In a Los Angeles court this week a female artist-writer who lives in Paris has been confronting Hollywood's most powerful male in an attempt to block release of his new $75 million film. Few give her much chance of success because her adversary is Steven Spielberg. But she and her lawyers have won similar battles before.
The dispute concerns Amistad, the first serious film Spielberg has directed since his 1994 Oscar for Schindler's List. More importantly, this is his first movie as director for DreamWorks, the Hollywood studio he co-founded.
Amistad was released in the US yesterday and if it receives critical acclaim and scores at the box-office, it will mark Spielberg's return as a serious artist and give DreamWorks a much-needed boost.
Such law suits are not uncommon in Tinseltown, where putative or obscure screenwriters claim their work as the true inspiration for successful films. Barbara Chase-Riboud, however, is not someone to be ignored. The 58-year-old African-American author, poet and sculptor has works permanently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Two collections of her poetry have been issued by major publishers. Three of her four books have been best-sellers.
The most widely known is Sally Hemings, her portrayal of the mixed-blood slave who was probably Thomas Jefferson's mistress and the mother of seven of his children. The historical novel was published in 1979 and sold 3.5 million copies worldwide amid critical enthusiasm and popular acclaim - except from crusty defenders of the Jeffersonian legend.
Custodians of Monticello, his home in Virginia - a national monument - retaliated by removing from visitors' view a staircase ascending from the bedroom of the third US president. In Chase-Riboud's novel it leads to Hemings's boudoir.
In 1989 Chase-Riboud wrote another best-seller, a historical novel called Echo Of Lions based on a 19th-century slave uprising - the subject of the Spielberg film.
In 1839, 53 Africans destined for slavery in Cuba rebelled on board the Spanish ship La Amistad. They killed the crew and were subsequently put on trial in America. The film's hero is the rebel leader Cinque. A century and a half later, Chase-Riboud's legal action pits someone of African descent against a white American establishment. Cinque won. Will she?
In LA, Judge Audrey Collins must decide whether to grant a preliminary injunction against the film's release because of its alleged unauthorised use of copyright material. The judge could dismiss the request outright, or grant it but require a bond - a payment into court from Chase-Riboud to compensate DreamWorks if the author-artist were to lose her $10 million law suit.
The studio insists that any bond should be $75 million, the cost of the epic and its advertising budget. Chase-Riboud's lawyers want a bond of just $10,000. This means that she could win a moral victory if the judge agreed to block the movie but set a bond the plaintiff could not afford. In either case, the suit will probably last for years.
"Obviously, Barbara wants a resolution while the movie is in the news, but it will be a difficult decision for the judge," says lawyer John Shaeffer, who represents Chase-Riboud. "In Spielberg we are taking on an icon of the cinema."
Shaeffer's partner, Pierce O'Donnell, successfully conducted a plagiarism suit brought by the humourist Art Buchwald against the studio that made Coming To America, the 1988 hit comedy with Eddie Murphy. After a long and acrimonious struggle, Paramount acknowledged that Buchwald did create the film's plot: an African king's search for a bride in working-class America.
Chase-Riboud herself won a plagiarism suit in 1991 against the playwright Granville Burgess, for his dramatisation of the Hemings story Dusky Sally. The judge ruled that a historical novelist had rights to invented material in a portrayal of a real event.
Chase-Riboud has said that "the whole thing could have been resolved with a fax. They're putting a $50 million film at risk for a credit line and fair compensation for a writer."
In return, DreamWorks's lawyer, Bert Fields, has attacked Chase-Riboud personally. "This woman should support this project and not try to stop it and grab some money for herself. She's trying to own American history." The studio followed these remarks by accusing her of "cribbing" from an earlier book about the Amistad incident.
As the facts are undisputed history (though rarely taught in American schools), the accusations of plagiarism revolve around Chase-Riboud's interpretation of events. She claims that "startling similarities" exist between the episodes and characters she fabricated for her novel, and those in the film.
After the Africans killed the crew, the surviving navigator tricked them into sailing to US waters rather than returning to Africa. They were arrested and jailed for two years until the case rose to the US supreme court, where six of the nine judges owned slaves. There the rights of the 53 were successfully argued by ex-president John Quincy Adams (played in the film by Anthony Hopkins) and they returned home.
Little is known about the personalities and lives of the Africans, however, and various interpretations have appeared. Chase-Riboud's is clearly in the context of post-civil rights America, in which Cinque (played by west African actor Djimon Hounsou) demonstrates fierce pride in his origins and demands freedom.
This is why she strenuously objects to DreamWorks's riposte, in which the studio cites as the source for her novel the 1968 book Black Mutiny, by William Owens. Shaeffer denounces it as "a pre-civil rights white guy's version" in which Owens makes much of some of the Africans' conversion to Christianity. He also included scenes of Africans playing drums for money and getting drunk on rum. "For DreamWorks to cite this book as Barbara's source is a travesty," Shaeffer says.
Each interpretation of Amistad over the years has differed, and this is why Chase-Riboud believes she can see her work in Spielberg's version. One of her invented figures, a central character, is a black abolitionist, and she claims the character played by Morgan Freeman in the film is based on him. In Echo Of Lions he is Brathwaite, a name from Chase-Riboud's family, and a printer. On screen he is Joadson - a judge in her book is Judson - and although he is seen next to a printing press reading about Amistad, a voice-over later explains that he is an owner of stores.
"The voiceover seems an intrusion, and it's a change made from the shooting script, and after we had complained about plagiarism," claims Shaeffer.
It is certainly odd that despite DreamWorks's claim of meticulous research, it never spoke to Chase-Riboud about the script, although she spent three years investigating Amistad. Her book, however, was known to Spielberg's closest associates.
It was in 1988, the suit says, that the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then Chase-Riboud's editor at her publisher, sent the Echo Of Lions manuscript to Spielberg's production company as a possible movie. The author flew to LA for a meeting but was told the book would work better on the small screen.
Amistad's producer is the actress Debbie Allen, who says she has yet to read Echo Of Lions. This is a curious omission but, according to DreamWorks's court papers, Allen began working on the idea in 1978 and her collection of "extensive volumes of letters, court documents, newspaper articles and other documents" were the "basic source material". These included Black Mutiny, which Allen bought an option to film.
Many US black intellectuals, who are closely following the film's development, do not like the book's tone. It would therefore be an odd choice as a main source for Allen, a black woman with a strong sense of civil rights - or indeed for Spielberg. Many male black Americans still dislike him for his 1985 screen version of The Color Purple, which contained not a single sympathetic portrayal of a black man.
At least America has finally turned towards its traumatic origins in slavery. Indeed, after decades of silence, the subject has become commodified, and perhaps therefore less unpalatable: this year the Owens history has been republished with an audio cassette; another book on Amistad is soon to be published; an all-black opera about it opened recently in Chicago; and Newsweek magazine's current issue has actor Hounsou on the cover with the headline "The Long Shadow Of Slavery".
Despite the research, Spielberg cannot resist squeezing from history some melodrama of his own: Hopkins transfixes the court with a passionate speech on freedom, when in fact Adams delivered a dry legalistic treatise on the intricacies of property rights.
White America still requires the services of the whitewash brush when it comes to its past. In one astonishingly refined act of political correctness during filming of the capture of the Africans, only blacks in the crew were permitted to shackle and chain the actors.
Amistad might have been a better example of how Hollywood could approach the legacy of slavery had it not provoked the ire of such a respected author. Barbara Chase-Riboud is, after all, descended from slaves.