Tuesday, September 23, 2008

All Your Trademarks Are Belong To Us?

Every Marx Brothers fan knows the legend: the brothers set out to make a film titled "A Night in Casablanca", Warner Bros. threatened them with a lawsuit (they had just released "Casablanca") and Groucho fired off a letter to the studio, famously stating that the Marx Brothers had been brothers long before the Warner Brothers and therefore their case had no merit.

Sixty three years later, it appears that Warner Bros. just got told off again, this time by a court in India, over a film called "Hari Puttar". So do the studios think spoofing a title is not cool but ripping off an entire plot is OK?

But back to "Groucho v. Warner". The story is false, of course. The real story is funnier.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That was funny. I like the thought that someone knew even more about publicity stunts than a movie studio :)

km said...

Lekhni: Groucho knew more than anyone about almost everything.