It’s a plot straight out of a Hollywood whodunit: high-tech sleuths hunting for clues in computer disks, ballpoint ink and UPC codes.
But these are plot twists in a very real courtroom drama involving an Academy Award-winning Brooklyn filmmaker, charges of copyright infringement and a powerhouse movie studio.
Ryan Brooks has sued Warner Bros., Clint Eastwood’s production company and a small army of other Tinseltown defendants claiming they ripped off his script for the 2012 film “Trouble with the Curve.”
Brooks, who lives in Carroll Gardens, won an Oscar last year for producing the short documentary “Inocente.”
“Trouble with the Curve,” starring Eastwood as an aging pro-baseball scout and Amy Adams as his estranged daughter, grossed $46.3 million and brought in another $18 million in DVD sales.
The trouble with “Trouble” is that Brooks claims it is strikingly similar to a project he came up with called “Omaha,” about an aging college baseball coach and his estranged daughter.
Adding to the intrigue, Brooks maintains “Trouble” was secretly penned by Don Handfield, his former collaborator on “Omaha.”
Warner Bros. filed papers in California court Feb. 8 to toss the case. The next court date is Monday.
Brooks, 35, claims he hired screenwriter Handfield in 2005 to help write the “Omaha” script. The two had a falling out in 2008 amid allegations that Handfield failed to deliver a polished final product.
Brooks found out through a press report in October 2011 that Eastwood was on board to star in a movie with a strong resemblance to “Omaha.” When he finally saw the “Trouble” script, he was “aghast,” according to court papers. He filed suit in Los Angeles federal court in October.
“The lawsuit is reckless and a waste of time and money. The allegations are false,” Warner Bros. contends, claiming Randy Brown wrote the “Trouble” script while a UCLA student in the 1990s.
But the plot thickened when, according to the lawsuit, the Brooks team produced a former Secret Service ink expert who found the ink used on Brown’s purported notes was less than two years old and that the notebooks themselves were not even on the market in the 1990s.
Another investigator, a former Army counterintelligence agent, analyzed computer disks that contained Brown’s purported script and found that “the date/time stamps of the disks were manipulated to present inaccurate information about date of creation,” court papers charge.