Spielberg's Disturbia accused of stealing Rear Window plot

Director M. Night Shyamalan has been accused of pilfering plotlines several times in his career: Signs supposedly stole from a script for Lord of the Barrens: The Jersey Devil and The Village followed a shockingly close track to Margaret Peteson Haddix's children's novel Running Out Of Time.

This week, Steven Spielberg finds himself joining Shyamalan's ranks, as a lawsuit from the rights-owner of Rear Window claims that Disturbia, which Spielberg executive produced, hijacked the Hitchcock film's plot. Spielberg-founded Dreamworks, parent company Viacom and Universal Pictures were all named in the documentation.

The suit comes from the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust. Abend, who died in 2003, had remade Rear Window for TV after obtaining the rights to the Cornell Woolrich-penned short story "Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint" (on which Hitchcock based his film) and the "exclusive right to adapt or copy" the story and plot.

As the complaint states:

"What the defendants have been unwilling to do openly, legitimately and legally, (they) have done surreptitiously, by their back-door use of the Rear Window story without paying compensation. "In the Disturbia film the defendants purposefully employed immaterial variations or transparent rephrasing to produce essentially the same story as the Rear Window story."

Both movies are murder mysteries launched when a man peers from his window and observes strange behavior in his neighbor's home. This, along with other dovetailing plot points, serve as the lawsuit's basis that the two films are "essentially the same." Testimony will probably not be taken from cinema critics, but nevertheless, the New York Times called Disturbia "a kind of adolescent Rear Window" and Paste's review refers to the former as an "homage" to the latter.

Related links:
Rear Window on IMDb
Review: Disturbia
Dreamworks.com

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