Spielberg accused of plagarism over DISTURBIA!

Matt here€ It's taken a long time for the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust to get their case together to file a lawsuit against Dreamworks over their modest $80 million domestic grossed 2007 thriller Disturbia but they they have finally done it this week, officially filing their claim yesterday in Manhatten. Last year's film was budgeted at $20 million, so it's $60 million profit hardly set the world alight for the studio but the Trust who obtained the rights to Cornell Woolrich's short story "Murder From a Fixed Point" upon which Hitchcock's classic 50's film Rear Window was based onshortly after the author's death in 1968, never received a penny. Way back in January 2007 when the first trailer was released I used the headline, Disturbia sure looks a lot like Hitchcock€™s Rear Window. And I remember nearly every review of the film referenced Rear Window in it's analysis. It was so blatantly a remake. So, so blatant. You can't believe they tried to shrug it under the carpet for so long. The lawsuit claims that Spielberg (who produced the movie and is named as the defendant here.. oh yeah they went straight for the big guy) committed copyright infringement and breach of contract for making the adaptation without obtaining permission from the copyright holder.

"In the Disturbia film the defendants purposefully employed immaterial variations or transparent rephrasing to produce essentially the same story as the Rear Window story... "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,"

Does Spielberg really have a leg to stand on here? Even director D.J. Caruso was very much aware of the similarities to Hitch's film, pulling out this quote to the L.A. Daily News last year...

"Obviously, Rear Window was a big inspiration,'' Caruso told the Los Angeles Daily News last year. "I embraced it instead of running away from it. But I didn't want it to be a remake because that would be silly. You can't remake Rear Window."

Here are some of the reviews as collated by E! Online, which all referenced Hitchcock's original (seriously, nearly every reviewer mentioned it, including our own Chief Film Critic Michael Edwards.

"Despite a serious (some would say blatant) homage to Rear Window, Disturbia finds solid-enough footing as a coming-of-age crime thriller." (San Antonio Express-News) "Christopher Landon gets credit for writing the story of Disturbia. But I'm not sure watching Rear Window qualifies as writing a story." (Richmond Times Dispatch) "Neither of the writers behind Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 masterpiece, Rear Window, is credited in DreamWorks' new thriller Disturbia. But if the filmmakers had any shame, they would have at least gotten a 'story by' tag." (Reno Gazette-Journal) "Teen Gets a Scary Peep at a Creep; Disturbia Puts High-Tech Spin on Rear Window (Detroit Free-Press headline) "This worthy film openly honors Hitchcock's work in Rear Window without merely ripping it off€”kind of like a bold director updating a Shakespeare play in a contemporary setting." (Denver Post) "The teen thriller Disturbia...is basically an uncredited remake of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock classic Rear Window." (Los Angeles Times)

DISTURBIA TRAILER

REAR WINDOW TRAILER

Discuss: As Disturbia was so blatantly a remake, they are guilty right?

source - reuters