist the time on Sprokets venn ve sue!
Not to be that guy, I’d love to have someone give me tens of thousands of dollars, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that “Tens of Thousands” “over the years” is “a lot of money” when you’re talking about someone with Steven Spielberg’s cash flow. He probably spends more than that on hotel bills for a single week vacation.
But I accept the story in the spirit it’s offered and understand the point you’re making.
Thanks, Miffed. A good interpretation. It’s a rare case of seeing the hidden side of a very famous person. The “deal” was no more than a student’s scribble on a piece of looseleaf paper along the lines of “Dear Mr Berg, I promise you 20% of my income, signed Steve”. Invalid. But he obviously felt bad about it.
Though there was one additional tangle, of a seemingly irrelevant matter: Spielberg used to lie about his age, but only by a year. Why? Because Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at age 26, every hotshot wanted to meet or beat Orson’s record. Why is that relevant? Because in the first legal proceedings, one of Spielberg’s lawyers foolishly tossed in the “fact” that he was only 20 when he signed it. They didn’t have to say that; it had little to do with why the agreement was not valid. But once it was brought into the case, it was part of the record.
But Spielberg wasn’t 20. He was 21, full legal age in California.
A fine case of an Irish actor playing a Jewish guy. He introduces himself as “I’m the schmuck who hired you!” and one of Buddy Holly’s Crickets, who has obviously never met a Jew in his life, eagerly sticks out his hand for a handshake. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Schmuck!”
George Lucas took action against ABC and Universal over a 1978 ripoff series to be called Star Worlds. Universal prudently retitled it Battlestar Galactica.
But wasn’t Lucas’s lawsuit also largely motivated by the involvement of John Dykstra, who created the innovative effects for Star Wars and then took his expertise to Galactica? Seems somewhat similar to the Pitt case, actually, since I think the Crichton estate’s view of the new show is largely based on the people who are doing it (Wells and Wyle). Similarly, ABC bringing in Dykstra to do their effects pretty strongly suggested that they wanted their show to be a lot like Star Wars.
That certainly was my expectation as a 12-year-old boy, anyway. In 1978 I was ready to gobble up anything even faintly connected to Star Wars, and when I heard that John Dykstra was involved with Battlestar Galactica, I was sold. (And I tried hard to like the show … I really did.)
There was also probably bad blood there, since I believe Lucas had fired Dykstra for his inability to bring in the effects shots on time.
When Spielberg made Close Encounters, he outsourced the special effects to Doug Trumbull. At the time, Lucas ribbed his pal Steven a little. “I’m not the kind of filmmaker who waits six months for a guy to say, “Here’s your special effect, sir.” Lucas made a point of doing it Kubrick’s way, with his own in-house effects team. John Dykstra was the one who came up with the “Dykstraflex”, buying an old Paramount VistaVision camera that shot 35mm sideways for a much larger picture, so Lucas did not own rights to the process. He was certainly incensed to lose Dykstra, but the lawsuit was aimed at Universal.
Ironically, Kubrick had much the same problem with Trumbull, who went around claiming to be “the special effects wizard behind 2001“. Trumbull had an important role on the team, but he was only a member of that team.
I had a post in May about trying to judge the originality of technology patents. It’s tough. Judging the validity of a copyright can be even harder.
I agree. I tried to show a Dieter Sprockets bit to my German wife. She was bewildered by it. And I was embarrassed; I had remembered them as funnier. But I was still sniffing glue back then.
(That was a joke.)
Shprockets was funny, in a certain way, but making a movie out of it? No thanks.
A lot of it was making fun of weird European people, etc.
One of the funniest versions was I think some kind of “Dating Game” thing where guest host Jason Priestley was the “bachelor” contestant and one of the “candidates” was supposed to be his mother. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to be on YouTube or anywhere else online.
I feel the same way about pretty much any SNL sketch.
Of course this sort of thing happens with music all the time. Two of the Beatles were found to have infringed copyrights; George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” is very similar musically to the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine,” and John Lennon swiped some Chuck Berry lyrics in “Come Together.” But it’s not always so straightforward, and given how derivative a lot of rock music is (by definition), it’s tough to know where to draw the line. There are only so many notes, after all.
I’m always amused by the thought of a bunch of stuffy old lawyers and judges, who might not know a riff from a middle eight, sitting in their offices listening to rock & roll records and trying to decide what is original and what isn’t. Maybe that’s not how those cases worked, but it’s how I like to picture it.