The Jane Fonda movie that sparked the most ludicrous legal battle of 2005: “I felt like I’d seen it before”
Movies can be sued for any number of reasons, and it’s not as if people need a leg to stand on to try and have their day in court. While plenty of pictures have been subjected to litigation under completely valid circumstances, one Jane Fonda film wasn’t part of that collection.
Hollywood copyright disputes have become increasingly common over the decades, especially when successful studio films generate huge profits. In many cases, the mere possibility of a financial settlement is enough to encourage speculative lawsuits from disgruntled writers.
James Cameron has spent half his career dodging copyright infringement accusations, and there’s definitely weight to the theory that aspiring screenwriters won’t pass up the opportunity to chance their arm if a hugely successful feature bears even a slight resemblance to something they’ve been working on.
That’s not to say every instance is completely frivolous, but in Fonda’s case, it most definitely was. After an absence from screens that stretched a decade and a half, the two-time Academy Award winner finally made her big screen comeback when she played the titular matriarch in the frothy Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy Monster-In-Law.
Thanks in part to the buzz generated by Fonda ending her self-imposed exile from cinema, director Robert Luketic’s by-the-numbers caper comfortably cleared $150million at the global box office despite taking a critical drubbing that ended up with Lopez making the ‘Worst Actress’ shortlist at the Golden Raspberry Awards.
The mother-in-law from hell is a cliche that’s been repurposed on stage, screen, and in stand-up comedy routines for what feels like forever, but Sheri Gilbert was adamant that Fonda’s first film in 15 years had stolen directly from a script she’d written based on her own experiences dealing with her spouse’s monstrous maw.
In an effort to leave no stone unturned, Gilbert named more than 50 defendants as part of her all-encompassing lawsuit against Monster-In-Law, which extended to Fonda, Lopez, Luketic, producers Chris Bender, JC Spink, and Paula Weinstein, as well as production companies BenderSpink and Spring Creek Productions, not to mention studios New Line Cinema and Warner Bros.
“I felt like I’d seen it before,” Gilbert remarked of her experience watching the movie. “I felt I could predict what would happen in the next scene.” Obviously, she was hardly the first person to have issues with their mother-in-law, and neither was she the first to pen a story about it.
In response, the deadpan rebuttal from the opposing legal team was a thing of beauty: “Plaintiff contends that she can ‘own’ the well-worn, general ‘mother-in-law’ character type simply by filing a copyright application,” it read. “Such is not the law.”
The courts agreed with the latter sentiment, which is where the case took an unintentionally hilarious twist. After it was determined that Gilbert had wasted everybody’s time with a completely meritless lawsuit, she was ordered to pay $894,983 to the defendants after a judge wisely ruled that Monster-In-Law was far too broad and generic to have been stolen from someone else’s intellectual property.
The outcome became a cautionary example of how expensive failed litigation can become in Hollywood. Rather than securing compensation, Gilbert ended up facing a financial penalty that dwarfed anything she might realistically have hoped to gain.
