Robot 6
Comic writer sues over Adam Sandler’s Zohan
"The Hair-Raising Adventures of Jayms Blonde"
The New York Daily News reports that a comic writer has sued Adam Sandler and Columbia Pictures, claiming they stole his idea for a hairdresser-turned-hero and transformed it into You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.
In a copyright-infringement lawsuit filed on Monday in Manhattan federal court, Robert Cabell charges that the 2008 movie rips off his comic The Hair-Raising Adventures of Jayms Blonde.
Created by Cabell in 2000, Jayms Blonde — “Secret Agent 69″ — is a Navy SEAL-turned-hairdresser who fights crime armed with a blow dryer. Cabell released the comic online two years later, and offers the book via print on demand.
According to the Daily News, Cabell pitched a Jayms Blonde movie to Columbia in 2007, around the time Sandler began filming Zohan.
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, about an Israeli special-forces operative who fakes his death so he can re-emerge as a hair stylist, grossed more than $100 million at the box office.
- February 24, 2009 @ 02:28 PM by Kevin Melrose
3 Comments
Bill Reed
February 24, 2009 at 2:36 pm
And maybe he’d have a case if it wasn’t just a parody of James Bond.
ultraaman
February 24, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Derivative work is still copyrightable. The case could be made that James Bond is a derivative of Secret Agent, a film by Hitchock filmed in 1936 more than 15 years before Casino Royale first saw print.
PalaceStationVegas
February 24, 2009 at 10:46 pm
I don’t think this is going to go.