Buchwald v. Paramount

Buchwald vs. Paramount (1990) 1990 Cal. App. LEXIS 634, was a breach of contract lawsuit filed and decided in California in which humorist and writer Art Buchwald alleged that Paramount Pictures stole his script idea and turned it into the 1988 movie Coming to America. Buchwald won the lawsuit and was awarded damages, and then accepted a settlement from Paramount before any appeal took place.

The decision was important mainly for the court's determination in the damages phase of the trial that Paramount used "unconscionable" means of determining how much to pay authors, which is widely called "Hollywood Accounting." Paramount claimed, and provided accounting evidence to support the claim, that despite the movie's $288 million in revenues, it had earned no net profit, according to the definition of "net profit" in Buchwald's contract, and hence Buchwald was owed nothing. The court agreed with Buchwald's argument that this was "unconscionable" and therefore invalid. Fearing a loss if it appealed, and the subsequent implications of the unconscionability decision across all its other contracts, Paramount settled for $900,000. The case was the subject of a 1992 book, Fatal Subtraction: The Inside Story of Buchwald v. Paramount by Pierce O'Donnell, the lawyer who represented Buchwald, and Los Angeles Times reporter Dennis McDougal.

In 1982, Buchwald wrote a screen treatment titled "It's A Crude, Crude World" (later renamed "King for a Day") that was pitched to Jeffrey Katzenberg of Paramount, with the intention of starring Eddie Murphy, who was under contract to Paramount at the time. According to the court documents, the synopsis for "King for a Day" was:

Paramount optioned the treatment in early 1983 and commissioned several unsuccessful scripts from several screenwriters. John Landis was considered as the director from time to time. After two years of development hell, Paramount decided to abandon the project in March 1985.

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