Lawsuits in Hollywood are par for the course and there are two sides to every story. And Jake Mandeville-Anthony’s side says he wrote Cars 2, or at least invented many of the concepts and characters Pixar decided to use.
“According to the complaint, he created a three-part screenplay titled “Cookie & Co.,” about the true-life adventure race-car driver Michael Owen Perkins, who won a 1988 race, and a second work titled “Cars,” which included a treatment, sample screenplay, 46 animated car character descriptions, 10 cars character sketches, and a marketing and merchandising plan.”
“Mandeville says he sent copies of the works to various production companies, including Disney. The plaintiff also says he met in person with a Lucasfilm executive named Jim Morris in 1993 and delivered copies of his work. Pixar and Lucasfilm have had relations with each other since the 1980s, when Pixar acquired certain divisions of the George Lucas company. In 2005, according to the complaint, Morris joined Pixar and is currently general manager at the company.”
“In Manderville’s latest complaint, he points to a long list of similarities among the characters in each of the works. Both have characters named ”Stanley” modeled after a Model T Ford. Both have lead characters modeled after a “James Aston-Martin” sports car. Both feature broken down truck characters, doctors as authority figures, glitzy showgirl movie star females, Italians, rich business cars past their prime, and so on.”
Let me first say that thousands of treatments and scripts run past tables of studios every year, and while there are some co-incidences that do happen.
I don’t think that it is co-incidence that paralell projects come out all the time. These “offers” by potential writers may get rejected and they “inspire” their own versions. I think we know what is going on there too.
But for every legimate story there is some guy with a related story concept looking to cash in on a $450million.
Does he have a case? Or a case of the green monster with a side order of greed?
