The Screengrab

David Chase, the creator of the landmark HBO series The Sopranos, has cut a deal to return to the cab;e network with a series about the history of the American film industry. The show, Ribbon of Dreams--the title comes from a line of Orson Welles's, who once used it as a definition of what a movie is--will begin in 1913 and, borrowing a gimmick from the HBO series Rome, chart history as seen through the eyes of a pair of fictitious characters, "one a cowboy with some violence in his past, the other a mechanical engineer", and their own offspring. The characters will be introduced as working for pioneering director D. W. Griffith; as the series progresses through the course of the twentieth century and up to the present day, there are plans to work in such figures as John Wayne, John Ford, Bette Davis, and Raoul Walsh. Brad Grey, who served as executive producer of The Sopranos and is now CEO of Paramount Pictures, will executive produce Ribbon of Dreams as well.

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The studio system is long dead, but for over 30 years, David Geffen has been proving that the old-time movie mogul is still a going concern.  One of the richest men in Hollywood history, Geffen is a true multimedia tycoon who's made money in film and music hand over fist and whose personal worth is estimated at close to $6 billion.  Indisputably one of the biggest power players in the industry, he's had a huge impact on almost every studio you can name:  Universal, Paramount, Disney, and the DreamWorks studio he founded with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.  But, having hit 65 -- the age at which most people look forward to a respectable retirement -- is Geffen ready to walk away from it all?

Just weeks after engineering a break from Paramount -- which had recently purchased DreamWorks for over a billion and a half dollars -- Geffen continued to wheel and deal like a mogul of old.  He formed a new company with Spielberg and Stacey Snider, backed by money from one of the biggest players in the emergent Bollywood system, and then -- shockingly -- seemed to indicate that he was backing off from production, and perhaps leaving the entertainment industry altogether.  According to an article in the New York Times, even Spielberg is stunned at the possibility:  "I cannot imagine not having David in my professional life.  If that's true, I'm going to have to figure out what to do about it." 

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Yes, it's All-Lawsuit Day here at the Screengrab, your one-stop shop for bizarre Hollywood litigation.  And they don't come much more bizarre than the case of Adams vs. Marvel, Paramount, the story of which comes to us courtesy of a trade magazine called Photo District News. 

Here's the skinny:  the Adams in question is one Ronnie Adams, a Los Angeles-based freelance photographer (as he calls himself), or paparazzo (as his detractors would term him) who was in the employ of the JFX Agency last summer when he took some illicit snaps of the filming of what would become the blockbuster hit Iron Man.  Marvel and Paramount, of course, would be the movie studios who produced and distributed that very movie -- in which one can see, for about three seconds of screen time, a fake newspaper headline under which is a photograph strongly resembling one that Adams says was his.

That's where it gets strange, because Adams -- who was, as do all paparazzi, taking pictures of a closed set, an activity of extremely dubious legality that is only not prosecuted because of the difficulty of enforcing the laws against it -- is suing Marvel and Paramount for unlawfully infringing his copyright and engaging in unfair competition against him.  Paramount had seen the illicit snaps on an entertainment website and demanded that they be removed, seeing as they constituted...well, a copyright infringement.  That's nothing new, of course, so the reat twist comes in when Marvel used the snaps in the film itself without compensation.  So, what Adams is actually seeking is monetary compensation from the companies over the use of photos he wasn't allowed to take in the first place.  It's not as if his case is without merit -- if true, it means that Marvel and Paramount were indeed using something that kinda sorta didn't belong to them -- but Adams is making a claim based on what is, technically, an illegal activity, which isn't something a judge is likely to want to admit into precedent.

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Moviemaking is "still a very challenging business," says media analyst Richard Greenfield. "The average movie still loses money." The question is, will Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull turn out to be an average movie? In a piece calculated to make you break out the crying towels, Claudia Eller of the Los Angeles Times reports on "the new economic realities of the movie business" and how they're reflected in the deal that Paramount Pictures cut with director Steven Spielberg, star Harrison Ford, and fount of contemporary mythology George Lucas in order the get the fourth Indiana Jones picture up and running.

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