Planet Hollywood’s Course Revealed : Restaurants: The cinema-themed venture will settle in South Coast Plaza. It took a suit by the owner of rival Hard Rock Cafe to confirm the plans.
It took nothing less than a lawsuit to confirm that the cinema-themed restaurant Planet Hollywood is coming to Orange County.
The suit, announced Tuesday by Hard Rock Cafe owner Peter Morton, contends that Planet Hollywood infringes on his restaurants’ trademark. But for Orange County, the most sensational aspect of the lawsuit is its incidental revelation that a Planet Hollywood is slated for Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza by the end of summer.
“It’s a done deal,” said Frank DiBella, a co-owner of the Orange County franchise for Planet Hollywood. Before the Hard Rock Cafe lawsuit was filed, he and his investment partners were mum about their lease negotiations.
DiBella declined to specify his new restaurant’s exact location in the South Coast Plaza area, saying only that it would occupy an existing building that would undergo extensive remodeling.
Planet Hollywood, which premiered last October in Manhattan, still has only one location. Like its New York sister, the Planet Hollywood in Costa Mesa would be a lively, visual restaurant decorated with celebrity photographs and memorabilia from popular films. It would feature ongoing movie videos and theme music from films.
Based on an artist’s rendering, the planned restaurant’s Art Deco exterior would have rotating spotlights, a movie marquee-like facade and a huge statue of the “Batman” character looming over the entrance to a second-floor balcony.
Italatin Inc., a Long Beach-based restaurant group that already operates three restaurants at South Coast Plaza, will manage the franchise. The new restaurant would be owned by five investors, including DiBella and Antonio Cagnolo, owner of Antonello Ristorante in South Coast Plaza Village.
Last fall, Italatin talked with Fashion Island about anchoring Planet Hollywood in a space that once housed the Amen Wardy designer clothing store. Those negotiations are a bone of contention with Morton, who has been angling for the same location.
The suit charges that Planet Hollywood had already decided on a South Coast Plaza site, and entered into talks with Fashion Island “solely for the purpose of delaying, obstructing and, if possible, destroying” Morton’s efforts to put a Hard Rock Cafe in the outdoor mall in Newport Beach.
But DiBella claims that at the time he “had no idea that the Hard Rock was planning on going to Fashion Island.”
“We just saw a vacant building there, and tried to put a deal together,” he said. “South Coast Plaza offered us a better deal, so we went with them.”
C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, which owns South Coast Plaza, could not be reached for comment. Meanwhile, Hard Rock Cafe spokeswoman Valerie Van Gelder refused to discuss the progress of its lease negotiations with Fashion Island. Susie Plummer, spokeswoman for this Irvine Co. mall, also declined to elaborate.
It is yet another messy chapter in the complex case of Hard Rock Cafe vs. Planet Hollywood.
In January, owners of the Hard Rock Cafes on the West Coast filed a separate suit against Planet Hollywood, which had indicated interest in coming to California. The suit--which seeks more than $1 billion in damages--alleged that its rival conspired to force Hard Rock Cafe to sell its assets below market value by creating “a chain of highly publicized entertainment/music themed restaurants . . . similar (to Hard Rock) but of substantially lower quality.”
The second suit, which seeks an additional $200 million in damages, takes aim at Planet Hollywood’s Orange County endeavor. “It is an extension of the original lawsuit, with some additional claims that bring in new parties,” said Bert Fields, a Los Angeles attorney representing Hard Rock Cafe.
Both suits include as a defendant Robert Earl, a Planet Hollywood investor who is also an executive with the Rank Organization plc. The British conglomerate controls rights to the Hard Rock Cafe name on the East Coast, and Earl manages its Hard Rock assets.
Other Planet Hollywood investors include actors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. The actors, however, are not named in the suits.
The Hard Rock Cafe group started in London in 1971. The restaurants feature rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia and a simple menu of hamburgers and sandwiches.
In 1985, the highly successful chain broke in two, with co-founder Morton heading up restaurants west of the Mississippi River and the Rank Organization taking the East Coast. The two sides agreed that they would not intrude on each others’ territory.
Rank says that Planet Hollywood is a totally separate restaurant that does not infringe on the Hard Rock’s trademark. If that were so, Fields asks, “why is a Rank executive running Planet Hollywood?”
The latest complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, adds Keith Barish, chairman of Planet Hollywood, and DiBella and Cagnolo as defendants.
“We are innocent bystanders in these disputes,” Cagnolo said. “I wish we could just sit down with (Morton) over a glass of wine and talk about this in a nice way.”
Howard L. Weitzman, a Los Angeles attorney who represents Earl and now DiBella and Cagnolo, called the lawsuit “a sham without merit.”
“The two restaurants have completely different themes and menus,” he said. “The Hard Rock Cafe was not the first memorabilia restaurant around, nor will it be the last. It’s like saying that Burger King should not be allowed to operate because it is stealing from McDonald’s.”
