Last month producer Scott Rudin, seeking to protect the financial future of a new stage adaptation of the novel now running on Broadway, forced at least eight theaters around the country to cancel productions of a 1970 stage version. Now the publisher of the earlier script says he will seek compensation and legal vindication.
“We feel horribly for those affected by the shameful bigfooting coming from Mr. Rudin,” Christopher Sergel III, president of Dramatic Publishing Co. and the grandson of the author of the first adaptation, said.
Sergel said he would ask an arbitration tribunal to protect the ability of local theaters to stage his grandfather’s adaptation and to award damages of at least $500,000. He accused the estate of “Mockingbird” author, Harper Lee, acting in concert with Rudin, of causing financial losses to Dramatic Publishing by making “false statements” to local theaters.
A lawyer representing Lee’s estate declined to comment. Rick Miramontez, a spokesman for Rudin, said, “This is an action between the Dramatic Publishing Co. and the estate of Harper Lee, and as such we have no comment.”
The move by the publishing company is only the latest legal controversy to erupt over the play since Rudin persuaded Lee, shortly before her death, to grant him the rights to create a Broadway adaptation of her novel and to permit screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to write the script.
The latest dispute, over whether and when the Sergel adaptation can be staged now that the Sorkin adaptation exists, pits an agreement Lee signed with Dramatic Publishing in 1969 against one she signed with Rudin in 2015.
The disagreement broke into public view in January, when a British production company announced it was canceling a planned tour of the Sergel production under threat from Rudin’s lawyers. Then last month, eight American theaters separately said they were canceling productions of the play for the same reason.
The cancellations prompted an outcry. Rudin then said he would allow the affected theaters to stage the Sorkin production, rather than the Sergel production.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.