Apparently Adam Sandler is getter sued by a guy who says he came up with the idea for his new movie, Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

Robert W. Cabell is the author of a 2003 webzine, 2005 comic book and 2007 novel all titled The Hair-Raising Adventures of Jayms Blonde. E! News reported that he is trying to get an injunction to stop the release of the movie on June 6th.

Ellis J. Pailet is the Louisiana attorney represents Cabell who sent a cease and desist letter to Sandler’s team on May 8th threatening a full lawsuit for the stealing of the idea.

In the C&D letter Pailet apparently documents several similarities between Cabell’s gay action hero, who fights vilians with his “trademarked Uzi blow-dryer, bulletproof mousse and hair-curler hand-grenades,” and Sandler’s character Israeli Mossad agent, Zohan, who fakes his death to leave the secret agent gig and pursue his dream of being a hair dresser in New York.

“Your transformation of our client’s gay character into your heterosexual character is not a fair use,” Pailet writes. “Like the Blonde logo, the Zohan logo used to promote your movie depicts your character pointing a blow-dryer as if it were a weapon.”

Pailet’s theory is that Sandler and costar Rob Schneider … PAUSE sorry but I have to say that I love Schneider and he has become a where’s Waldo in Sandler’s movies. Who doesn’t know the “you can doooo it!” line? …. ok back to what I was saying - Pailet believes that Adam and Rob stole the idea from Cabell’s MySpace page. He writes that they were among “Cabell’s first 100 MySpace friends in 2005 when the Blonde MySpace.com website was created.”

“Your image unfairly competes with Blonde and your continued use would subject our client to legal liability and further damage to his intellectual property rights,” he continues. “This is patently unfair.”

Steve Herlocker, a representative for the author, says that Pailet and a legal counsel for Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions are in talks about a possible settlement. However, he said his client wouldn’t be afraid to file a lawsuit to stop Zohan from opening should negotiations fail to resolve the matter in a timely manner.

Cindi Guagenti, Sandler’s publicist, declined to go into any detail of the suit.

“We don’t comment on lawsuits, especially ones without merit,” she said.

Someone explain to me why these things suddenly come up after millions of dollars have been spent filming, producing, and advertising a movie? SO WHAT if it is somewhat similar! Me and millions of other movie-goers have never heard of Cabell’s The Hair-Raising Adventures of Jayms Blonde so really… what publicity rights is he really protecting? Aren’t all movies based on something like 6 main types of plot lines anyway? Couldn’t virtually every movie be similar to another. The character is different, the dialogue, the plot is different. What ever happened to creative license? If Cabell was so darn worried about making money off of his “idea” then what the heck has he been doing for the past 5 years?

I know a little something about publicity rights and they are VERY tricky. Virtually every state looks at it differently and many claim that you (or your work) MUST be known to the average person and that a reasonable person could actually confuse your work with the infringing one.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.