Adam McKay Accused of Ripping Off Self-Published Novel for ‘Don’t Look Up’
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A self-published novelist is claiming Adam McKay ripped off a book he wrote for his 2021 Netflix movie Don’t Look Up in a new lawsuit.
William Collier claims that in 2007, he wrote a novel called Stanley’s Comet, which was later self-published in 2012. The suit describes Stanley’s Comet as a “dark comedy” about low-level NASA scientists who discover a giant comet hurtling towards Earth, but their attempts to warn the public about the danger are dismissed and downplayed by politicians and media figures.
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Collier alleges that McKay had access to his book. In 2007, the suit states, Collier’s daughter was working in the production division of Jimmy Miller Entertainment, which was owned by McKay’s management company at the time, Mosaic (the titular Jimmy Miller owned Mosaic and was then McKay’s manager). Collier claims he sent Stanley’s Comet to his daughter so that it could be submitted for consideration and potentially turned into a movie.
The lawsuit claims Stanley’s Comet was “reviewed, received and considered” by numerous people at Mosaic, including Miller and McKay.
It wasn’t until over a decade later that McKay wrote the screenplay for Don’t Look Up. In an effort to prove that McKay couldn’t have “independently created” the work without using Stanley’s Comet, the lawsuit states that McKay has given “contradictory” interviews about the inspiration for the film. One story McKay “repeated in several interviews,” the lawsuit says, was that the film came out of a conversation he had with journalist David Sirota about climate change.
“Sirota mused that it was like a comet (or an asteroid or a meteor, depending on the interview) hurtling toward the Earth, but no one seemed to care,” the lawsuit reads. “McKay has repeatedly claimed that Sirota’s climate change metaphor inspired him to write the movie script.” (Sirota received a “Story By” credit on Don’t Look Up and is named as a co-defendant in the suit.)
In a different interview, per the lawsuit, McKay said he got the idea not from a conversation with Sirota but from a newspaper column in which Sirota used the “comet/climate change metaphor.” There was an additional interview, the suit says, where McKay said he was inspired by David Wallace-Wells’ climate change book, The Uninhabitable Earth.
The lawsuit alleges that McKay “used the ‘climate change’ story to turn Sirota, a respected journalist, into a witness to the actual moment of McKay’s claimed ‘independent creation’ of the Film’s storyline and then to bind him to the story by crediting him as the co-author of the Screenplay… McKay concocted this implausible story of his ‘independent creation’ of the storyline, using Sirota for that purpose. Accordingly, any claim by McKay of independent creation is implausible.”
The lawsuit lists numerous alleged similarities between Don’t Look Up and Stanley’s Comet. These include similarities in tone and theme (both are dark comedies with “strong political critique of the media, the government, and the cultural elite”), as well as plotting, pacing, dialogue, and character.
Among the alleged story similarities: The scientists try to warn the public about the comet on a “Sunday morning ‘soft news’ show” but end up congratulated instead; a “whirlwind media tour”; both scientists have “flings with high profile people”; the emergence of a “shoot the messenger” mentality that leads to the scientists being “abducted/taken by FBI/Angry mobs”; powerful people “minimizing the astronomer’s credibility”; the government considering using “nuclear weapons to destroy the comet,” but calling that off for political reasons.
Collier also claims his book deploys the phrase “Don’t Look” in the same way way Don’t Look Up deploys its titular phrase, to convey “the same expressive message of willful ignorance of imminent calamity.”
Reps for McKay and Sirota, as well as Netflix — also named as a defendant — did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
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