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Eddie Murphy Sued for Alleged Theft of Script

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A Long Island man filed a $35-million suit Tuesday alleging a screenplay he wrote was stolen by actor-comedian Eddie Murphy and used as the basis for the film “Harlem Nights.”

The allegations come a month after Paramount Pictures lost a similar suit filed by writer Art Buchwald, who charged Murphy stole one of his stories and used it as the basis for the 1988 film “Coming to America.”

In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Uniondale, Hempstead resident Michael Greene said his agent, who works for the William Morris Agency, asked him in 1988 to “write a property for Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor.”

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Greene, 35, said he submitted the screenplay, titled “A Halloween to Remember,” but the William Morris Agency rejected it without returning the copies of the screenplay.

Greene said he began to hear rumors that the script for “Harlem Nights” bore a strong resemblance to his screenplay.

Murphy could not immediately be reached for comment on the allegations.

Les Fagen, an attorney for Paramount Pictures in New York, said: “We have reviewed Michael Greene’s screenplay and also the screenplay from ‘Harlem Nights,’ and we find no similarity and no basis for the lawsuit.”

Greene, who has been writing screenplays for 16 years without selling anything, said, “You work for a break all your life, and then someone steals your work.”

In January, Paramount Pictures lost a breach-of-contract suit filed by Buchwald, 64, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. Buchwald said the movie company stole his story, titled “King for a Day,” and turned it into Eddie Murphy’s 1988 film “Coming to America.”

Buchwald is seeking $5 million in damages and a second trial is scheduled in Los Angeles Superior Court to determine how much he can collect.

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Greene’s attorney, Steven Legum, said both Greene’s screenplay and “Harlem Nights,” whose author is listed as Murphy, “start with an 8-year-old boy who is orphaned and raised by underworld characters.”

“The scene of both screenplays is Harlem, and both have a corrupt Italian police officer,” Legum said.

“We are not saying that the two scripts are identical,” he said. “Clearly there have been changes, but some of the similarities are nothing less than mind-boggling.”

Despite the $35-million compensatory figure named in the court papers, Legum said the amount of damages Greene could be awarded would be based on the earnings from “Harlem Nights.”

“The film has grossed $70 million,” Greene said.

Named as defendants are Murphy, Paramount Pictures Corp., William Morris Agency, Eddie Murphy Productions and Steven J. Weiss, the agent who asked him to write the screenplay for Murphy.

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