Quantico in legal jeopardy

Producer Mark Gordon faces lawsuit alleging show premise lifted from documentary

LOS ANGELES: Priyanka Chopra’s international TV series Quantico has run into a legal cauldron. A lawsuit has been filed against producer Mark Gordon, claiming that the idea for the American series was lifted from a 1999 documentary that aired on CNN.

Filmmakers Jamie Hellman and Barbara Leibovitz Hellman, and business executive Paula Paizes filed a 35-page complaint on Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court that says Gordon took the show’s premise from Quantico: The Making of an FBI Agent.

According to the complaint, the filmmakers were “granted unprecedented access to the FBI Academy” for their project, which followed a class of trainees through their 16-week programme. It read that Paizes and Gordon formed a business relationship in 2001 and introduced him to the filmmakers, later saying in an email that “they have a ton of research and can get us inside Quantico and the FBI.”

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In 2002, Leibovitz and Hellman signed a deal with the Mark Gordon Company and their Leibovitz-Hellman Productions and “provided MGC with the film from the documentary, information that was not included in the documentary, including all of their notes and transcripts related to the film.”

The complaint further alleged that initially, the ‘Quantico Project’ was discussed as a movie, with a storyline that “included a conspiracy inside the FBI Academy.” It added that the series substantially resembles the plot lines created and moulded by Paizes. The Mark Gordon Company had not commented on the suit.

Priyanka forayed into the small-screen fiction space through the ABC action-thriller series, in which she plays Alex Parrish, a rookie FBI recruit with a mysterious past. The Quantico series follows a group of young FBI recruits battling through training, inter-cutting between their hidden pasts and present training. 

Published in The Express Tribune, November 1^st, 2015.

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