West Virginia Business Litigation

    Sooner or later, just about every movie becomes the subject of litigation.  So perhaps it's no surprise that "We Are Marshall" is now at the center of a lawsuit.  Deborah Novak and John Witek filed suit in federal court in California on June 20, alleging fraud, copyright infringement, breach of contract, and unfair trade practices against Warner Bros. Pictures and others involved with the movie.  "We Are Marshall" was released in December 2006, and deals with the 1970 plane crash in which 75 people, including 45 Marshall University players, coaches, and staff died, and the process of rebuilding the team.   

    Novak and Witek, who live and work in Huntington, West Virginia, home of Marshall, made the Emmy-winning documentary, "Ashes to Glory," and claim that their work was unfairly used in the movie, and cite 24 specific similarities between "Ashes to Glory" and "We Are Marshall."  Here's the complaint, courtesy of www.courthousenews.com.

    Litigation like this often centers on who had the idea (or wrote the screenplay or novel) that became the movie.  That was the basis for Art Buchwald's lawsuit against Paramount Studios over "Coming To America," which starred Eddie Murphy.  Incidentally, that litigation was the subject of a book by Pierce O'Donnell, Buchwald's lawyer, entitled Fatal Subtraction: The Inside Story of Buchwald v. Paramount, which describes the creative accounting practices employed by movie studios when calculating a movie's "net" profit.