Los Angeles, Oct 30 (IANS) Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra’s international TV series “Quantico” has run into a legal hassle. 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”, reports deadline.com.
Priyanka has made inroads in the small screen fiction space of the west through the ABC action-thriller series, in which she plays Alex Parrish, a rookie FBI recruit with a mysterious past.
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 program.
Elaborating on the matter, it says 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”.
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 which was not included in the documentary, including all of their notes and transcripts related to the film”.
It further read that initially the “Quantico Project” was discussed as a movie, with a storyline that “included a conspiracy inside the FBI Academy”.
It also adds that the series substantially resembles the plot lines created and moulded by Paizes.
The “Quantico” series follows a group of young FBI recruits battling through training, inter-cutting between their hidden pasts and their present training, and also flashes-forward to the near future, where one of the recruits will turn out to be a sleeper terrorist responsible for a devastating terrorist attack in the US.
The Mark Gordon Company had no comment on the suit.