Pirates Screenplay Plundered?

Wednesday, July 12, 2006  -  reddit

A writer for Yahoo!/E! Online/exclamation! is reporting that Disney, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Touchstone are being sued over Pirates/Black Pearl (not recent blockbuster Dead Man's Chest). Royce Mathew is claiming that he came up with the idea first, with registered materials including a script, story boards, drawings, and other various materials to back up his claim. He also says that he exposed certain people involved with the making of Pirates to his material in some misguided attempt to get it sold.

The story says that Disney is being sued for copyright infringement, which means all that junk that Mathew made is utterly irrelevant with the exception of the screenplay, and I find it exceptionally hard to believe that any of the companies or people named in the suit would do something that stupid. They know better, trust me. The money they would have had to pay this guy for the screenplay would have amounted to a grand total of about $100,000. With a company as big and smart as Disney, there is no way in the world they wouldn't just buy it if they really wanted it. It would be stupid to do otherwise, and $100k is pocket change to them.

Variety doesn't have it yet, and I came up dry sifting through Google News. The Yahoo! article includes no link, but I did find the tmz.com article it referenced over here. TMZ looks really amateurish to be honest, and I'm shocked they could find a real news story even if it fell out of the sky and crushed them to death. The court document (4MB) is a horridly bloated scan that is water marked by TMZ. Real classy...

Just looking quickly through the papers, I see that Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio have both been named in the suit, which is odd, because I was under the impression that writers were to some degree indemnified against this sort of thing, since screenplays are done as work-for-hire. What a ridiculous thing to happen to two people who are flying higher than satellites right now over their second blockbuster in as many years. Mathew should be ashamed.