Legal News

Totally Fabulous! NBC Sues Weinsteins Over ?Project Runway?

By Dan Slater

Q: Were you surprised that you weren’t asked to complete a 13th look?

A: Jillian, I don’t know if you saw it, but God, all she talked about was like, “There’s going to be a surprise challenge! There’s going to be a surprise challenge!” I was like, “Ooh! Let’s make three outfits!” The thing is, that’s my game. I can make an outfit in a day. Jillian can’t, so that would have eliminated her. . . . — from an interview with Christian Siriano, winner of “Project Runway”

OK, so when it comes to “Project Runway,” we approach the subject with a bit of a bias. After all, we’ve never actually seen an episode of the show — which apparently pits clothing designers against one another — only spoofs of it. But now that the hit reality series, hosted by Heidi Klum (pictured), has become the subject of a court battle between two entertainment heavies, the Law Blog needs to get serious.

NBC Universal, which airs the show on its Bravo cable network, filed a lawsuit against the show’s producer, the Weinstein brothers’ Weinstein Co., for selling the rights to Lifetime Networks. Here’s a copy of the complaint. In the suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, NBC claims that it had a right of first refusal on the show, which was scheduled to launch its fifth cycle on Bravo this summer. Here are reports from the WSJ and NYT.

The Weinsteins, who are turning to David Boies for representation, say their Weinstein company never granted NBC the right of first refusal, and that NBC had already turned down the same deal struck with Lifetime, a JV of Disney and Hearst. Filing the complaint on behalf of NBC: Gibson Dunn’s Orin Snyder.

Of course, an entertainment industry spat just wouldn’t be proper without an anecdote from a lunch at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons between NBC CEO Jeff Zucker and Harvey Weinstein. In the suit, NBC alleges that, at the lunch, Weinstein agreed to honor an NBC right of first refusal, saying words to the effect of: “You can only have in your life five true friends and I consider you one of my five friends. And I’m telling you, I will not embarrass you.”

Boies, however, says that his client’s statement, and another statement the suit cites from a Weinstein agent in a post-lunch email, didn’t relate to a right of first refusal.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 08, 2008 (boomark / email).