My son Michael's first feature film MOLLI AND MAX IN THE FUTURE will premiere at SXSW 2023.
 
Molli and Max in The Future is a sci-fi romantic comedy about a man and woman whose orbits repeatedly collide over the course of 12 years, 4 planets, 3 dimensions and one space-cult.

A grounded romantic comedy set in an absurd world, “Molli and Max” takes the character-driven romance of a movie like "When Harry Met Sally" and combines it with a sci-fi universe found in shows like “Futurama or “Rick and Morty." Through a combination of old-school practical visual effects (hand-built models, miniatures, puppets, stop-motion animation, and rear-projection) and cutting-edge technology (Unreal Engine and LED Volumes) the filmmakers have created a universe like no other. Tentacles! Robots! Glorp!

STARRING: Zosia Mamet (Girls, The Flight Attendant), Aristotle Athari (Saturday Night Live), Arturo Castro (Broad City), Okieriete Onaodowan (Broadway’s Hamilton), Erin Darke (Good Girls Revolt), Grace Kuhlenschmidt (Search Party), Michael Chernus (Severance), Aparna Nancherla (Bojack Horseman), Danny Burstein (Broadway’s Moulin Rouge),  Paloma Garcia-Lee (West Side Story) and  Matteo Lane (The Advice Special).
 
The film is the first feature directed by Michael Lukk Litwak whose thesis film won NYU Tisch’s top prizes and Deadline Hollywood voted it the #1 Short Film of 2014. He subsequently directed the entire third season of the series (Snatchers Season 3) for Warner Brothers and has directed numerous commercials and branded content including for Subway, Burger King, Keystone, Macy’s, Verizon, Yahoo, Applebee’s, Squarespace, Spotify and Snapchat.   www.Michaellitwak.com.
 
Produced by Ben J. Murphy (Lucy and Desi), Candice Kuwahara (Milkwater), Mallory Schwartz (Before You Know It), Kate Geller (Casting Director, Shiva Baby), Executive Producers Ted Geogeghan (We Are Still Here) and  Jeanne Elfant Festa (The Bee Gees).  
SCREENING TIMES

Stateside Theatre on Saturday, March 11 at 11:30 AM
Violet Crown Cinema 2 on Tuesday, March 14 at 5:30 PM
Violet Crown Cinema 4 on Tuesday, March 14 at 6:00 PM
Alamo Lamar C on Saturday, March 18 at 11:15 AM

Donald Trump has filed suit against journalist Bob Woodward claiming that Woodward improperly published  audio tapes of their interviews. The interviews were conducted with  the understanding that that Woodward was authoring a book which was published in September 2021 with the title  Rage. Woodward later decided to separately publish the audio tapes of his interviews with Trump.

Trump alleges that the publication of the audio tapes violates his rights because he only consented for the interviews to be used in the book although no written agreement exists to that effect. The lawsuit names Woodward, Simon & Schuster and the publisher’s parent Paramount Global as defendants and seeks damages of $49.98 million dollars. They have denounced the suit as “without merit.”
The case is likely to be thrown out like other Trump lawsuits. Trump’s lawyers do not seem to understand that one of the requirements for copyright is that the work has to be fixed in a tangible medium of expression to be copyrightable. Extemporaneous conversations are not copyrightable because they have not been fixed in a writing, on audio tape, or some other stable medium. Trump did not record these interviews, Woodward did.

Another requirement for copyright is originality. Here Woodward created  his questions, but not Trump’s answers. So, Woodward  may not own the copyright in Trump’s answers  to his questions, but that does not mean that Trump has a copyright interest in them.

In the Estate of Hemingway v. Random House, Inc. (1966), book author A.E. Hotchner authored a book titled  Papa Hemingway. It incorporated long conversations between the author and Ernest Hemingway. They had been close friends for 13 years and went on drinking escapades and travels together. Hotchner took notes and published several articles incorporating their conversations. Hemingway liked the articles. After Hemingway’s death, his estate sues Hotchner, seeking an injunction against the book and damages for infringement of common-law copyright. The court refused to find that Hemingway had any rights in their conversations.

In the case of Falwell v. Penthouse Int'l, Ltd., Jerry Falwell an evangelical fundamentalist minister objected when interviews with  him were published in softcore porn magazine Penthouse. Falwell claimed  that the interview appeared without his consent and contrary to specific conditions given orally to the defendants at the time of the interviews. Reverend Falwell objected to his interview appearing in this publication. However, the court found against Falwell stating:

Plaintiff's claim of copyright is not founded on any existing principle of law, nor is it even analogous  to any of the circumstances which heretofore have been contemplated by the courts. Plaintiff's claim of copyright presupposes that every utterance he makes is a valuable property right. If this were true, the courts would be inundated with claims from celebrities and public figures all of whom may argue that their expressions should also be afforded the extraordinary protection of copyright. Such a result was never contemplated  by the development of the law regarding common law copyright, and such a result would run counter to the firmly established constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press. Falwell v. Penthouse Int'l, Ltd., 521 F. Supp. 1204, 1207-08 (W.D. Va. 1981).

Recently a Florida judge ordered Trump and his lawyer to pay nearly $1 million in sanctions to cover the legal costs of Hillary Clinton and others sued by Trump alleging a conspiracy to target him for criminal prosecution.
 
Read the Rage lawsuit.
 

Investors have filed a class action lawsuit seeking $11 billion in damages against Crypto platform FTX’s  founder Sam Bankman-Fried and various  celebrity endorsers who   promoted the platform, including Shaquille O’Neal,  Larry David, Tom Brady, and Stephen Curry. FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11.
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The lawsuit alleges that the failed  FTX Platform was based upon false representations and   deceptive conduct to take advantage of   unsophisticated investors who made investments. The complaint states  that FTX and its affiliates used  celebrity endorsers to raise funds pouring billions of dollars into the  FTX Platform to keep the company  afloat.

The suit alleges that the endorsers  never disclosed the nature, scope, and amount of compensation they personally received in   exchange for the promotion of the FTX Platform, and  that a  failure to disclose is  a violation of the anti-touting provisions of the federal  securities laws. Furthermore, Plaintiffs alleged that  none of these defendants performed any due diligence prior to marketing   these FTX products to the public.

The lawsuit cites other celebrities similarly accused and prosecuted for failing to disclose their paid   endorsements including  Kim Kardashian and basketball player Paul Pierce. According to the FTC, investors  have lost more than $80 million in crypto scams, due in large part to celebrity endorsements. Kim Kardashian reportedly  settled similar claims this year by the SEC for $1.26 million without admitting any  wrongdoing.

Read the lawsuit

William Sadleir  was sentenced to six years in prison for his participation in two fraudulent schemes relating to investments made by a New York-based investment fund (the “Fund”) in indie film distributor Aviron Pictures, LLC and its affiliated entities. Sadleir pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud, one relating to each of the schemes.
 
Sadleir was the chair and chief executive officer of Aviron and oversaw its operations from in or about 2015 until in or about December 2019.

In the Advertising Scheme, Sadleir  misappropriated millions of dollars that the Fund had invested in Aviron. Sadleir  represented to the Fund that Aviron had invested this money in pre-paid media credits with the advertising placement company MediaCom Worldwide. Sadleir  actually  used a sizable part of those funds for his personal benefit, including to purchase a private residence in Beverly Hills for approximately $14 million dollars.

 In the other scheme, Sadleir  engineered the illicit and fraudulent sale and refinancing of assets worth more than $3 million that secured the Fund’s loans to Aviron. Sadleir  used the forged signature of one of the Fund’s portfolio managers on releases to remove the liens on certain secured assets. He  did so in order to sell or refinance the assets without the Fund’s consent, thus depriving the Fund of its collateral on outstanding loans.

In addition to the prison term, the Judge sentenced Sadleir  to three years of supervised release and ordered Sadleir  to pay $31,597,000 in forfeiture and restitution.
Sadleir was expelled from Aviron in 2020 after he and the company were sued by BlackRock for fraud. He was later charged by federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The 68-year-old producer has also pleaded guilty to money laundering and fraud charges for pocketing nearly $1 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans meant to help Aviron stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Criminal Complaint

SEC Complaint 

U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal in South Florida sentenced Jason Van Eman, a 44-year-old movie producer from Oklahoma to 262 months in prison for his part in a financing scheme that defrauded investors out of more than $60 million. The defendant was also ordered to pay $9 million in restitution.
 
After a six-week jury trial, a  federal jury found Van Eman, doing business as Weathervane Productions, guilty of conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering.  Van Eman promised the victims that his partner Benjamin McConley  would match any funds that the victims contributed to their projects.
 
Van Eman and his co-conspirators then stole the victims’ money by moving it to their personal and corporate bank accounts. To make the scam more credible,  they recruited Benjamin Rafael, a Wells Fargo bank employee, whose role was to assure victims that their cash contributions had been matched and that their money was secure – neither of which was true.
 
Van Eman, McConley, and Rafael used the stolen money to purchase luxury cars, watercraft, real estate, jewelry, home furnishings, designer clothes, and private and commercial air travel. Van Eman used some of the stolen cash to fund movies in which he was cast.  
 
Co-conspirator McConley was sentenced to 13 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Bank employee Benjamin Rafael was sentenced to 30 months in prison plus  three years of supervised release.
 
Van Eman’s credits include producing the Sundance hit “The Tale”  with Laura Dern and Jason Ritter. He has 23 producer  credits and 10 acting credits listed on IMDB.
 
To learn how investors can better protect themselves see my article: The Hollywood Shuffle: Protecting Film Investors published in the Vanderbilt Law Journal.

 
An author’s heirs has sued Paramount Pictures Corporation in federal court over the underlying rights to the  hit movie Top Gun: Maverick, which plaintiffs contend is  a  sequel to the original movie. Ehud Yonay wrote the original 1983 article in California magazine titled “Top Guns,” from which the 1986 motion picture “Top Gun” (the “1986 Film”) was based. According to the plaintiffs, the  recently released 2022 motion picture “Top Gun: Maverick” (the “Sequel”) is also  derived from the article. Yonay’s heirs availed themselves of their right to recover the copyright to the story under the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 203(a)), by sending Paramount a statutory notice of termination and filing it with the Copyright Office as of January 24, 2020.

Under U.S. copyright law, authors (or their survivors), can “terminate” copyright assignments they have previously made in certain circumstances and regain rights to their work. Consequently, even if an author, musician, or filmmaker signed an agreement transferring all rights in their work in perpetuity, the Copyright Act provides that the author can end that grant and demand that the rights revert. Essentially, the author is getting a second chance to make money from his work which may have initially been sold at a time when it did not fetch much money.
 
However, works previously created before termination can continue to be distributed. The owner of a film produced based on a novel, for example, can continue to exploit the movie because that grant was prepared under authority of rights before termination. However, no new sequels or remakes could be made after termination.

The 1986 Film was  produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and its screenplay written by Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr., and was derived from the story according to the plaintiffs. They mention in the lawsuit that the 1986 Film specifically credits Ehud Yonay for his story.
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Under copyright law (17 U.S.C. § 203)  a  derivative work prepared under authority of the grant before its termination may continue to be used under the terms of the grant after its termination, but this privilege does not extend to the preparation after the termination of other derivative works based upon the copyrighted work covered by the terminated grant. The plaintiffs contend the movie wasn’t completed until May 8, 2021, more than a year after Paramount’s rights to the story expired. The release of the film was delayed because of theater closures forced by Covid-19.
 
Paramount can be expected to argue that the sequel movie is not derivative of the article and many of the facts are in the public domain. It may also argue that a mere story idea is not copyrightable, and the movie was produced before termination was effective, even if it was released later.

Should the plaintiffs prevail, they could stop distribution of the hit film causing Paramount to lose enormous amount of revenue. Moreover, they can seek damages for copyright infringement. In cases like this, the parties often reach a settlement. 

Read lawsuit

Recently artists like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell demanded that  Spotify take down their music from their service.  They objected to Spotify hosting Joe Rogan’s podcast, one of Spotify's most popular podcasts, because it spread  COVID-19 misinformation. Whether an artist has the right to take down their music is an interesting question. 

For sound recordings that are audio-only (meaning no video), Artists or their labels can take down their music from on-demand services like Spotify and Apple Music. However, if an artist’s music is on a non-interactive service radio streaming service like Pandora or iHeart, they cannot take their music in the USA but can do so internationally. That is because in  the United States,  there is a statutory right to broadcast  sound recordings provided the radio service pays the per-play rate set  by the Copyright Royalty Board. Attorney Elizabeth Moody explains in her recent article in  The Hollywood Reporter why this is so.  Article. 
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I am once again presenting  my Risky Business seminar for the New York Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. However, this year the seminar will be in the form of an online webinar on Zoom. The seminar will be presented over two days, 3 hours each day. For those of you who have wanted to attend this seminar but could not come to New York, now is your chance to participate remotely.
 
This comprehensive seminar is for new attorneys, attorneys transitioning to entertainment law, and filmmakers. It explores how independent films are financed and produced.
 
Particular attention will be paid to how producers and filmmakers can protect themselves, including:
 
·       Criteria for selecting a distributor;
·       Investigating distributors;
·       Adding contract provisions and understanding terms;   
·       Dealing with investors, and more

Other topics will include compliance with state and federal laws regarding investors, retaining an attorney, producer's rep, and publicist, and confirming awards and enforcing judgments.

Participants will receive a 149-page detailed handout with a distribution contract, articles, forms and a self-defense checklist, as well as a 150 slide powerpoint of the presentation. 

This program is a two-day online seminar offering up to 7 Continuing Legal Education credits to attorneys.

Dates and Time:
Thursday, March 17, 2022   1 - 4:30 PM EST
Friday, March 18, 2022  1 - 4:30 PM EST


For more information and to register click here.