According to a lawsuit filed
against James Franco, Franco had an agreement to develop the film version of
“Ham on Rye” by Charles Bukowski but it expired in 2010. In an agreement entered by both Franco and
Humphries in January 2009, Humphries allowed Franco to develop a film based on
this novel. The lawsuit states the film “barrows the Novel's themes of childhood loneliness; adolescent
self-consciousness; the failures, hypocrisy, and cruelty of adults; and, in an
unflinching depiction, the crude interest teenage boys take in sex. …The Film
incorporates entire scenes, including substantially their dialogue, from the
Novel." The complaint of the lawsuit covers all the alleged similarities
as well as all the discussions between Humphries and Franco’s representatives
over the past year. In December
of last year, Humphries caught wind that the film had completed work and was
being shopped by Franco for distribution. I believe that Franco should allow
Humphries to see the completed work of the film thus far and allow him to sit
in on the rest of the filming so that Humphries can have the piece of mind
about his novel as a film.
Tess
Gerristen, Best-selling author, is suing Warner Bros. with the allegation that
the movie Gravity was derived from her 1999 book Gravity. The lawsuit filed
claims that it was not copyright infringement, but a contract that she had
stemming from a film option when her book was released. The premise of
Gerristen’s book “is a female
medical doctor/astronaut who is stranded alone aboard a space station after a
series of disasters kill the rest of the crew." She was promised that if a
film was made "based on" her book was made, she would receive a
$500,000 production bonus, screen credit and, maybe most importantly, 2.5 percent
of defined net proceeds. Last year's film -- which won seven Oscars -- grossed
more than $700 million worldwide, putting potentially a lot at stake in the new
lawsuit.” In my opinion Gerristen is out of luck with this one. I do not think
she going to be able to prove that she deserves to be given credit and receive
payment for the movie.
Thomas Althouse sued Warner Bros
alleging that The Matrix trilogy had similarities to a script he submitted to
Warner Bros. in 1993. The premise of Althouse script The Immortals is “a CIA
agent who gains immortality from a drug and finds himself in the year 2235,
where Adolph Hitler and some
Nazis have been reanimated from cryopreservation. In the script, the spy
protagonist is now fighting with those now immortal Nazis who seek to oppress
and destroy all "short-lifers." "The basic premises of The
Matrix Trilogy and The Immortals are so different that it would be
unreasonable to find their plots substantially similar," writes Judge R. Gary Klausner. This was pretty much an open and shut case.
The premises of The Matrix Trilogy and The Immortals were just too different,
so I rule for Warner Bros.
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