New Fight for Celebrities’ Heirs

Many believed Robyn Astaire’s crusade to control use of her dead husband Fred’s image ended last October with a U.S. Supreme Court rejection of her lawsuit involving a dance video.

But they don’t know Astaire.

On Tuesday, the former jockey brought her cause--to protect deceased celebrities’ images--to Sacramento, where she has persuaded some legislators to join her fight.

Astaire, who was married to the dancer until his death in 1987, piloted a private plane to the Capitol, carrying her attorney, her publicist and Bela Lugosi Jr., who controls the rights to the image of his famous father and those of the Three Stooges.

The bill in question, SB 209, was introduced by Senate Leader John Burton (D-San Francisco), who is no stranger to celebrity privacy issues, having handled the anti-paparazzi legislation after Princess Diana’s death that became law in January.

By removing several exemptions in existing law, Burton’s measure would increase the rights of heirs like Astaire to prevent commercial use of images--rights already protected for living celebrities. It also would extend those rights 70 years after death, up from 50 years.

In testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Astaire gave the example of Mickey Mouse, whose likeness cannot be re-created without Disney’s permission.

“Why should corporations be treated better than people?” she asked.

“What do the heirs have left except this right?” added Burton.

The bill cleared the committee on an 8-0 vote, but only after two hours of intense, sometimes red-faced debate.

Those championing the importance of free speech and bemoaning the legislation’s potentially chilling effect on creativity ranged from studio executives to UC Berkeley law professor Stephen R. Barnett.

Barnett maintained that merely extending the rights 20 more years upsets the tricky balance between the rights of the famous person and the interests of the public that made them famous.

Warner Bros. attorney Jeremy N. Williams said that uses of famous people’s images in films already must be carefully monitored. “Don’t make us censor our artists any more than we have to,” he said.

Screen Actor’s Guild President Richard Masur countered that digital technology increases the urgency of added protections because of the ability to “morph” a dead performer into a live one.

The back and forth was nothing new for Astaire, who left the hearing grinning at the vote in her favor.

Ignoring accusations that she was greedy, Astaire spent nearly a decade doggedly working her way through the court system after a dance studio’s how-to video featured 90 seconds of Fred Astaire clips without permission from, or remuneration to, the star’s estate.

She got started, she said in an interview before Tuesday’s hearing, after discovering the video advertised in a mail order catalog as “Fred Astaire teaches you how to dirty dance.”

“Fred Astaire was like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval--my God!” she said. “I could only think about how my husband would’ve reacted to it.”

In October, she lost a U.S. Supreme Court appeal in that case, leaving intact a lower court decision that the video was in essence a film, which would therefore be excluded under state law.

Burton’s bill removes that exemption.