Fox Loses Santa Suit

In a $19 million lawsuit, a jury in Ann Arbour, Michigan, has decided that 20th Century Fox stole the idea for its hit 1996 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Jingle All The Way from a screenplay by Michigan high school teacher Brian Alan Webster. Murray Hill Publications claimed that the Jingle screenplay bore a remarkable resemblance to a script of Webster's called Could This Be Christmas, the rights to which they bought in 1993 and which they pitched to numerous studios, including Fox, without success. "They were both about an African-American parent and a Caucasian trying to find a toy for a son," said Mayer Morgonroth, a lawyer for Murray Hill. In both screenplays a boy draws a picture of the action figure he wants for Christmas and puts it on the refrigerator. His father sees it and ventures to the shops to try and track it down. 'Hilarity' ensues when he realizes that it is the hot toy of the season and all the stores are sold out. "In our script [it] was Action Man," said Morgonroth, "in their script it was Turbo Man." The writing credit for Jingle All The Way went to Ed McQueen, which is in fact an alias for a 20th Century Fox script reader named Randy Korn. Bang to rights, it would seem.