EXCLUSIVE: After decades of legal wars between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow and various jurisdictions over child sexual assault claims against Oscar-winning director, HBOs Allen v. Farrow documents may have opened up a whole new battlefield.
Skyhorse Publishing is seriously considering a lawsuit against the premium cable and the filmmakers behind the four-part documents for unauthorized use of audio from Allen’s 2020 memoir. Speaking of nothing.
“Neither the producers nor the HBO have ever approached Skyhorse to ask permission to use excerpts from the audiobook,” the publishing company told Deadline on Monday.
“Skyhorse only received second-hand information late last week that each of the four films in the documentary uses extensive excerpts from the audiobook,” Skyhorse added.
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“On Friday, 19 February, our lawyer immediately informed the HBO’s internal lawyer by letter that if the use of the audiobook was close to what we heard, it would be copyright infringement. HBO did not respond to our letter. ”
“Now that we’ve seen the first episode, we believe that its unauthorized use of the audiobook is a clear, willful violation under existing legal precedent, and that the other episodes will also infringe if they apply the audiobook in a similar manner. , “Skyhorse continued.
“We will take the legal action we deem necessary to rectify our and Woody Allen’s rights to his intellectual property.”
Skyhorse does not want to elaborate on their future plans beyond what has been set by the deadline. HBO did not respond to requests for comment on the letter contacted by the deadline.
Excerpts from the Allen-told memoirs appear throughout the four-part HBO documentation, including more than three minutes in the first episode alone. The Fair Use Doctrine, which can use copyrighted material without permission in certain news reports, critiques and specific other formats, usually allows less than ten seconds of the copyrighted material to be incorporated into a project.
Allen v. Farrow filmmakers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick gained full access to Mia Farrow and daughter Dylan Farrow for Allen v.Farrow, which discusses their allegations of assault on Allen against Allen, and how the filmmaker mastered the legal system.
Since the indictment was made in 1992, Allen has denied that it was inappropriate with his adopted daughter Dylan, who was 7 at the time of the alleged assault.
Earlier, Deadline reported on Skyhorse’s official statement on the use of HBO Speaking of nothing “Without permission.” Ziering and Dick used parts of the audiobook, from which Allen reads aloud, to represent his side in the documentation. That was after the filmmakers reached out to Allen, his wife Soon-Yi Previn and Moses Farrow to take part in the documentary.
A spokesman for Allen and Previn said on Sunday night that they were “approached less than two months ago and only had a matter of days to ‘respond’. Of course they did not want to do that.” said: “These documentaries had no interest in the truth. Instead, they worked dormantly for years with the Farrows and their enablers to compile an ax with untruths.”
Allen’s memoir was originally published by Grand Central Publishing, a print by Hachette Book Group, the same publisher of his son Ronan Farrow’s Harvey Weinstein research novel Capture and kill. Farrow summoned Hachette, and there were 75 staff members of the publisher to protest that Allen’s autobiography had been published. After Hachette canceled the publication of the memoir, Skyhorse picked it up in March 2020 under its Arcade Publishing print.