EXCLUSIVE: After decades of legal wars between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow and various jurisdictions over allegations of child sexual assault against Oscar-winning director HBO Allen v. Farrow docuseries may have opened up a new battlefield.
Skyhorse Publishing is seriously considering a copyright infringement lawsuit against the premium hairdresser and the filmmakers behind the four-part documentary series for unauthorized use of Allen’s memories of 2020. By the way, nothing.
“Neither the producers nor HBO approached Skyhorse to request permission to use excerpts from the audiobook,” the publisher told Deadline on Monday.
“Skyhorse received secondhand information only at the end of last week that each of the four episodes of the documentary makes extensive use of excerpts from audiobooks,” added Skyhorse.
Related Story
Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn attack HBO’s ‘Allen V. Farrow’
“Promptly on Friday, February 19, our lawyer notified HBO’s internal lawyer by letter that if the use of the audiobook was close to what we were hearing, it would constitute copyright infringement. HBO did not respond to our letter. “
“Having now seen the first episode, we believe that the unauthorized use of the audiobook is a clear and intentional violation of the existing legal precedent and that the other episodes will also infringe if they appropriate the audiobook in a similar way,” continued Skyhorse.
“We will take whatever legal measures we deem necessary to repair our rights and Woody Allen’s rights over his intellectual property.”
Skyhorse would not go into details about its future plans beyond its term statement. HBO did not respond to requests for comment on the letter when contacted by Deadline.
Excerpts from the memoir narrated by Allen appear throughout HBO’s four-part documentaries, including more than three minutes in the first episode alone. Fair Use Doctrine, which allows copyrighted material to be used without permission in certain reports, reviews and other specific formats, generally allows less than 10 seconds of such copyrighted material to be included in a project.
Allen v. Farrow filmmakers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick had full access to Mia Farrow and daughter Dylan Farrow to Allen v. Farrow, which covers his sexual assault charges against children against Allen and how the filmmaker controlled the legal system.
Since the charge was filed in 1992, Allen has denied any impropriety with his adopted daughter Dylan, who was 7 at the time of the alleged assault.
Deadline previously reported Skyhorse’s official statement on the use of The purpose of nothing “Without permission.” Ziering and Dick used parts of the audiobook, which Allen reads, to represent their side in the documentation. This was after the filmmakers contacted Allen, his wife Soon-Yi Previn and Moses Farrow to participate in the documentary.
On Sunday night, a spokesman for Allen and Previn said they were “approached less than two months ago and had only a few days to ‘respond’. Of course, they refused to do so. “Allen and Previn’s spokesman also said,” These documentarians had no interest in the truth. Instead, they spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their facilitators to put together an ax job riddled with falsehoods. ”
Allen’s memoir was originally scheduled to be published by Grand Central Publishing, a brand of the Hachette Book Group, the same publisher of Harvey Weinstein’s research novel by his son Ronan Farrow Catch and kill. Farrow called for Hachette, and there was a strike by 75 of the publisher’s employees in protest of Allen’s autobiography being published. After Hachette unpublished the memoir, Skyhorse chose it under the Arcade Publishing label in March 2020.