DreamWorks Suggests Writer ‘Cribbed’ From Earlier Work

Seeking to turn the tables on the author bringing suit over Steven Spielberg’s upcoming holiday movie “Amistad,” DreamWorks has suggested in a court filing that writer Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel about the historic slave mutiny cribbed extensive material from an earlier book on the same subject.

In his first direct response to the lawsuit, Oscar-winning director and DreamWorks co-founder Spielberg also said in an affidavit that “Amistad” is “an extraordinarily important film, perhaps the most important of my career,” and stopping its release would be “a tragedy for our company, but I believe it would also be a serious loss to the American public.”

Chase-Riboud has accused DreamWorks of stealing fictionalized portions of her 1989 historical novel “Echo of Lions” and is seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the release of “Amistad.” A hearing on the request is scheduled for Dec. 8 in U.S. District Court, two days before the film’s release.

While such a request is rarely granted, the case has drawn unusual attention in Hollywood because the dispute involves DreamWorks’ first film by Spielberg, the world’s most successful filmmaker. “Amistad,” about a real-life revolt aboard a Spanish slave ship in 1839, already is being touted by DreamWorks as a potential Oscar contender.

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Clearly angered by DreamWorks’ latest response, Chase-Riboud’s lawyer Pierce O’Donnell said, “The accusation that my client is a plagiarist is a damnable lie. But desperate defendants do desperate things.”

In its legal response to the request for an injunction, DreamWorks contends the invented elements Chase-Riboud says were cribbed from “Echo of Lions” were in fact taken from “Black Mutiny,” which was published some 35 years earlier. DreamWorks owns the rights to “Black Mutiny,” written by William Owens.

DreamWorks, the fledgling studio of Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, cites 88 examples of similarities between “Echo of Lions” and “Black Mutiny,” many of which it claims are “almost verbatim.”

DreamWorks attorney Bertram Fields stopped short of accusing Chase-Riboud of plagiarism, but did say there are “things in her book that she claims she made up that are obviously in ‘Black Mutiny,’ which was 35 years earlier.”

O’Donnell said that “all 88 of the alleged rip-off passages appear in the original historic record of 1839-1841, which is where my client got them from.”

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In October, Chase-Riboud filed a $10-million suit against DreamWorks alleging that “Amistad” plagiarized “the structure and flow” as well as the “fictitious characters, incidents and relationships” from her novel.

Her attorneys later amended the suit, asking for an injunction, after uncovering what they believe is “direct evidence of actual copying” that links “Amistad” screenwriter David Franzoni to “Echo of Lions.” Franzoni had access to “Echo of Lions,” though he says he never read it, when the book was optioned by Dustin Hoffman’s Punch Prods., which engaged Franzoni to write a screenplay about the Amistad mutiny.

Executives at Spielberg’s company, Amblin Entertainment, also had access to “Echo of Lions,” having met with Chase-Riboud nine years ago after her friend Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, at the time an editor at Doubleday, submitted her manuscript for consideration as a movie. At the time, the author was told the material was better suited for a miniseries than a feature film.

Fields said that while “we are not denying we had access to her book, nothing in the film comes from it. Any similarities come from history itself or out of our book ‘Black Mutiny.’ ”

In a declaration, Spielberg states that “Echo of Lions” “was rejected without being referred to me so that I never saw it.”

DreamWorks said it would lose $75 million in production and marketing costs it invested in “Amistad” if the film is enjoined.

The company contends that “Black Mutiny,” which was brought to DreamWorks by actress and “Amistad” producer Debbie Allen, was “the basic source material for its movie, along with extensive volumes of letters, court documents, newspaper articles and other sources.”

Allen, who optioned “Black Mutiny” in 1984, says she began working on a movie idea in 1978, “long before the publication of ‘Echo of Lions.’ ” In 1994, she convinced Spielberg to pursue a movie on the subject and subsequently assigned the book rights to DreamWorks.

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She also claims she has “yet to read ‘Echo of Lions.’ ”

Some industry observers find it hard to believe that with all the research DreamWorks did on the subject of “Amistad,” no one ever came across “Echo of Lions,” which sold more than a half a million copies and was reviewed by major publications.

DreamWorks claims that there are “far more ‘striking similarities’ between ‘Echo of Lions’ and ‘Black Mutiny’ than exist between ‘Echo of Lions’ and ‘Amistad.’ ”

As an example of the 88 alleged similarities, DreamWorks says Chase-Riboud claims to have invented the concept of what her book calls “the abominable executive conspiracy going on against the lives of Africans,” which John Quincy Adams and his wife discuss.

In “Black Mutiny,” Adams repeatedly ponders how he can defeat “the abominable conspiracy--executive and judicial--of this government against the lives of these wretched men.”

O’Donnell acknowledged that his client “consulted ‘Black Mutiny’ ” in researching her novel, “but did not use it as source material for ‘Echo of Lions.’ ” He says Chase-Riboud’s take on the Amistad story “is different than ‘Black Mutiny’ or any other work. The only thing it resembles is ‘Amistad’ [the movie].”

He cited several similarities of the author’s inventions that appear both in “Echo of Lions” and “Amistad,” which appear in neither the historic record (which cannot be copyrighted) nor in “Black Mutiny,” including the fictionalized relationship between the character of Cinque and President John Quincy Adams.

O’Donnell and Fields have discussed a potential settlement, but according to Fields, the talks “went nowhere, because they want millions of dollars and we’re not interested.” Fields said O’Donnell was asking for $2 million, which Fields said was out of line, given that the original purchase price on “Echo of Lions,” when it was optioned by Punch, was just $250,000.

O’Donnell would only say, “DreamWorks doesn’t seem interested in settling.”