Jul 14, 2006 03:06 PM
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Hollywood, 1:28 PM
Tue Feb 9
56 posts in the last 24 hours
The producers of Crash are suing one another again, this time over what one faction of the team believes to be the misleading promotion of the forthcoming Lifetime TV series Angela's Eyes. The LAT reports that Alpha Crashers Paul Haggis, Mark Harris, and Bobby Moresco feel that producers Cathy Shulman and Tom Nunan are deceiving the housebound female Lifetime-watching public by billing their new series as from "the producers of the Academy Award-winning movie Crash", and are willing to sue to stop the opportunistic treachery of a somewhat misleading credit:
That description isn't sitting well with several of the other producers of "Crash," including the film's director and co-writer Paul Haggis, Mark R. Harris and co-writer Bobby Moresco, who have joined in a lawsuit against Lifetime demanding that the tagline be removed from billboards, radio ads and other promotional materials. [...]"We are asking for this to stop. It's just not correct," said celebrity attorney Richard L. Charnley, who filed the lawsuit in Santa Monica Superior Court on Wednesday seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the network's use of the description. He said the network has gone "out of its way" to leverage Nunan's involvement in "Crash" while also diluting the value of future projects being developed by Haggis, Harris and Moresco.
A settlement in the dispute aimed at imposing greater specificity to the credit could result in some kind of absurd compromise, like new ads altering the line to read "from some of the producers of Crash," or "from two members of the Crash team who made a lot of phone calls, but not from the guy who wrote and directed it or his two pals." And while we hate to take sides in such matters, we do see Haggis' point in seeking legal remedy: He really can't risk executives in this town thinking that he'd waste his heavy-handed magic on a Lifetime series when bigger players are still hungry for his hacky, obvious gifts.
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