Gary Oldman has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit over his 2017 war drama Darkest Hour, in which he starred as British prime minister Winston Churchill. The suit, filed by screenwriter and teacher Ben Kaplan on September 18th, alleges that Darkest Hour took multiple elements from Kaplan’s unproduced script, which had been the focus of a project that Oldman was briefly attached to in early 2015.
The suit claims breach of implied contract, unfair business practices, interference with contract, and false designation of origin under federal trademark law. Kaplan alleges that his script and Darkest Hour‘s, written by Anthony McCarten (Bohemian Rhapsody, The New Popes), share multiple similarities, scenes, and historical inventions. This includes the scripts’ constructions, both of which lead up to Churchill’s delivery of his famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech as their conclusion; both scripts also reportedly contain the same fictional conceit that Churchill had the idea to use Britain’s fleet of civilian vessels for the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940.
Kaplan claims that he registered his script with the Writers’ Guild of America in 2002 before bringing it to a producer in 2011 who, in turn, took it to Oldman. As per Kaplan’s version of events, the producer had signed Oldman to a deal where he’d star in the film for a $5 million paycheck, but Oldman dropped out of the project in March of 2015. A little over a year later, the news came that Oldman had become attached to a wholly different Winston Churchill project. As per Kaplan’s version of events, then, he alleges that Oldman liked certain elements of Kaplan’s script so much that he took them with him to Darkest Hour and used them without credit or compensation.
Kaplan’s CV is hard to track down, as there are a solid ten other people by that name that have been involved in the entertainment industry at one point or another. However, via IMDB, there is a Ben Kaplan credited as a writer and story editor on several History Channel productions, including the 2020 Jeff Daniels-narrated miniseries Washington.
Darkest Hour, co-starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily James, depicts a single famous month early in Churchill’s tenure as prime minister of Britain during World War II, which contained both the famous Operation Dynamo evacuation (as seen in Dunkirk) and one of the most famous political speeches in British history. The film grossed $150 million off of a $30 million budget, and was in heavy rotation during the 2017 awards season. Oldman himself collected the Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA Award for Best Actor due to his role in Darkest Hour.
Oldman can next be seen in The Woman in the Window, a psychological thriller, set to premiere on Netflix at an unspecified date in 2020. Oldman stars alongside Amy Adams, Anthony Mackie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Brian Tyree Henry.
Source: Variety
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