Screenwriter and film producer Rob Grabow is suing Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James, the production company James shares with Maverick Carter, the SpringHill Company, and Netflix over claims that the 2024 film “Rez Ball” comes from his intellectual property.
According to CBS Sports, Grabow alleges in his lawsuit that much of the film actually comes from a script he wrote for a movie titled “The Gift of the Game,” which tells the story of an Indigenous teenager who led his high school basketball team to a state championship.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Grabow’s lawsuit states, “There are numerous substantially and strikingly similar concrete and expressive elements in the two works’ plot, theme, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, characters and sequence of events.”
The lawsuit also alleges that Grabow reached out to filmmaker Brit Hansel, and although she passed on the project, allegedly shared details about Grabow’s film with a co-writer of “Rez Ball.”
According to the complaint, “In both the Infringing Work and the Original Work, the protagonist has a parent who was a star high school basketball player in the area where the film takes place; that parent set a state high school scoring record, received a Division I basketball scholarship but ultimately did not make it off the reservation to pursue college basketball.”
According to Variety, Grabow actually sent the script months after the film had wrapped production, which may not help his case.
“Rez Ball” is inspired by two different true stories—the life of director Sydney Freeland and Michael Powell’s 2019 book, “Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation,” Screen Rant reported.
Although Powell’s book is cited as a source of inspiration, Sterlin Harjo, a co-writer of the film, told Time Magazine that he never read the book, instead, he referred to the director’s experience playing high school basketball when she played on a Navajo reservation growing up. Harjo and Freeland are both Indigenous.
“I didn’t need to read the book, it was from her (Freeland’s) community and she played basketball there,” Harjo said. “It was really about just telling a real story that we both connected to and felt authentic and real to us.”
Freeland added, “We don’t have professional sports teams back home, we don’t even have college teams. What you have is high school sports, and a lot of that fell onto basketball because that’s what a lot of indigenous communities excelled at.”
Neither Netflix nor James have commented publicly about the lawsuit, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, copyright law has been undergoing a move towards eliminating early dismissal of copyright infringement claims because reasonable minds can differ on whether or not two works are substantially similar.
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