Trying to Put a Value on a ‘Treatment’ : Film: As Art Buchwald’s suit against Paramount winds up, the debate comes down to the dollar value for the idea of ‘Coming to America.’

David Picker was president of Paramount Pictures in the late 1970s when Alan Carr and Robert Stigwood talked him into making a movie out of a Broadway musical he had been unable to sit through. The upshot, he said on the witness stand last week, was the mega-hit “Grease,” and the two producers walked away with $26 million.

Paul Maslansky was 50 years old and had produced 20 movies when he finally scored big. After seeing some police cadets on a San Francisco street, he testified, he was inspired to write a treatment for the first in the “Police Academy” series. He wound up making $11 million.

Clearly, having a good idea and the perseverance to follow through on it is sometimes worth a lot of money in Hollywood. But how does one put a dollar value on humorist Art Buchwald’s idea and what producer Alain Bernheim’s contribution would have been to the “staggering success,” as their lawyer describes it, of the 1988 hit comedy, “Coming to America”?

This was the question bedeviling last week’s trial in Los Angeles Superior Court marking the third, and presumably last, phase of Buchwald and Bernheim’s case against Paramount Pictures. Testimony in the long-running lawsuit ended Friday. It was a week less memorable for concrete information than for colorful war stories as well as the opportunity to hear a froufrou of a movie dissected--or deconstructed, in the parlance of English lit classes--as though it were a work by Aristophanes.

Halfway through, even Judge Harvey A. Schneider characterized much of what he had been hearing as “fluff.”

In some ways, this phase of the closely watched trial was anticlimactic. Schneider, who is hearing the case without a jury, decided in January, 1990, that “Coming to America,” which tells the story of an African prince who leaves his homeland to find a wife, was based on Buchwald’s treatment, “King for a Day.” He also said there was no doubt the studio had long considered the project a vehicle for Eddie Murphy.

The following December the judge unleashed a firestorm in the entertainment industry by declaring the 1983 contract negotiated between Bernheim and Paramount under the so-called net profits formula unconscionable and unduly oppressive. Although the movie has grossed $145 million, according to Paramount, studio attorneys say its $111-million cost was so high that it is unlikely ever to return net profits.

Testifying in behalf of Buchwald and Bernheim, Maslansky, an old friend of the producer’s, stood up for the value of ideas--”our true currency,” he called them. He said the pair was entitled to receive just as much as the film’s director, John Landis, who has earned $6.2 million so far in combined “up-front” fees and gross participation points. Eddie Murphy, who played the prince, has made $24 million off the film.

“Without Buchwald and Bernheim there would have been no ‘Coming to America,’ ” Maslansky stated flatly.

At the other extreme, defense witness Picker, whose hit movies have included “Tom Jones” and “Midnight Cowboy,” told Schneider that Buchwald and Bernheim got a better deal from Paramount than he would have given them. Calling Buchwald’s treatment “an idea that could not have been more embryonic in its original form,” he said, “I would have paid as little as possible.”

On Friday, lawyer Pierce O’Donnell asked the judge to adopt Maslansky’s calculation in awarding damages, while Paramount lawyer Charles P. Diamond contended the plaintiffs are entitled to no more than $265,000, the amount of fixed fees in their contract.

Diamond said the judge should base his calculation of fair market value on the “real world” as it existed in 1983 rather than “pure conjecture.” “Everything else is marshmallows. You grab it and it disappears between your fingers,” he asserted.

O’Donnell, however, said Paramount should be forced to pay his clients what their contribution was worth in 1987, when the studio had committed to filming “Coming to America.” Both Picker and another defense witness, producer Martin Ransohoff (“Jagged Edge” and “Silver Streak”), testified that Bernheim would have commanded a much greater sum if Paramount had waited until after Murphy and Landis were involved before buying rights to “King for a Day.”

Both sides expressed optimism. “This case will endure forever in the hearts and minds of people who put greater value on principles than profits,” O’Donnell declared in closing arguments.

Diamond told reporters he felt encouraged by the questions the judge had posed to him. “I think he understands (Paramount’s) position for the first time.”

Outside the courtroom, Buchwald was more cynical. “No matter what happens here we’ve changed what’s going on in Hollywood and the writers, actors and producers . . . are going to have a better shot,” he said. “But not for long because they’ll find another way to (cheat) them.”

Though sometimes dry, the proceedings offered moments of levity. When UCLA film scholar Howard Suber drew a blank while trying to recall the name of the film, “Romancing the Stone,” the judge, a movie buff, immediately came to his rescue. When film critic Michael Medved, a witness for Paramount, jokingly offered to “plug” the studio’s current hit, “Wayne’s World,” Schneider, wrinkling his nose, interjected, “Don’t.”

But occasionally, a note of resentment crept in, as David Brown and other producers lamented the ever-increasing dominance of directors, and the co-screenwriter of “Coming to America” complained that his contribution to the film has been slighted.

Over the past couple of decades, producers have been “downgraded economically” in comparison to directors, Brown testified. But he acknowledged that today, the title of producer has been cheapened through indiscriminate use.

“We did not give those titles away,” he said, defining a producer as “the person responsible for giving birth to the movie.”

Barry Blaustein, who is credited with the “Coming to America” screenplay along with David Sheffield, maintained that too much weight is given to ideas. Said Blaustein, who testified for Paramount under subpoena: “I get pitched ideas all the time, and some of them are good and some of them are not. But they are not screenplays. . . . Otherwise, my mailman would be a screenwriter.”

Blaustein’s testimony, like much of what was said on the witness stand last week, seemed to revisit territory from earlier stages of the trial. Both sides conceded that some of this evidence was introduced in anticipation of Paramount’s appeal.

Several witnesses were asked to analyze just what it was that made “Coming to America” a hit.

Relying on the same structural analysis he has applied to more than 1,000 movies, plaintiffs’ witness Suber isolated two attributes, which he characterized as the “twin pillars” on which the movie rests: the “persona” of Eddie Murphy and “the concept that he is an African prince coming to America.” These were the points the studio itself emphasized in publicizing the movie, Suber noted.

But two of the studio’s witnesses--Richard Walter, who teaches screenwriting at UCLA, and film critic Medved--described the movie as a romantic fairy tale about a charming young man’s coming of age. They said the film bears little resemblance to Buchwald’s treatment, a political satire about a despotic African king who come to Washington to buy weapons.

They also praised the film’s execution as a key factor in its success.

In his first ruling, however, Schneider discounted the plot differences and said the film “must be compared with the Buchwald treatment as it was developed” in the two scripts commissioned by Bernheim after he made his deal with Paramount.

For example, the judge wrote, studio executives made it clear early in the development process that they wanted Buchwald’s protagonist to be more likable, and by the time the second script was submitted, “the king had none of his despotic characteristics.”

As the testimony ended, Buchwald was asked how he feels about Hollywood. As always, he had a ready retort: “It’s a nice place to visit.”