Hollywood Lawsuits

It’s known as a “sue-crazy town”. Hollywood has long been famous for it. People here have a long history of threatening legal action. It generally amounts to the application of lawyer-induced financial pain to coerce or punish business counterparts, rivals and competitors.

Showbiz lawsuits seldom make it to court. The threat of an expensive suit usually results in a financial settlement, often with non-disclosure, non-disparagement clauses all around. The Godfather cliché, “It’s business, not personal” applies. But then there are times when it doesn’t apply. The juiciest cases, journalistically and financially, are the ones where one or both of the parties to the suit have come to hate each other so much that they no longer care how much money this is costing them. Two of the cases in this post concern Ian Fleming, James Bond’s haughty creator. Another is about the time that Mike Myers so utterly, totally pissed off a major studio that it cost him $20 million. Sometimes it’s the principle of the thing. More often, it’s the money.

In the Fifties, the James Bond series achieved moderate success, but they weren’t yet celebrated best sellers, at least in the USA, until the JFK era. In 1958 Ian Fleming formed a brief partnership with Anglo-Irish film producer Kevin McClory to bring James Bond to the screen. The first film would be called Thunderball.

McClory hired Jack Whittingham as co-writer of the script. Today Whittingham is all-but-unknown, but it was he who came up with SPECTRE, as well as a more high-tech tone. Fleming’s idea of romance was rather brusque, to say the least. McClory and Whittingham improved on him. Fleming assumed his readers were male; his collaborators knew that, handled right, Bond’s masculine edginess could appeal to female as well as male cinema audiences.

But the deal gradually came apart. One of McClory’s other films died at the box office, hobbling his ability to get Bond financed. There was a brief-lived hope of getting Alfred Hitchcock involved with Thunderball, but he declined. McClory’s binding option had run out. Ian Fleming was free to make the deal with Al Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli that would result in more than half a century of James Bond.

Fleming owned Bond, all right; but he didn’t have sole rights to any of the work done in 1958 and ’59 on that one specific screenplay, so it was a shock to Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham when in March 1961 Thunderball the novel was published, solely under Ian Fleming’s name. It was little more than Fleming’s own quick novelization of the script the three men had worked on for a year. McClory and Whittingham promptly sued the famous author on the bare-knuckle grounds of plagiarism. (Whittingham eventually withdrew, unable to afford enough of the lawyer bill to stay in the game.)

The case went to the UK courts in 1963, and there’s no other way to put it; the Queen’s bench royally handed Fleming’s rear end to him. He permanently lost the film and television rights to Thunderball, including remake rights. Fleming retained the publishing rights and income from the book, provided each subsequent edition co-credited McClory and Whittingham for the original story.

Why did Fleming think he could get away with it? We’ll never know for sure, but Occam’s razor points to sheer lazy arrogance. Everyone knows he’s the author of Bond, dear boy. But what counted was, he wasn’t the sole author of Thunderball. As with comic caricatures like Arrested Development’s Lucile Bluth, like Will and Grace’s Karen Walker, Fleming radiated a blithe assumption that the laws are for little people. It was his costliest mistake.

Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli bore no grudge; the suit was Fleming’s problem, not theirs. They let Kevin McClory take the producer credit when Thunderball was finally brought to the screen in 1965. Adjusted for inflation, it was the highest box office Bond until 2012’s Skyfall, 47 years later. What didn’t make Cubby happy was that remake clause, activated with some acrimony with McClory’s independent production of Never Say Never Again in 1983. After McClory’s death in 2006, EON Productions bought out the remaining rights, unifying ownership of the series and at last ending the vestiges of the Thunderball legal dispute.

In 1963, MGM startled the entertainment industry when they announced they were developing an original project with Ian Fleming called Solo, “a James Bond for television” that would air on NBC in fall ’64. Most startled of all, indeed dismayed, were Bond’s producers in London, who wasted no time indignantly calling in lawyers. The American studio and network hastily withdrew, revising their build-up for what was now called The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

When the show aired, it turned into a real moneymaker for Leo the Lion. Hence, the cover story, the publicity version of how it came to be: Metro producer Norman Felton was sent to approach Fleming while he was in New York, reasoning that the British-born Felton would hit it off with him. They met for dinner at the hotel, discussed concepts, and over the following months the two would meet sporadically. Fleming’s ideas about a new spy show were written down in ink. Then, (in MGM’s telling), regrettably the Bond producers were so jealous that Fleming withdrew, gallantly accepting only a single dollar in payment for his work.

I believed it at the time; everyone accepted it. I’ll say up front that I don’t have any secret info to undercut Normal Felton’s studio-approved version of the story. But now, long after it matters to anybody, with a couple of decades of better understanding of how Hollywood does things, I’m going to gently debunk the accepted story of U.N.C.L.E.

Let’s start with what seems indisputably true: the two men were seen dining together at a New York hotel. Fleming had worked with American networks before, and although he was snobbish, he was also money hungry. He was known to be looking for other “franchises” besides James Bond. Felton’s starting ideas may have appealed to Fleming because of the many ways he wasn’t looking for Bond. The hero would be American and work in New York City; he’d be part of a multinational law enforcement agency that would include Russians, maybe linked to the United Nations. The atmosphere would be high-tech and corporate.

The name Napoleon Solo was apparently Fleming’s idea; he’d forgotten that a minor villain in Goldfinger was called Solo (he’s the gangster whose life ended in a memorably crushed Lincoln Continental). He is also said to have suggested April Dancer as Solo’s female counterpart, and that does sound like Fleming.

But after that the story hits several snags. Those handwritten notes? Written in Felton’s handwriting, not Fleming’s, on a handful of blank telegram forms. Okay, Felton wrote them himself, right after each meeting with Fleming. It could happen. But except for that initial dinner, according to Felton every one of their subsequent face to face meetings was done via long late night walks in Manhattan. To me, that’s an improbable “tell”.

Ian Fleming died in August 1964, a month before the first episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. would air, so we have only Norman Felton’s word. My own theory is he may simply have gotten in over his head. He tried and ultimately failed to land a commitment from Fleming but nervously hoped for the best, not tipping off the studio that the prize had slipped off the hook.

Looking into the threatened lawsuit now, it wasn’t that EON Productions was suing to prevent Ian Fleming’s valuable ideas from being stolen; no, EON and Fleming’s own estate sued to prevent MGM from even claiming that the show was ever based on his ideas, other than a few informal suggestions of character names. In 1963 he accepted one dollar as legal formal payment for those suggestions, allowing him to sever any other connection to Metro’s TV project.

We’ve gone from James Bond’s courtroom adventures to Napoleon Solo’s. Now, how about Austin Powers? Or at least his actor? At the turn of the century, Mike Myers was at his box office peak with the Powers films, so Universal, through Ron Howard and Brian Glazer’s company, hired him to write and direct a movie based on his SNL sketch, Sprockets. It would film in 2000 for release in summer 2001. Austin Powers: The Spy that Shagged Me, the second film in the series, outperformed the first, unusual for a sequel, so Myers and his agent managed to double his price to $20 million. Stars never had such financial clout, before or since. But trouble was brewing in showbiz paradise.

Now, after 14 script drafts, Mike Myers claimed he needed more time before cameras rolled. With pre-production in its late stages, getting ready to shoot the film was already costing a million dollars a week. Imagine Productions (Ron Howard and Brian Glazer) was fed up with the stalling. They felt like they were negotiating with a financial gun to their heads. Myers claimed he was a filmmaker with too much integrity to insult his fans with an inferior script. The other side retorted, “And who wrote the script? Myers.” Suits and countersuits flew back and forth.

Industry disputes are generally taken care of quietly, sensibly, out of view of the press. But once in a while, both parties in a legal wrangle get so emotional about it that they don’t give a damn how many billable law hours they’re ringing up. This can be a self-destructive impulse, but not necessarily a totally irrational one if you’re the aggrieved party in a suit. Imagine’s lawyer Bert Fields said “Brian and Ron wanted a movie, not a lawsuit, but Mr. Myers left them no choice. Now we just want to get the case to trial and let the jury and the public learn what Mike Myers is really all about.” In the end, both sides settled. Myers missed out on his payday. The movies all but gave up on him.

Usually, though, Hollywood doesn’t like to burn its bridges. You never know who you’ll be working with tomorrow. Rob Long says, “In show business, the term ‘friends’ is so expansive it encompasses the term ‘enemies’”. When brittle egos are involved, that line can be a thin one, and when it’s crossed, things get personal fast. Top agent Mike Ovitz once said, “I always conducted myself knowing that Hollywood is a dog-eat-dog town. I forgot that the other dogs have livid scars and long memories”.