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Vancouver Sun (10/Jan/1990) - The story's the thing, court told: Rear Window legal fight no open-and-shut case

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The story's the thing, court told: Rear Window legal fight no open-and-shut case

There was a taste of Hollywood at the Supreme Court as lawyers for Jimmy Stewart and the estate of director Alfred Hitchcock battled with lawyers for the man who holds the rights to the story on which the movie Rear Window was based.

The justices heard arguments Tuesday in a copyright dispute that could be worth millions of dollars and set a precedent for the way future deals will be handled in the movie business.

The justices seemed to enjoy the give and take during questioning of lawyers in Stewart vs. Abend, No. 88-2102, even bantering about hypothetical sequels to Rear Window.

The arguments came a day after a California court ruled that humor columnist Art Buchwald was the creator of the concept for Eddie Murphy's hit movie Coming to America. The Rear Window case also raises questions of authors' rights, but under difference circumstances.

The dispute centres on writer Cornell Woolrich's short story It had To Be Murder, later retitled Rear Window, published in a 1942 issue of Dime Detective Magazine.

Woolrich assigned, for a total of $9,250, the rights to this story and four others to a production company. The rights to the Rear Window story were subsequently sold for $10,000 to a production company formed by Stewart and Hitchcock called Patron Productions.

The 1954 movie stars Kelly and Stewart, who believe a murder has taken place in a neighbor's apartment that Stewart can see across a courtyard through his back window. It made nearly $8 million.

The legal action concerns the 1984 rerelease of the movie on videotape, which generated an additional $12 million.

Sheldon Abend, a literary researcher who had acquired the rights to the short story when the author died in 1968, sued the Stewart/Hitchcock production company, maintaining that the videotape was a derivative use of the original story, which was still copyrighted. He maintained he was entitled to a percentage of the profits resulting from the redistribution.

The producers say the rights to the rereleased material follow the movie inspired by the story.

The law in question is the highly technical and undramatic 1909 Copyright Act and its 1976 revision, which altered the time and procedures for renewing copyrights. Lower courts have issued conflicting decisions on how to apply the law to similar disputes.

Abend's lawyers argue that the Stewart/Hitchcock company is attempting to escape "the risks they chose to bear" when they bought the original rights. They say it is "exploiting copyrighted literary materials without paying compensation."

The production company responds that such a limit on use of rights that have been purchased could make it too risky to produce movies.

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