Novelist Urges Court to Block Spielberg Film

Unearthing what they say is evidence of “deliberate literary piracy,” attorneys for an author claiming director Steven Spielberg stole ideas from her historical novel in making his movie “Amistad” filed for a preliminary injunction Monday to block the film’s December release.

While claims of plagiarism are common in the movie business, it’s rare to seek such an injunction and even more unusual and costly to obtain one. In 1996, a New York judge granted a preliminary injunction against Universal Studios’ release of “12 Monkeys,” when an artist sued over the use of his copyrighted drawing in the film. The movie wasn’t blocked, however, because a settlement quickly was negotiated.

Last month, author Barbara Chase-Riboud filed a $10-million suit against DreamWorks, alleging “Amistad” cribbed “the structure and flow” as well as the “fictitious characters, incidents and relationships” from her 1989 historical novel, “Echo of Lions,” about a true-life failed revolt aboard a Spanish slave ship in 1839.

DreamWorks lawyer Bert Fields said that there is “absolutely no merit” to Chase-Riboud’s suit and that no one can copyright historical events. “For her to try and stop the film is a disgrace--she’s doing it only for money.”

The “Amistad” case has taken on an unusual level of interest in Hollywood, presumably because it involves the most successful filmmaker in the world and his first directorial outing for his fledgling studio, DreamWorks SKG, co-founded with music mogul David Geffen and former Disney Studios chief Jeffrey Katzenberg. “Amistad,” one of the upcoming holiday season’s most anticipated releases, is being talked about in Hollywood as one of the year’s major Oscar hopefuls.

Chase-Riboud, though little known in Hollywood, is a noted author whose works include the acclaimed 1979 novel “Sally Hemings,” about the purported relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave.

The author’s lead attorney, Pierce O’Donnell, tackling his first plagiarism suit since winning the high-profile Art Buchwald case against Paramount Pictures eight years ago, said Monday, “While I always suspected the actual copying of ‘Echo of Lions,’ when I recently developed concrete evidence of plagiarism, I decided to move for the rarely granted preliminary injunction.”

O’Donnell amended Chase-Riboud’s suit after uncovering “direct evidence of actual copying” that links David Franzoni, the credited screenwriter of “Amistad,” to Chase-Riboud’s “Echo of Lions.”

Added as defendants in the suit alongside DreamWorks are Dustin Hoffman’s New York-based movie company, Punch Productions, which optioned Chase-Riboud’s novel in February 1993 and chose Franzoni as the writer on its “Echo of Lions Project,” and Penguin Books, publisher of the novelization of “Amistad.”

Franzoni won a recent Writer’s Guild arbitration against Steven Zaillian (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”), awarding him sole screenwriting credit on “Amistad.”

Franzoni’s attorney, Linda Lichter, acknowledged that while her client had met with executives at Warner Bros. to pitch the idea, she alleges “he had his own take on the story” and “he never read ‘Echo of Lions.’ ”

Regarding the connection of Franzoni, Punch and “Echo of Lions,” Fields, who also represents Punch, says, “I don’t care how many suspicious links they think they’ve unearthed. There’s nothing in the film taken from her book.”

In a declaration filed in court Monday, Chase-Riboud said, “I feel that I have been violated by the theft of my creative work by DreamWorks and am at a loss to understand why Mr. Spielberg would not have sought to purchase ‘Echo of Lions’ and give me a screen credit.”

Others in Hollywood’s creative community are pondering the same question, particularly because the rights to historical novels are relatively inexpensive by Hollywood standards.

Nine years ago, not long before Chase-Riboud’s novel was published, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a friend of the author’s and at the time an editor at Doubleday, submitted a copy of the manuscript to Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment. Executives there met with Chase-Riboud but shortly thereafter told her they saw “too many obstacles in adapting [the book] to a feature film.”

In February 1993, Punch bought a 12-month option on her book, then renewed for two six-month periods and one additional month. Hoffman was considering playing the role of John Quincy Adams in the movie version, and Barry Levinson was interested in directing.

Around March 1995, Punch let its option lapse, and “less than two months” later, Chase-Riboud alleges, “DreamWorks took over the project, putting Franzoni on its payroll as the writer.” The author claims that an early version of the shooting script for “Amistad” that surfaced at DreamWorks was titled “The Other Lion.”

In November 1996, Chase-Riboud said she was shocked to read DreamWorks’ announcement that the first film Spielberg would direct for the new studio was “Amistad.” Through her agent, Chase-Riboud said, she contacted DreamWorks executives to remind them about her book and offered to consult on the movie, asking whether her work had been used as a reference in “Amistad,” to which the reply was “the ship has already sailed on the project.”

After a series of requests, DreamWorks provided her lawyers a copy of the shooting script, in which Chase-Riboud found “numerous striking similarities” with her novel that “have no basis in historical record and are solely my creative expression of history or my creative inventions.”

She states that after attending a foreign-press screening of “Amistad” in New York (unbeknownst to DreamWorks) last week, she discovered that “some of the similarities between the shooting script and the novel pointed out [earlier] by my lawyers have been edited out.”

In their motion for an injunction, her lawyers wrote: “In a flurry of activity, DreamWorks has attempted to alter the movie on the eve of its release in order to masquerade its plagiarism.”

The author claims both her work and “Amistad” feature a fictional black abolitionist character living in New England and the made-up relationship between Cinque, the rebellion leader, and John Quincy Adams, who in real life defended Cinque before the Supreme Court but never met him.

DreamWorks says that it did not use any portion of “Echo of Lions” as its source material. The company says Spielberg became interested in pursuing a project about 18 months ago when actress Debbie Allen pitched the idea based on a book she had optioned called “Black Mutiny,” by William Owens.

Despite extensive research, DreamWorks says, it never came across Chase-Riboud’s novel, which was reviewed by major publications and sold more than 500,000 copies.

Fields, who said he has both read “Echo of Lions” and seen “Amistad” about a week ago, says that “nothing came from the book into this film. Stuff came from history into the film.”

He says that the black abolitionist character (Theodore Joadson) in “Amistad” is “radically different” from Chase-Riboud’s erudite character, Henry Braithwaite, and that the meeting between Cinque and Adams in her novel “is totally different from the one in the film.”

A hearing on the request for an injunction has been set for Dec. 8 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, two days before the film’s scheduled release. But sources suggest a settlement is more likely than a court battle. They say Spielberg would rather not have the testify in such a case, and they note that Chase-Riboud couldn’t afford to post the huge bond typically ordered in these cases. In her motion, the author has requested a nominal bond of $10,000.