A WOMAN wrote The Matrix, one of the most profound movies ever made.
Apparently there have been some false reports. Ms. Stewart DID win her case, but not for $2.5 billion dollars. Her attorney failed to appear at a court date and her case was dismissed, so she filed a lawsuit against the attorney. Never giving up, she re-filed her case and was granted permission by the California courts to proceed with her lawsuit. Below, I have outlined what is true and what isn't.
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| Sophia Stewart |
FALSE: After a six year dispute, prolific writer and profound spiritualist, Sophia
Stewart has received justice for copyright infringement and racketeering and
will finally recover damages from the films, The Matrix I, II and III, as well
as The Terminator and its sequels. Yes, you heard that correctly – the entire
Matrix & Terminator franchises, and her suspected pay off is expected to be
the highest in history – an estimated 2.5 billion.
TRUE: “Stewart filed her case in 1999, after viewing the Matrix, which she felt
had been based on her manuscript, ‘The Third Eye,’ copyrighted in 1981. In the
mid-eighties Stewart had submitted her manuscript to an ad placed by the
Wachowski Brothers, requesting new sci-fi works.
TRUE: According to court documentation, an FBI investigation discovered that more
than thirty minutes had been edited from the original film, in an attempt to
avoid penalties for copyright infringement. The investigation also stated that
‘credible witnesses employed at Warner Brothers came forward, claiming that the
executives and lawyers had full knowledge that the work in question did not
belong to the Wachowski Brothers.’ These witnesses claimed to have seen
Stewart’s original work and that it had been ‘often used during preparation of
the motion pictures.’ The defendants tried, on several occasions, to have Stewart’s
case dismissed, without success.
The case is not over as previously reported. HERE is the real story:
In what continues to loom as one of the biggest criminal copyright
infringement cases in the history of Hollywood, a lone African American woman
is fighting the battle of her life against those who would ultimately take
credit for blockbuster movie franchises, Terminator and Matrix. Sophia
Stewart, a divorced mother of two, Tasha and Paris. and displaced New Yorker
now residing in Las Vegas, is in an epochal legal battle with the famed
Wachowski brothers (Andy and Larry) from Chicago, two carpenters/Marvel comic
book writers who dropped out of college to pursue careers as Hollywood
filmmakers. According to Ms. Stewart, an articulate if enigmatic writer turned
litigant — the Wachowski brothers stole her script for a science fiction
screenplay and turned it into the mega hit that we know today as the Matrix
(1999) which racked up billions worldwide.
Here’s how the story goes. Ms. Stewart, with her Bachelor’s degree in
journalism from City University of New York in tow, moved to Los Angeles to
pursue a writing career and to attend film school at the University of Southern
California. Through her association with R&B singer Janet Jackson (go
figure), she obtained entree into the entertainment business, initially working
on small television projects and eventually landing at Columbia Pictures in the
office of then vice president, Dick Berres.
Soon after arriving in L.A., Ms. Stewart wrote a
science fiction novel called The Third Eye.
The book, she says, is a science fiction version of the ‘second coming’ which
she was inspired to write after seeing Star Wars. “What
I wrote was the evolution of consciousness, the second coming of Christ — man
vs. the machine.”
In 1986 Ms. Stewart answered a magazine advertisement for a science fiction
script that the Wachowski brothers were going to make into a comic book. Years
later, Ms. Stewart contends, her vision hit the movie screens on March 31, 1999
in the form of
Matrix. In fact the Wachowski brothers used a verbatim
quote from her book to introduce the film which was later removed after an FBI
investigation into the criminal copyright infringement was initiated.
When I first spoke with Sophia Stewart a few months ago in April 2012, she
was most gracious with her time and forthcoming with the complex details of her
lawsuits. The legal documents involved could make your head spin. She shared
some of them with me.
When Stewart saw the
Matrix, she recognized her work right away and
called the legal department at Warner Brothers on April 1, 1999. According to
her, they knew exactly who she was and therefore, one would assume, they knew
that her work had plagiarized. “They offered me money right off the bat,” she
says. She had also kept a copy of the original Wachowski ad which ultimately
became one of many aces in the hole. “The ad is what brings it all together,”
she says. “The ad is what says I told the truth.”
There
is a ton
of information on the web about this case. There are several interesting
radio interviews on Youtube where you can learn about Ms. Stewart’s early life
as a prodigy, her leap into college at a young age and her travails in
Hollywood. She was writing in the 1980s about technologies that had not even
been invented. She’s already written Matrix 4 with
“hologram clones, virtual reality, etc.” according to her, but she’s keeping it
close to the vest, not surprising. She says that she writes in the universal
language of mathematics.
Stewart contends that there are a lot of people whose work has similarly
been stolen, but because the media is corrupt, you don’t hear about it. In her
case, no one is talking. The Wachowski brothers were famous for their reclusion
especially after the release of
Matrix and the subsequent controversy.
My contention is that because they knew the work was stolen, they didn’t want
to address it in the media. In fact, they made a deal with Warner that they
would not have to do interviews. (In a bizarre twist, one of the Wachowski
brothers (Larry) had a sex change and is now a woman named Lana, so the
Wachowski brothers are no more.)
I spoke with Ms. Stewart again in late July. One
may read reports on the Internet that Ms. Stewart won a multi-billion dollar
lawsuit when, in fact, she received some funds but not the damages. “The
Wachowskis Brothers lost on a default judgment in 2004,” she says. “They never
answered the complaint ever.” On June 4, 2012, she won a judgment against her
now deceased attorney, Jonathan Lubell (alias Jon Lubell) for failure to appear
at a pre-trial conference in
December 2011, and failure to appear to show cause in January 2012 causing
her to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue and, more important,
causing the dismissal of her $300 million 2003 California lawsuit.
Her judgment
is for $150 million.
You will be hard-pressed to find information about Ms. Stewart’s wins in the
mainstream media. I know for a fact that people had written her off as a crazy
lady. How dare she take on such giant corporations as Twentieth Century Fox and
influential individuals like the Wachowski brothers and other mega figures in
the industry? The fact is, the woman is brilliant and brave. Her story deserves
to be heard — that you can wage a battle against the so-called powers that be
and win. The reader might say, “…well, she didn’t for damages…” (yet).
Truthfully, I don’t think – having spent hours on the telephone with Ms.
Stewart – that money is her motivation. The point is that people (or
corporations) can not STEAL your copyrighted material, do with it as they
might, make billions of dollars and think they can get away with it.
(Aside): Ms. Stewart wrote herself into her story as the Oracle, played in
Matrix by the late Gloria Foster
.
Notes on Terminator:
The issue of
Terminator is a convoluted story of mischief, mayhem,
malfeasance, misconduct and racketeering.
Canadian born James Cameron (
Titantic, Avatar) is credited with
directing and co-writing
Terminator (his partner in crime Gale Anne
Hurd, producer), but another science fiction writer, Harlan J. Ellison sued him
and won a paltry $65K because Cameron admitted in interviews that he had
“ripped off” story lines from two
Outer Limits segments Ellison had
written. Ms. Stewart claims (and the FBI concurs) that
Terminator is
also based on her seminal work (
The Third Eye) and that it is, in
fact, the prequel to
Matrix. Initially, she was not aware of this
infringement, not having seen
Terminator. It was the FBI that informed
her that
Terminator was indeed part of the copyright infringement case
and pursued a civil liberties case on her behalf.
(Sarah Connor who the
Terminator relentlessly pursues in the film is Neo’s mother (Matrix).
WOW! The case was ruled in her favor.
The teleplay and the final film reveals that Gale Anne Hurd and James
Cameron were not really authors, rather, they were copying the protected work
product of other people and then gave false oaths to the United States
Copyright Office in violation of 17 U.S.C. 506 (e) to set void agreements that
were based upon these illegal acts.
…The Debtors’ have committed Felony Copyright infringement and do not
own legitimate interest in the Terminator movie franchise. -
Source: Universal Commercial Code (UCC), California, 2009
The “Debtors” refers to director James Cameron, producer Gale Anne Hurd,
et
al.
(Aside) The famous line ” I will be back ” in
Terminator uttered by
Arnold Schwarzenegger that reverberated around the world, was created by Ms.
Stewart.
I have selected the following paragraphs from the Civil Rights court
case filed on Ms. Stewart’s behalf to provide a synopsis of the proceeding:
41. Hence, Plaintiff Stewart maintains that
all deals made without a recognition of her rights was done to willfully
suppress her rights and to show that some industry leaders concealed the
malfeasance by illegal means in violation of 18 U.S.C. 4 so that the
perpetrators could benefit from their illegal malfeasance and to make certain
that Plaintiff Stewart did not collect her just compensation as an African
American who in 1981 did not have membership in the Writers Guild of
America. That is not a reason to set up a scheme to take her work by
illegal means in that the laws of the United States are the supreme law
regarding the right to own and use copyrighted works, not a private agreement
between writers and various studios.
76. Nevertheless, Defendants Gale Anne
Hurd, James Cameron, Pacific Western Productions, Inc., and Hemdale Film
Corporation did not reveal their knowledge of the co-authorship of Sophia
Stewart to the United States Copyright Office when the “Terminator” screenplay
was submitted under number PAu 584-564 on February 3, 1984 as it was their duty
to do under 17 U.S.C. 506 (e).
82. On information and belief, the sole
story concept that Gale Anne Hurd had between May 1, 1981 and May 10, 1981
involving a post nuclear war fight between man and machines from another planet
in a darkened earth that used naked people without shame through a large
mechanized spacecraft to engage the machines was written by Sophia Stewart on
May 1, 1981 which was then submitted to Twentieth Century Fox to the Vice
President of Creative Affairs for consideration.
175. In spite of the fact that no “Terminator” movie
has lost money at the Box Office, the companies that have acquired the rights
and the companies that have profited from the use of this intellectual property
repeatedly go to the Bankruptcy Court to transfer the rights from Hemdale Film
Corporation in 1995 through Halcyon Holding Company LLC, the parent company to
T Asset Acquisitions LLC, filing for Chapter 11 reorganization on August 17,
2009 and then illegally transferring those rights that were never lawfully
acquired in light of at least two violations of 17 U.S.C. 506 (e) and multiple
violations of 18 U.S.C. 152 (2) regarding the proper ownership of the so called
“Terminator” merchandising, production, game, and other rights that arose from
the “Third Eye” written by Sophia Stewart that was pilfered by Gale Anne Hurd
and Pacific Western Productions, Inc. and then falsely represented to every
buyer through subjects that were not bona fide purchasers since they could not
buy all of what Hurd, Cameron, and Pacific Western Productions, Inc. did not
own, which void outcome based upon violations of 18 U.S.C. 152 (2) also apply
to the representations of ownership by Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson
through Halcyon Holding Group LLC to Pacificor LLC for $29.5 million on
February 8, 2010 in the fictitious auction.
182. Every entity that got close to the “Third Eye”
had amazing outcomes:
a) Roger Corman – $16.5
Million;
b) Gale Anne Hurd – in
excess of $8 million;
c) Pacific Western
Productions – (unknown);
d) Hemdale Film Corporation
– - $72 million;
e) Carolco Pictures, Inc. —
$400 million;
f) C2 Partners (Intermedia)
– $233 million;
g) Halcyon Holding Group LLC
– $172 million;
h) James Cameron – unknown;
and
i) Roger Corman –
$16.5 million.
In any case, Sophia Stewart stood her ground and refused (refuses) to be taken lightly. She is a woman of obvious spiritual strength, as well as integrity and immense courage. She battled Hollywood head on, and still continues to fight for her work and monies that it earned. If you read this blog regularly then you know, SHE is the type of woman we applaud, revere and want to know about.
Not to mention, this is what she did to her haters..
I fucking LOVE it.
It makes absolute sense that this movie was written by a woman. The knowledge that this movie captivates..?
ESTROGENATED.
Sarah Conner is Neo's Mom? Like fucking wow!
Sidenote: I hope all you aspiring filmmakers/writers/etc learn something from this story: HOLLYWOOD STEALS. They tried to discredit Ms. Stewart because she wasn't a member of the Writer's Guild at the time she submitted material. A very lame excuse but was still presented in court. Please make sure you have all your ducks in a row and know what you're dealing with. Have your material copywritten and/or whatever else you need to do to protect your work. Just because someone won an Oscar or has a distinguished career doesn't mean they aren't a thief *cough/JamesCameron/cough*
In any case, Ms. Stewart's achievements makes me proud to be a member of the Female Club. I think I'll go bra-less for the rest of the day.
Sophia Stewart, WTS salutes you!
Men don't have to worry about this. The person at the counter will simply see you as a kind hearted gentleman, doing something nice for a woman in your life.
