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Quentin Tarantino Sued Over Kill Bill's Anime Segment
posted on by Egan Loo
A man named Dannez Hunter filed a lawsuit against Quentin Tarantino and others on Monday on several claims, including the allegation that Tarantino's Kill Bill film project plagiarized Hunter's "Lotus" film treatment. Hunter claims that he gave the Miramax film studio the concept of a character named "Ren based on the historical lineage of Samurai 'Sakanouye No Tamuramaro.'"
Hunter further claims that Tarantino "copied verbatim the concept/character name 'Ren,' without changing anything and pilfered every element from the Lotus treatment, including Ren witnessing her mother's sadistic murder in a cartoon format, the knife through the mother's abdomen that went inches away from her face with droplets of blood on her face as she gasped for breath, burning the house down while standing next to the small shrine, Ren becoming the head of the Yakuza, the collection of the Katana swords, the death touch, the esthetic [sic] look of the Yakuza, the collection of the Katana swords, the death touch, esthetic [sic] look of the cover-page treatment marketing plan, and her being taken by her father to be trained by her grandfather to become an assassin."
According to Hunter, he registered a copy of his treatment with the Writers Guild of America in 1999, four years before Kill Bill: Vol. 1 opened in theaters. Tarantino and his A Band Apart production company, Miramax and its founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein, Miramax's parent company Walt Disney, The Weinstein Company, Carlos Goodman, Bloom Hergott, and the Visiona Romantica and Lawrence Bender Productions corporations are named in the lawsuit as defendants. Hunter is seeking in excess of US$1 million for damages. The E! network's website posted the filed document that launched the lawsuit.
Source: E!, Entertainment Weekly
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