Latest Carl’s Jr. TV Commercial Prompts Lawsuit

When actor-writer Benjamin Stein watched the latest television commercials for Carl’s Jr. restaurants, he says he saw himself.

Stein, a former Richard M. Nixon speech writer who played a boring economics teacher in the hit movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” is suing Carl Karcher Enterprises, alleging that the Anaheim-based company’s new commercials feature a character that too closely resembles a character that Stein has developed.

The suit, filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleges that Karcher hired an actor to imitate the character portrayed by Stein in the movie and on television after Stein declined to appear in the commercials because Karcher wouldn’t pay him enough. The suit also names as a co-defendant Della Femina McNamee, a Los Angeles advertising agency that created the Karcher commercials.

The suit seeks unspecified damages and an injunction to stop the Karcher commercials from being broadcast.

Patricia Parks, a Karcher spokeswoman, declined to comment on the suit.

Stein, who is also a teacher and a prolific writer, said the commercials steal his persona and undermine his ability to earn a living. “That nerdy, boring, slightly nutty teacher is what I use to feed my family, in part,” he said in a telephone interview Friday.

In “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Stein played the teacher who repeatedly calls Ferris Bueller’s name in a monotone as the camera fixes on an empty school desk, showing that the boy has not come to school.

Stein, 45, said he has been teaching college classes for almost 20 years and the character he portrayed in the movie and in regular appearances on the hit television show “The Wonder Years” closely resembles his own personality.

Stein said the character was created a few years back when he was visiting the Paramount Pictures studio to pitch a screenplay. John Hughes, director of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” overheard Stein speaking, told him he had a funny voice and asked him to ad-lib for the part of an economics teacher in the movie. Hughes liked what he heard and offered Stein a part in the film, Stein said.

Stein’s suit alleges that Karcher’s commercials violate laws against unfair competition.

“The whole basis of commercial law in America is ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ ” Stein said. “When I go to Carl’s Jr., if I buy a bacon cheeseburger, I don’t just walk out without paying for it. I expect Carl’s to do the same with me.”

Stein is a well-known Los Angeles personality.

He is probably best known as the defendant in a lawsuit filed by comedian Joan Rivers involving a 1987 article Stein wrote under the pseudonym Bert Hacker in Gentlemen’s Quarterly magazine. The article was a first-person account in which the author claimed to know Rivers and to have heard her joke about her late husband, who killed himself shortly before the article ran. Stein later admitted that he had never met Rivers, and the suit was settled out of court.

A former columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times opinion page, Stein once wrote that the German people might not have as willingly followed Adolf Hitler if they had seen American television’s portrayal of life in 1944 Grand Rapids, Mich., complete with “the sweater girls, the cars, the unlimited food and the right to thumb one’s nose at anyone.”