CBS & ‘Hawaii Five-O’ Creator’s Estate Settle $100M Lawsuit With Talent Agent
George Litto won’t be getting his day in court after all — and the talent agent is probably OK with that. CBS’ lawyer James Curry today told an LA Superior Court judge that the network and the estate of Hawaii Five-0 creator Leonard Freeman have come to an amicable resolution with Litto in the nearly 2-year-old case. With a much-delayed trial set to start shortly, today’s resolution came as a surprise when Curry and other lawyers appeared in front of Judge Elizabeth Allen White. Litto was the agent of Freeman, who passed away in 1974. His initial May 2012 lawsuit against the estate sought $10 million in punitive damages and a big swell of the shares of the profits from the reboot version of the Hawaii-set cop show, which CBS brought back in 2010.
While no details of the settlement were provided by the Sheppard Mullin attorney in court, it is highly unlikely Litto received all he was asking for from the estate. Nonetheless, this marks the end of what has been some choppy surf of a lawsuit for CBS. The network was pulled into the suit in the fall of 2012, then got itself dropped out, and then pulled back in again in separate rulings last September and November. Litto claimed that Freeman’s heirs and CBS wrongly excluded him from negotiations for the new Five-O. The talent agent also said that after Freeman’s death, he and the producer’s widow Rose came to an agreement that gave Litto significant rights in connection with future versions of the series. Hawaii Five-0 originally ran from 1968-1980.
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