A battle for control of the Superman franchise pits Time Warner against the original Lois Lane.
Originally appeared in Portfolio, October 2007
BY: Amy Wallace
In May 2002, Richard Parsons, then co-chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner, received a scathing letter from the widow of Jerome Siegel, the man who invented Superman. “Dear Dick,” wrote Joanne Siegel. “Have you been aware that your representatives have gone too far?”
In the mid-1930s, when she was in her late teens, Siegel had been the sketch model for Lois Lane. Now she was accusing Parsons’ company of trying to fleece her and her daughter of their share of Superman revenues. She called AOL Time Warner “greedy” and alleged a “heartless attempt” to rewrite history. “Just like the Gestapo, your company wants to strip us naked of our legal rights…. Is that the reputation you want?”
In the five years since Parsons received that three-page screed, Siegel’s outrage has found a more formal outlet: two lawsuits, both championed by a controversial Malibu litigator named Marc Toberoff. The 52-year-old attorney has made a career of taking on big entertainment companies on behalf of creators and their heirs. He has been especially successful against what is now Time Warner.
His most publicized victory came in 2005, when he persuaded a judge to enjoin Warner Bros. from releasing the movie The Dukes of Hazzard because it was based in part on an earlier film, Moonrunners. Six weeks before the Dukes premiere, the studio settled with the Moonrunners producers for $17.5 million.
In the pending cases, Toberoff is taking a different tack, asserting that the Siegel family has terminated the grants to the Superman and Superboy copyrights that Jerry Siegel had bestowed in 1938 and 1948, respectively. The Siegels have exercised a clause in U.S. copyright law that gives creators or their heirs a five-year window to reclaim rights to their works 56 years after the copyright was issued. Toberoff says this entitles the Siegels to half of all Superman-related profits earned since the copyright termination took effect in 1999—a sum he estimates tops $50 million—as well as any future profits. He also asserts that Time Warner has infringed the Siegels’ Superboy copyright with its Smallville TV series and thus owes unspecified damages.
Time Warner’s lawyers dispute these claims, saying, among other things, that the Siegel heirs have reneged on a settlement hammered out before Toberoff entered the picture. The attorneys also question whether the termination papers were filed correctly and say that, even if they were, the Siegel family has vastly overstated how much it is owed.
At stake is not just money but, potentially, the very future of the franchise. If the Siegel heirs prevail in winning back their copyrights, the result could be a similar challenge by the heirs of Superman’s co-creator, artist Joe Shuster. And if that challenge were successful, then Time Warner—which is currently developing a follow-up to last year’s film Superman Returns—could eventually find itself out of the Superman business altogether. How big is that business? Only Time Warner knows for sure (and it isn’t saying), but counting the Superman- and Superboy-related movies, TV shows, DVDs, books, comics, and merchandise, the conservative estimate is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Toberoff says it’s $1 billion.
As the first suit moves toward a January trial, Time Warner has retained three law firms to keep the Man of Steel in the fold. Overkill? Not considering how much the company stands to lose—and the fact that it has lost to Toberoff before.
Reviled by some as the Hollywood equivalent of an ambulance chaser, Toberoff specializes in helping aging writers and artists (or their heirs) reassert their claims to decades-old properties. Then, in exchange for an ownership stake in the recovered rights, Toberoff tries to get new projects produced that are based on those properties, sometimes at the very same media company with which he just did battle.
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Now more than ever, risk-averse Hollywood loves remakes, which are seen as easier to market. That trend has created opportunities for Toberoff, who, despite what one executive has called “pushy and aggressive” tactics, has a knack for attaching himself to projects that studios want to make. For example, back in the mid-1990s, it occurred to Toberoff that the 1978 TV series Fantasy Island could be the basis for a feature film. He tracked down Gene Levitt, the series’ creator, and convinced him that it would be worth his while to dig his original contract out of the basement. Toberoff then proved that Levitt (who died in 1999) owned the show’s movie rights. Sony Pictures is now developing the series into a film to star Eddie Murphy. If it is made, Toberoff will collect a producing fee. (He won’t say how much.)
