Stereophonic

A producer who worked on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is suing the creators of the hit Broadway play Stereophonic, claiming they stole material from his memoir about working on the legendary album.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday (Oct. 2) in Manhattan federal court, Ken Caillat and co-author Steven Stiefel call the Tony Award-winning show an “unauthorized adaptation” of their 2012 book Making Rumours — and accuse playwright David Adjmi of “flagrant and willful infringement.”

“Stereophonic copies the heart and soul of Making Rumours,” attorneys for Caillat and Stiefel write in their complaint. “The striking similarity is readily apparent right from the beginning of the show.”

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Featuring the music of Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, Stereophonic debuted on Broadway last fall, eventually winning five Tony Awards including best play, best direction of a play and best featured actor in a play.

Critics quickly noted the similarities to the infamous story of the recording session for Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which featured high tensions and heavy drug usage. A reviewer for the Wall Street Journal said the play was “fictionalizing Fleetwood Mac”; another critic said the play “isn’t literally about Fleetwood Mac, but c’mon.”

In their lawsuit, Caillat and Stiefel say the hit play “presents a nearly identical story arc as Making Rumours,” told from the same perspective of a sound engineer in a recording studio, about five characters who are “undeniably analogous to the members of Fleetwood Mac.”

“Stereophonic is undoubtedly a play based on plaintiffs’ memoir Making Rumours because substantial similarities exist between the two works, a reality that has been independently confirmed by those familiar with plaintiffs’ book who have also had the opportunity to review the play,” the duo’s lawyers write.

The new case presents tricky legal questions. Under U.S. law, historical events cannot be monopolized under copyrights, and nobody can claim exclusive ownership over the real story behind the making of Rumours. But specific creative elements of how such a story is told can be protected by copyrights, and film, TV and stage producers often license non-fiction books as the basis for their works.

In their case, Caillat and Stiefel claim that Adjmi copied those exact kinds of creative choices when he created his play: “Stereophonic’s audience not only sits in the same place that Mr. Caillat sat, but the show also depicts Mr. Caillat’s wild ride as it is described in Making Rumours.”

Adjmi is no stranger to copyright litigation. Back in 2014, he filed a preemptive lawsuit over his off-Broadway show called 3C, which riffed on the sitcom Three’s Company. In that case, filed after the sitcom’s owners threatened litigation, Adjmi argued the play was clearly a legal parody of the earlier show. And he eventually won, securing a ruling that his play was a legal “fair use” of the famous show.

In their complaint, Caillat and Stiefel noted that earlier case, but pointedly argued that such a defense would not work this time around: “Stereophonic is not a parody, and it is not in any way a fair use of Making Rumours.”

Reps for Adjmi did not immediately return requests for comment.