Writer Lauren J. Salkin has accused Taylor Sheridan of stealing his marquee series “Yellowstone” from her 2016 pitch in a lawsuit filed on Friday. 101 Studios, Paramount and Elevate Entertainment are also listed as defendants.
Reps for Sheridan, 101 Studios, Paramount and Elevate Entertainment did not immediately respond to Variety’s request for comment.
In the court documents, obtained by Variety, Salkin alleges that she pitched her own sprawling Western drama, “Sovereign Nation,” to Sheridan’s management company, Elevate Entertainment, in 2016, only to be told: “Taylor thanks you very much for your interest. Unfortunately, he’s unavailable for TV projects.” The suit then claims that “Yellowstone” was greenlit at Paramount “within months” of her rejection.
“Sheridan, however, was not ‘unavailable for TV projects,’” the suit reads, “Instead, he and others used Salkin’s copyrighted works to develop Yellowstone. On June 20, 2018, Paramount Network aired its first episode.”
The lawsuit lists several “specific expressive choices” that “Yellowstone” allegedly lifted from Salkin’s “Sovereign Nation.” Those elements, the suit states, include “a tribal casino functioning as the institutional center of political and development power; a signature confrontation staged in the tribal chairman’s casino office over expansion beyond reservation boundaries; the use of trust land, the absence of zoning restrictions, and a 99-year lease structure as the concrete mechanism for that expansion; and recurring master-plan imagery deployed to dramatize the struggle for territorial control.”
Salkin’s lawyers also claim that she “proposed” Danny Huston and Gil Birmingham for “Sovereign Nation” in her pitch deck. Both were later cast in “Yellowstone” and played “materially parallel structural roles: Birmingham as the tribal political leader whose authority and development strategy run through the casino, and Huston as the outside development power broker who supplies the political or commercial path for that expansion.”
The suit later states, “When the works are objectively compared, the same coordinated design repeatedly appears: casino-centered institutions organize political power; the same unusual land-development mechanisms propel the conflict; parallel scenes perform the same dramatic functions; and the same actors appear in materially parallel roles. These are not merely convergences of a shared genre. Taken together with access and timing, they support a strong inference of copying.”
