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"Six Feet" Under Fire
The funeral parlor-based dramedy, which just racked up a leading 23 Emmy nominations, including Best Drama, was the target of a $30 million federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court by a Los Angeles screenwriter, who claims execs at the cable network and its parent company, Time Warner Entertainment, stole her idea.
Gwen O'Donnell says she wrote her mortuary oeuvre, The Funk Parlor, nearly five years ago and registered the script with the Writers Guild of America in February 1998. She sold the screenplay to an indie production company called Funky Films (which is currently putting the finishing touches on the feature).
Funky Films is a coplaintiff with O'Donnell in the suit.
The complaint claims that Chris Albrecht, at the time HBO's head of original programming, "gained access" to the script in the summer of 1999. Months later, the cable network had corralled Alan Ball, the Oscar-winning writer of American Beauty, and convinced him to make a show about a family and their funeral parlor. Six Feet Under premiered on HBO in the summer of 2001.
O'Donnell and Funky Films call Six Feet Under "a blatant ripoff" of The Funk Parlor, citing several similarities between the indie flick and the TV series. Among them: Both focus on a dysfunctional family that lives in their funeral home; each begins with the "untimely and unexpected" death of the family patriarch; the families in both include a gay younger brother and a smart-alecky teenage sister. The success of Six Feet Under, the suit concludes, is "directly attributable" to The Funk Parlor and the plaintiffs are suing for copyright violations.
Hogwash, says HBO. "We haven't seen the lawsuit, but Six Feet Under springs from the imagination of Alan Ball," the network asserts in a statement. "Anyone who suggests otherwise doesn't know what they are talking about."
Just ask J. Davis Reed. The scribe, who also goes by Glenn Kakely, was suing mad at Six Feet Under last year, claiming HBO stole the idea from his funeral-friendly treatment for a television series.
Just days after Six Feet Under debuted to boffo ratings and reviews in July 2001, Reed and his lawyer filed their federal copyright-infringement suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, alleging "Six Feet Under contains substantially the same setting, characters, plot, story line, theme, development of story, sequence of events, dialogue and other copyrighted expressions" as Reed's For Heaven Sake.
But the presiding judge ruled there wasn't enough evidence in the suit to immediately grant an injunction barring HBO from airing future episodes, essentially deep-sixing the suit. Reed subsequently dropped the complaint.
As for the Funk fight, no court dates have been set.
Production begins this month on the third season of Six Feet Under.
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