Last month producer Scott Rudin, seeking to protect the financial future of a new stage adaptation of the novel now running on Broadway, forced at least eight theaters around the country to cancel productions of a 1970 stage version. Now the publisher of the earlier script says he will seek compensation and legal vindication.
“We feel horribly for those affected by the shameful bigfooting coming from Mr. Rudin,” Christopher Sergel III, president of Dramatic Publishing Co. and the grandson of the author of the first adaptation, said.
Sergel said he would ask an arbitration tribunal to protect the ability of local theaters to stage his grandfather’s adaptation and to award damages of at least $500,000. He accused the estate of “Mockingbird” author, Harper Lee, acting in concert with Rudin, of causing financial losses to Dramatic Publishing by making “false statements” to local theaters.
A lawyer representing Lee’s estate declined to comment. Rick Miramontez, a spokesman for Rudin, said, “This is an action between the Dramatic Publishing Co. and the estate of Harper Lee, and as such we have no comment.”
The move by the publishing company is only the latest legal controversy to erupt over the play since Rudin persuaded Lee, shortly before her death, to grant him the rights to create a Broadway adaptation of her novel and to permit screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to write the script. Last year the Lee estate sued Rudin, asserting that a draft script deviated impermissibly from the novel; Rudin countersued, and the case was settled.
The latest dispute, over whether and when the Sergel adaptation can be staged now that the Sorkin adaptation exists, pits an agreement Lee signed with Dramatic Publishing in 1969 against one she signed with Rudin in 2015.
The disagreement broke into public view in January, when a British production company announced that it was canceling a planned tour of the Sergel production under threat from Rudin’s lawyers. Then last month, eight American theaters separately said they were canceling productions of the play for the same reason.
The cancellations, some of them at small, volunteer-run theaters, and in some cases just before the start of planned productions, prompted an outcry. Rudin then said he would allow the affected theaters to stage the Sorkin production, rather than the Sergel production, an offer that came too late for some, but was enticing to others.
Rudin and the Lee estate cited provisions in the 1969 contract that prohibited the Sergel play from being produced in or near many cities when a “first-class dramatic play” based on the novel was on stage in New York or on tour.
In a complaint seeking binding arbitration filed with the American Arbitration Association, Sergel included the original contract between Dramatic Publishing and Lee, in which she granted the rights to a stage production for a $2,500 advance. The contract allowed Dramatic Publishing to sell licenses to local theaters to stage the Sergel play, and Dramatic, in turn, would pay royalties to Lee, and now her estate.
The author earned millions of dollars in royalties from the play over the years, the complaint says.
According to correspondence filed with the tribunal, a representative of Lee’s estate specifically approved many of the community theater productions that Rudin later contested. In July 2018, after the schedule for the Broadway production was announced, Dramatic Publishing wrote to the estate to ask if nine local theaters that had already purchased rights to stage the play could proceed, including the Dayton Playhouse in Dayton, Ohio; the Grand Theater in Salt Lake City; and the Curtain Call Theater in Braintree, Massachusetts.
The estate objected to a planned production in Staten Island, saying that while it was “certainly not economically competitive, it would be preferable not to have any competing press distraction here in NYC,” but authorized the others.
Then, earlier this year, a different lawyer for the estate emailed a lawyer for Dramatic Publishing and said that several of the productions that had previously been cleared by the estate were in violation of the 1969 contract and could not go forward, and that any “prior consent by any purported representative of the Estate to the granting of these licenses is hereby revoked, and the Estate demands strict compliance with the terms of the Agreement.”
It was not clear why the Lee estate changed its position, but the controversy forced the eight small theater groups to call off “Mockingbird.” Some had to cancel at the last minute and suffered financial losses as they had to refund tickets or could not substitute another production in time.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.