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A Different Kind of Dodgeball
by Richard Horgan |
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2/2/2007 at 4:13:15 PM |
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It’s not often that writers suing Hollywood for copyright infringement make positive headway. But that’s the case with a long-simmering court case involving the 2004 Vince Vaughn-Ben Stiller comedy Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.
Last Friday, a judge in New York District Court denied a motion by 20th Century Fox for summary judgment against Ernando Ashoka Thomas and David Price. What this means basically is that the pair’s claim that Rawson Marshall Thurber, the WGA-credited author of Dodgeball, wrote the near identical script Underdogs a few months after accessing their 2001 screenplay Dodgeball: The Movie will now likely be allowed to go to trial.
Thurber (pictured above), who also directed Dodgeball, graduated in 1999 from USC’s prestigious Peter Stark Producing Program. In an interview with FilmStew a few years ago, Thurber said among other things: “So I’m sitting in my Hollywood apartment and I’m writing the role of Peter for Vince Vaughn and I’m writing the role of White Goodman for Ben Stiller, never imagining that I would get them. But to get them both is just a bull’s-eye within a bull’s-eye.” But according to the plaintiffs, it was more a case of William Morris agent in training Sean Redick or WMA literary rep Gregory McKnight passing along a copy of their script in the spring of 2001.
In her January 26th Opinion, under the heading “Degree of Similarity,” Judge Shira Scheindlin outlines a number of character and plot line points shared by the two scripts. Among those that caught my eye are:
- Both coaches are wheelchair-bound and use unorthodox training methods, including giving their players a slimy green power drink as part of their training. They both die in freak accidents in the middle of competition and come back as wisdom-filled ghosts. (Rip Torn played the part of Patches O’Houlihan in the film.)
- In terms of the plaintiffs’ character of Gordo vs. the Hollywood Dodgeball character of Gordon (Stephen Root), they’re both overweight, they both must overcome a flaw, and both do so by miraculously nearly single-handedly eliminating almost every player on the opposing team.
Scheindlin also references the suspicious fact that after months and months of writer’s block, Thurber suddenly uncorked his Underdogs gem in a very short time, after the spring 2001 window during which he is alleged to have gotten the plaintiffs’ script. Thurber worked as an intern at WMA in 1998-99, but it is after a meeting that subsequent spring between plaintiff Thomas, co-director Greg James and Redick to discuss their independent film Raw Fish that Thurber may well have been given the plaintiffs’ script. (During that meeting, Redick definitely took receipt of a copy of the Dodgeball: The Movie script.)
You can get lost for hours in these kinds of legal documents. For example, it was as an actor a few years later in the summer of 2003 that co-plaintiff Price got hold from his manager of Thurber’s shooting script, for the purposes of determining whether or not there was a role for him to pursue. The moment he read it, a series of events were set in motion, culminating with the filing of a copyright infringement lawsuit in June of 2005.
Hollywood often likes to settle these kinds of matters before they go to court, as per some of the examples I cite in a previous Hollywood Spin article. But something tells me that unless 20th Century Fox offers up a whole lot of that Borat bounty, Thomas and Price are going to take their chances with a jury. As the plaintiffs’ attorney Guy Cohen puts it: “For some reason, 20th Century Fox have chosen to fight this case to the death, but ultimately they’re going to regret that choice.”
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