Deep Throat vs. Lovelace.
Arrow Productions Ltd., the company behind the 1972 cult porn hit Deep Throat, took the producers of the biopic Lovelace, starring Amanda Seyfried, behind the shed of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan yesterday in an attempt to force it to swallow a $10 million copyright infringement lawsuit.
Millennium Films Inc. and United Entertainment Inc. have not responded to today’s lawsuit filed by Deep Throat’s creators, which charges that the film used more than five minutes of unlicensed footage and that even the name ‘Linda Lovelace’ is trademarked. However, in a 2011 statement responding to Arrow’s lawyers, a lawyer from Millennium stated, “The producers had a First Amendment right to use the name and likeness of Lovelace and depict her in connection with the production of Deep Throat.”
“The defendants use that title without license or permission,” the lawsuit states. “Arrow and its partners were surprised to hear about [the film] Lovelace, because no one had approached Arrow for a license to use any of Arrow’s intellectual property.”
Yet Arrow said it approached production company Millennium Films as early as December 2010, and seeing as how Lovelace premiered at Sundance seven months ago, where it was snapped up by a division of The Weinstein Company, RADiUS-TWC, for distribution, the porn producers can’t really claim that they didn’t see this one coming (pun intended) until three days before Lovelace’s, er, wide release.
And what about the other Deep Throat nostalgia trip, Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story, which has now stalled out due to financial trouble? Arrow claims that that movie was given permission to use footage from its porn flick. Which might be a little bit too PG to be true, considering that it looks like production has halted and the title might go flaccid before it ever gets to the big screen.
