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Spielberg sued for plagiarizing Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW

September 9th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Steve stared too long and stole too much

According to the lawsuit, filed by the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust, Steve Spielberg’s Dreakworks Entertainment shamelessly “borrowed” the plot from The Master’s Rear Window for last year’s Disturbia.

High five me!

According to Yahoo! Movies, “Dreamworks, its parent company Viacom Inc, and Universal Pictures, a unit of General Electric Co’s NBC Universal, are accused of copyright infringement and breach of contract for making Disturbia without first obtaining permission from the copyright holders, the suit said.”

Executive Producer Steve is named as a defendant.

Instead of a convalescing Jimmy Stewart witnessing a killing across the courtyard, Disturbia places Shia “Indy, Jr.” LaBeouf under house arrest and has him peep on a murderous neighbor.

The rights to Cornell Woolrich’s short story Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint, were purchased by Hitch and James Stewart in 1953 and transformed into Rear Window. In 1971, Hollywood producer Sheldon Abend bought the rights to the short story. The lawsuit claims that in 1991, Abend obtained “exclusive right to adapt or copy the story.” In 1998, Abend produced a dreadful TV remake designed as a vehicle (no pun intended) for wheelchair bound Christopher Reeve. Abend died in 2003, but the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust filed the lawsuit in New York last week because it claims the makers of Disturbia did not obtain the rights to the story before raping Alfred Hitchcock’s bones.

The Daily Telegraph reports, “The trust complain of copyright infringement and breach of contract. The lawsuit said: “What the defendants have been unwilling to do openly, legitimately and legally, (they) have done surreptitiously, by their back-door use of the Rear Window story without paying compensation. “In the Disturbia film the defendants purposefully employed immaterial variations or transparent rephrasing to produce essentially the same story as the Rear Window story.’”

No word yet on whether the Ford Bebe estate is considering a similar lawsuit for Steve’s using his Monogram serials as the basis for the Indiana Jones series.

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