Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

tessgerritsen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 130 posts

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#41

Post by tptacek »

spiritplumber wrote: post #24
tptacek wrote: post #23

Here's the whole ruling: https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/wb-gravity-... It's more complicated (of course) than Gerritsen makes it out to be. The Hollywood Reporter does a decent job of explaining the contours: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/warner-bros-knocks-... (and, in fairness, it's more complicated than WB makes it out to be as well). Most of the ruling concerns itself with the admissi…

No, if you buy a company, you buy it lock stock and barrel - that includes outstanding debts, existing deals, and obligations. Otherwise it'd be trivial to make a company go millions in debt, then sell it to an accomplice who would keep the assets and poof the debts. This still happens, of course, but there are fraud laws against it, and successful attempts when they happen generally require wriggling through a lot o…

The last third of the ruling covers the cases under California law in which an acquirer gains successor-in-interest liabilities, and they seem to address exactly the kind of fraud you're referring to.

Also, Gerritsen specifically alleged "fraud", and so the ruling considers whether sufficient facts were presented which, stipulated as true, would have led to a colorable fraud claim.

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#42

Post by voyou »

madsravn wrote: post #28
spiritplumber wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if you buy a company, you buy it lock stock and barrel - that includes outstanding debts, existing deals, and obligations. Otherwise it'd be trivial to make a company go millions in debt, then sell it to an accomplice who would keep the assets and poof the debts. This still happens, of course, but there are fraud laws against it, and successful attempts when they happen generally require wriggling through a lot o…

Let's turn it around. If they (WB) feel like they didn't buy it all, they shouldn't have the intellectual property to make a movie based on the book. Seeing it this way, they never bought anything.

The author clarifies in another post on her blog[1] that she isn't claiming that the film is sufficiently similar to the book that it would infringe on her intellectual property. Rather, she is arguing that she has a contract which guarantees her certain compensation if the studio make a film "based on" her book, and that "based on" doesn't require that the film be so similar to the book that it would infringe her copyright. She references an earlier court case (about the film "Coming to America") which distinguishes what would count as copyright infringement from what would count as a film being "based on" a story, when the words "based on" are used in a contract[2]. This does seem like a slightly headache-inducing legal subtlety.

[1]: http://www.tessgerritsen.com/difference-breach-contract-copy...

[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20111108152730/http://www.degenev...

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#43

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #23

Here's the whole ruling: https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/wb-gravity-... It's more complicated (of course) than Gerritsen makes it out to be. The Hollywood Reporter does a decent job of explaining the contours: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/warner-bros-knocks-... (and, in fairness, it's more complicated than WB makes it out to be as well). Most of the ruling concerns itself with the admissi…

> Most of the ruling concerns itself with the admissibility of various documents for the purposes of a dismissal ruling, which is complicated by the fact that the court has to stipulate all of the plaintiffs facts as true and still find no cause for a lawsuit in order to grant the motion. To add some more color: Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8 only requires a complaint to allege facts, which if proven true, would m…

At one point the judge rebuts one of Gerritsen's arguments, regarding the nature of WB's control over New Line, by acknowledging "judicial notice" of WB's 10-K filings while refusing to evaluate them for truth. What does it mean to "take notice" of something without "considering it for truth"?

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#44

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Her contract stipulated she gets "based upon" and a percentage of net profits.

Now I know nothing about Hollywood but I do know that if you have a percentage of the net then everyone you meet sees a great big L on your forehead. Almost no movie makes a net profit.

You get a percentage of the gross or you are not taken seriously.

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#45

Post by tim333 »

dxhdr wrote: post #11
prawn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead they just screw him..." Just a quick correction, but Tess Gerritsen is female. Otherwise, I agree. Very unfair and they deserve what is (hopefully) coming.

Fixed thanks

Indeed you've got to wonder if the studio would have tried to screw over the writer so blatantly if it had been a he.

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#46

Post by teej »

ubernostrum wrote: post #40
ricardobeat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss the part about the person who wrote the script for the movie being involved in the original project, based on the book?

Did you miss the part where this was a contract issue? Where the author of the book said, literally, "Yeah, Gravity is a great film, but it's not based on my book"? She's trying to argue that a contract she made with one company would somehow jump across multiple acquisitions, mergers and organizational changes and begin binding a different company that made a movie she admits wasn't based on her book. And that's why…

I think it's completely rational to assume that mergers and acquisitions would assign all assets, liabilities, and obligations to the purchasing entity. Given the history of Hollywood Accounting, I think it's also rational to assume that WB is trying to use legal loopholes to weasel their way out of obligations.

That being said, I thought the bulk of WBs case wasn't that they weren't beholden to her contract, but that the movie GRAVITY is a derivative of a different work entirely.

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#47

Post by tptacek »

ricardobeat wrote: post #39
ubernostrum wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, some of the issues seem to be: 1. The movie "Gravity" is primarily an action/special-effects pageant about an astronaut trying to get safely back to Earth after an accident destroys the space station she was on. The book "Gravity" is a medical techno-thriller about a doctor in space fighting a disease outbreak on a space station. Reasonable people can probably disagree about whether the movie, given its signifi…

Did you miss the part about the person who wrote the script for the movie being involved in the original project, based on the book?

The notion of an "original" product causally linked to the WB-produced film _Gravity_ assumes facts not in evidence.

Gerritsen alleges that the film she worked with Katja on formed a basis for WB's film by dint of Cuaron's involvement in both projects. In the earlier project, Cuaron is alleged to have been "attached" to the project. In the WB production, Cuaron and his son wrote the entire screenplay.

The film term of art "attached" doesn't have a precise meaning. "Attached" can be an indicator of someone's commitment to a project --- a spectrum from "aware of" through "interested in" through "attached" through "committed". It could also mean that the person is sponsoring the project and shepherding it through the development process.

At no point does Gerritsen allege that Cuaron's screenplay included any of Gerritsen's writing. At best, her claim is to the storyline --- the ideas --- of the WB film.

What Gerritsen is saying --- informally, in explaining her reason for deciding to pursue the case, and also in rebutting WB's claim that Gerritsen had already conceded the film wasn't based on her work --- is that she had always felt that the WB project had an uncanny resemblance to her own story, but that she didn't have a smoking gun until she discovered Cuaron has been "attached" to the earlier project without her knowledge.

The fact that the author of the book and a contributor to the punch-up of the screenplay was unaware that one of the most famous directors in Hollywood was "attached" to the project suggests that the word "attached" was meant in its more casual meaning.

But the fact that Cuaron and his son wrote a screenplay involving a novice astronaut marooned on the ISS after being made aware of a project with a similar story suggests that there's some link.

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#48

Post by FrankenPC »

It seems to me a safer way to sell intellectual property rights would be to place a legal caveat that if the purchasing company is dissolved/acquired for any reason, the contract is null and void and the rights revert back to the original owner.

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#49

Post by charlesdm »

bsder wrote: post #17
chrisbennet wrote: post #9

Even if they honor the contract she will get nothing besides being credited. Her contract states that she gets a percentage of the profits - and the movie will probably never make a profit. Return of the Jedi never made a profit "despite having earned $475 million at the box-office against a budget of $32.5 million" (Wikipedia "Hollywood Accounting") Very sad.

Yeah, there is a reason why everybody who negotiates a contract with Hollywood or the music industry asks for percentage of gross , not net.

One wonders why not everyone just negotiates gross then?

Is it because people are that inexperienced, that some rookies will still fall for net profit thing? Heck, I'm not in film, and even I know not to ask for net. :P

Re: My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood

#50

Post by spiritplumber »

sukilot wrote: post #29
spiritplumber wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar problem a good while ago, on a much smaller scale, when a company that was buying land to put solar panels on it went bankrupt - essentially, they bought the panels, installed them on land that was actually belonging to another company that belonged to the crook's wife, and then declared bankruptcy after setting up some deal with the wife's company whereby it would get first rights to the assets (the…

In your story, fair and criminal are not exclusive. So the cultural bias was more about if you could expect to be punished by law.

Good point. That's the problem - what's honest and what's legal should... well, at least have some correlation!
Post reply on HN