Spielberg fights Hitchcock claim

Steven Spielberg (pictured) is to be forced to defend a legal action which claims that his film Disturbia, released last year, was little more than a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1954 Rear Window, a fact that was unacknowledged at the time. The legal suit, which was filed in Manhattan's federal court, accuses the Hollywood director's Dreamworks studio, its parent company Viacom Inc, and Universal Pictures of copyright infringement and breach of contract for making Disturbia without first obtaining permission from the copyright holders.

The action does not come from Hitchcock's estate, but the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust, the company that own the rights to the short story on which the film was based, The Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint by Cornell Woolrich. Hitchcock and actor James Stewart obtained the motion picture rights to the story in 1953. The lawsuit argues that Dreamworks should have done the same.

"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," the lawsuit said. It also asserts that Disturbia, which made $80m at the box office, and the Rear Window story are "essentially the same." Both are murder mysteries beginning with a man who, while peering from his window, witnesses strange behaviour in the home of his neighbour. The protagonist in all three of the works behaves in essentially the same way, interacts with similar characters and the plot unfolds in basically the same way.

The claims are endorsed by the media reception to the movie - the New York Times called it "a kind of adolescent Rear Window" while the Toronto Star said it was "a rip-off with wit."