"Sweet Home Alabama" script suit dismissed

By Leslie Simmons

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - A federal court judge has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit against The Walt Disney Co. concerning its movie "Sweet Home Alabama"

Stuart Benjamin, a producer on the Oscar-winning film "Ray," along with Alise Benjamin, John Schalter and Sheldon Cohn sued Disney in 2005, claiming that the 2002 Reese Witherspoon movie was an unauthorized adaptation of their 1997 screenplay, "Rescue Me."

In his 22-page decision issued December 12, U.S. District Court Judge George Schiavelli ruled that while Disney executives may have had some limited access to the "Rescue Me" screenplay, no "substantial similarities" between the two scripts exist.

"The general stories of 'Rescue Me' and 'Sweet Home Alabama' are similar only at the most abstract level," Schiavelli wrote. "Abstract story ideas, such as those here, are not copyrightable."

The lawsuit alleged that the film's producer Stokley Chaffin and writer C. Jay Cox had access to the script via a tracking system in place at Chaffin's production company. But Schiavelli ruled there was no evidence to support that claim.

Chaffin, Cox and "Sweet's" original writer Douglas Eboch provided "uncontroverted evidence" of independently creating and developing the screenplay," the judge ruled.

Witherspoon played a successful New York fashion designer who returns to her Alabama hometown to secure a divorce from her long-estranged husband so that she can marry her perfect beau. But complications ensue, and she realizes that life is better in the south.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter