Guillermo del Toro has been riding high all awards season thanks to the success of The Shape of Water but now new claims threaten to taint the glow that the director has been experiencing as the front-runner for the Best Director prize at the Academy Awards.
The director has come out to directly refute claims made in a lawsuit filed yesterday by the estate of playwright Paul Zindel that the filmmaker appropriated plot elements from Let Me Hear You Whisper. That is a 1969 play about a janitorial cleaning woman who attempts (and fails) to free a dolphin from a scientific laboratory facility that weaponizes animals for military use.
A suit was filed in US District Court by attorney Marc Toberoff, who is no stranger to suing studios on behalf of writers and estates, most notably against Warner Bros on behalf of Superman co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. The play by Zindel — best known for his Pulitzer-winning play The Effects Of Gamma Rays On Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds — is described in the lawsuit as “a beloved work of fantasy/science fiction by an esteemed author, making the glaring similarities between the Picture and the Play too egregious to ignore.”
Del Toro had a short but pointed statement about the claims:
“I have never read nor seen the play. I’d never heard of this play before making The Shape of Water, and none of my collaborators ever mentioned the play.”
Tactics to create controversy in an attempt to derail a front-runner late in the Oscar race is nothing new. It has been seen in varying forms and perhaps most egregiously when press reports on Best Picture winner A Beautiful Mind alleged that its subject John Nash made anti-Semitic statements. The timing of the lawsuit — Oscar voters have begun filling out their ballots — wasn’t at all lost on Del Toro who went on to say:
“I really cannot stomach the timing of this accusation. It’s pretty transparent what is happening here. To me, it’s actually a relief to take something from the arena of opinion into the arena of fact and law.”
Fox Searchlight has been dealing with this estate claim for weeks and instead of succumbing to the claims, they have gone down the route of fighting them because they don’t believe they have any merit. The studio had this to say in defense of del Toro:
“These claims from Mr. Zindel’s estate are baseless, wholly without merit and we will be filing a motion to dismiss. Furthermore, the estate’s complaint seems timed to coincide with the Academy Award voting cycle in order to pressure our studio to quickly settle. Instead, we will vigorously defend ourselves and, by extension, this groundbreaking and original film.”
