He's Got Their Number, Almost

By Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

"I'd hire the devil himself as a writer if he gave me a good story."

-- Sam Goldwyn

Movie moguls crave good scripts, but they hate to pay for them. So goes the age-old gripe among disgruntled Hollywood screenwriters, but it took an outsider like columnist Art Buchwald to put the allegation to the test. In a star-studded courtroom drama, Buchwald cast a bright light on the machinations of Hollywood's power brokers. Last week a Los Angeles judge ruled that Paramount Pictures used Buchwald's script proposal as the basis for its 1988 blockbuster Coming to America and failed to pay him accordingly. Paramount plans to appeal.

The dispute goes back to 1983, when Paramount agreed to buy the rights to Buchwald's proposal It's a Crude, Crude World, a tale of an African royal who ventures to the U.S. and falls in love in a Washington ghetto. Paramount renamed it King for a Day and began developing it as a vehicle for Eddie Murphy, but abandoned the project two years later, having paid Buchwald a total of $17,500.

Murphy then wrote a story outline called The Quest, about a black prince searching for true love, which eventually became Coming to America. Buchwald went to see the picture while vacationing on Martha's Vineyard, and was struck by its similarity to his proposal. Murphy, who received screen credit as the creator of the story, testified in a written deposition last month that he conceived the idea for the film in the wake of a painful romantic breakup. But Judge Harvey Schneider ruled that the parallels were substantial and that Paramount and Murphy had known about Buchwald's original story, although he stressed that his verdict was in no way meant to "disparage the creative talent" of Murphy.

For Buchwald, the hard part will be getting the money he thinks he has coming to him. Judge Schneider ordered the studio to pay $250,000 to Buchwald and Alain Bernheim, who was originally scheduled to produce the film. In the next phase of the trial, Buchwald and Bernheim will try to establish a dollar figure for the 19% of the net profits promised them in the 1983 contract. Trouble is, the studio claims that while the movie took in more than $300 million at the box office, it has made no net earnings -- at least according to the arcane accounting of Hollywood.

It will be up to Buchwald and his lawyer to find the profit. Joked Buchwald: "We suspect it's in Gloria Swanson's dressing room." Of the $300 million gross, half was kept by theaters showing the film. The rest went for shooting the picture (one cost estimate: $40 million), distribution fees charged by Paramount ($50 million), studio overhead ($5 million), film prints and promotion ($15 million), Murphy's salary ($8 million) and other expenses.

One sizable outlay was probably Murphy's guaranteed piece of the box-office take, which was calculated as a percentage of the gross and may have exceeded $15 million. Hollywood's megastars demand a slice of the gross because they know that most films will never pay any earnings to holders of net-profit percentages, which Murphy has derided as "monkey points." Before Buchwald's case is over, Hollywood neophytes may get a first-class education in how the power players operate.