A friend of mine who is new to show business wrote a great feature-film script and he gave it to me to read.

“But here’s the thing,” he said. “I don’t care if you read it. I just want you to send it along to…” And here my friend named a very successful feature-film producer that he knows is a close friend of mine. He was using me, in other words, to get his material into the hands of a more powerful and influential person.

Which was fine with me. In the first place, this is pretty much how anything gets done in show business. It’s an industry built on intersecting webs of relationships and a favor bank that’s too big to fail. My friend is a novice at this, but he’s clearly figured out the basics.

But then he committed a rookie mistake. He asked me to wait a week or so before I passed the script along. “I need time,” he told me, “to register the script with the Writers Guild. I don’t want anyone stealing my original idea.”

“There’s not really an original idea here to worry about,” I said, regretting my words the moment they left my mouth. “I guarantee you that somewhere in the desk drawers of every studio, there’s a version of this, an updating of this story—I mean it’s Rush Hour, basically, isn’t it? A buddy cop picture?”

“No,” he said. “NO. She’s a cop and he’s a woke journalist doing a ride-along for one night. Totally not Rush Hour.”

I decided not to argue. (But for the record: It’s basically Rush Hour.)

“Look,” I said, “No one is going to steal this script from you. They wouldn’t bother. You’re an unknown writer without a credit. Your fee will be peanuts. They’ll just buy it from you.”

Whenever they can, studios will take the cheaper, easier option. Which is why the recent lawsuit between Warner Bros. Television and the estate of the late mega-bestselling author Michael Crichton, the creator of the 1990s blockbuster hospital drama ER, is such a curious and unlikely event.

The short version is this. John Wells, the executive producer of ER during its entire 15-season run, and Noah Wyle, a star of ER for the same duration, have collaborated on a new series called The Pitt for the Warner Bros. Discovery streaming service, Max. It’s a fast-paced hospital drama set in an emergency room in Pittsburgh, and it deals with the professional and private lives of a handful of stressed-out doctors. Maybe this sounds familiar?

ER was one of the biggest television hits of all time. So it’s unsurprising the studio involved would want to reassemble the creative team to launch a new hospital drama. The estate of Michael Crichton (who died in 2008 of lymphoma) believes The Pitt is merely a reboot of ER and that therefore it is entitled to compensation in the form of episodic fees and profit participation. The creator of Westworld, The Andromeda Strain, Coma, The Great Train Robbery, and Jurassic Park, among many other famous titles, Crichton had something called “frozen rights” to his ER work. This means essentially that any iteration of the ER idea would need his—or his heirs’—approval, which Warner Bros. Television didn’t get for The Pitt because a hospital show is a hospital show and every studio’s got one in a drawer somewhere.

Except: Before The Pitt became a go-project for Warner Bros. and the creative team, they tried to make a deal with the Crichton estate for an ER reboot. For two years, according to court filings, the sides tried to hammer out terms but couldn’t agree on simple issues like screen credit for Michael Crichton and back-end points for the estate. The deal fell through—and then a few months later, Warner Bros. Television announced that it was making a hospital show called The Pitt. And a little while after that, the studio got a nasty letter from the law firm of Hueston Hennigan LLP, representing the Crichton estate, and the lawsuit was on.

Talk about rookie mistakes! These seasoned professionals should have known that once you’ve negotiated unsuccessfully with a party for a piece of intellectual property, it’s awfully hard to claim later that any resulting similar project has nothing at all to do with whatever it was that you wouldn’t pay for. Especially when it’s produced by the guy who produced ER and starring the guy who starred in ER and made by the studio that made ER and set in an ER. Good luck explaining that to the judge, or if they’re very unlucky, to the jury.

There (probably) won’t be a jury, though. Or a trial of any kind. It’s important to remember that when these kinds of cases go to trial, the studio almost always loses. Judges and juries alike tend to want to punish the soulless corporation and reward the independent artist. Studios mostly remember this, which is why they may shout and slam down the phone and fight like wildcats against giving anything away but in the end make the deal. That’s what we do in Hollywood. That’s the work product of the majority of the town: to make deals, to shake hands, to get the production underway.

So, yes, there will be shouting and threats and a volley of unpleasant emails. And then a deal will get done that roughly matches what the Crichton estate demanded in the first place, with a little extra sugar for the law firm of Hueston Hennigan LLP. It will prove to have been a costly detour in money and in time for a studio that has lost nearly 40 percent of its value in the past year and has laid off thousands of employees. And all because someone in the organization forgot the Robin Williams Rule of Show Business.

Robin Williams, the late actor and frenetic comedian, was a notorious joke thief. Young comedians would complain that he’d show up at their shows, laugh along with the audience, and then a few days later they’d see Williams on The Tonight Show or some other widely seen television talk show effortlessly dropping their material into his conversation. Which ruined it for them, of course. They couldn’t show up to the comedy club and do that material again, because people would just assume they had stolen it from Robin Williams.

Williams, it is said, always felt terrible about this. His explanation was that in the rush of performance, with his brain zooming at some untold speed, he simply no longer remembered that the joke or observation or one-liner that popped into his head had been written and performed by someone else. Somebody, it must be said, a lot less famous and considerably poorer.

So he did what you do in show business when you want to apologize for something. He would write a big fat check. Rumor had it that those payments often amounted to $10,000 each, which for an otherwise destitute comedian (especially back in the 1980s) must have gone a long way toward making peace. Some comedians would even show up at a comedy club whenever they heard Robin Williams was in the audience, angling for the chance to have a joke stolen and, subsequently, their rent paid. In other words, you can get away with a lot in show business as long as you’re prepared to write a check. The trick is to write it before somebody hires a lawyer.

Photo from ER, © Warner Bros. Television. All rights reserved.

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