Spielberg Swipes Storyline

Well to be fair I’m not really sure just how much Steven Spielberg had to do with this film, I think the papers just like to drag his name into the dirt. Although this does go to my ongoing rant that it seems to be a sin to have an original idea in Hollywood:

Steven Spielberg’s Disturbia ‘stole plot from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window’

“Steven Spielberg stole the plot from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1954 film Rear Window for last year’s Disturbia, a lawsuit has claimed. Hitchcock’s film was based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich called Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint, which the director and actor James Stewart obtained the film rights to in 1953.

Sheldon Abend, a Hollywood producer who re-made Rear Window for TV, bought the rights to the short story in 1971 and obtained “exclusive right to adapt or copy” the story in 1991, it is claimed. Abend died in 2003 but the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust filed the lawsuit in New York last week because it claims the makers of Disturbia did not obtain the rights to the story before remaking the Hitchcock classic.”

…the funny thing about this lawsuit is that in 1984 Brian De Palma directed (and co-wrote) the film Body Double which owed quite a bit to Rear Window — but De Palma was smart enough to go that step further and make his film into a homage to Alfred Hitchcock by also borrowing plot elements from other films like Vertigo and Dial M for Murder (and of course setting the film on the set of a low budget horror flick).