Paramount Pictures has countersued the cousin of a writer on Top Gun: Maverick, who alleges he co-wrote the screenplay, opening another front in the legal battle over alleged copyright infringement in the writing process for the film.
In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in California federal court, the studio alleges Shaun Gray deliberately hid his role in penning key scenes, with the aim of asserting claims for idea theft and seeking joint ownership of the screenplay. It accuses him of fraud and infringing on its copyrights.
With the success of Top Gun: Maverick, Gray “saw an opportunity to shake down” Paramount, states the complaint.
In a statement, Marc Toberoff, a lawyer for Gray, said Paramount’s counterclaims are “designed to scare and intimidate” the writer “from asserting his authorial rights.”
“After Paramount likely made a secret deal with Eric Singer, they try to blame Gray for Singer’s alleged deception, when Gray was victimized by it,” Toberoff added. “There is one saving grace though, Paramount’s counterclaims serve as a ringing admission that indeed Shaun Gray authored most of the major character-defining action scenes appearing in Top Gun: Maverick.”
Gray is the cousin of Singer, who was recruited by Kosinski to write the film after collaborating with him on Only the Brave. He’s argued he should be credited as a co-author of the screenplay stemming from his role in writing pivotal sequences for the movie. This includes the opening in which Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, pushes a high-tech prototype fighter jet past its limits, breaking speed records before the aircraft fails, and another scene in which he repeatedly outmaneuvers elite pilots during a training exercise, culminating in a dogfight with a trainee.
Gray never reached a work-made-for-hire deal, which governs a production company’s employment relationship with a writer and gives it the copyright to a script, with Paramount, unlike other Top Gun: Maverick writers, opening the door for him to claim joint authorship of the screenplay.
Paramount brought on three waves of screenwriters for the movie, according to court documents. Singer — and by association, Gray — were brought on in the middle of the writing process, with two scribes penning drafts before and after the American Hustle writer submitted his own.
Had it known of Gray’s involvement in the movie, Paramount claims it would’ve pursued other options that didn’t put a cloud over its title to the film. The first is stopping Singer from working behind-the-scenes with Gray; another is cutting the scenes that Gray wrote; one more is not sharing Singer’s draft with the next wave of screenwriters for the movie.
“Gray did not try to negotiate a screenwriting contract with [Paramount], either individually or jointly with Singer, even though he knew that [Paramount] (like any mainstream studio) would not knowingly allow a writer to work on a screenplay for a major film without a work-made-for-hire agreement in place,” writes Molly Lens, a lawyer for the studio, in the complaint.
In January 2023, more than half a year after the release of Top Gun: Maverick, Gray sent Paramount a written statement through his attorney in which he claimed he had a role in penning the film and kept it hidden from the studio out of concern that it’d interfere with Singer being brought on as a writer, according to the complaint. Gray wrote he was worried that, if Singer pushed for the studio to contract them as a writing team with a shared credit, “it risked blowing up the deal and could cause [them] to lose the project entirely.”
The Writers Guild of America in 2019 began its process to determine the writing credits for the film. Paramount stresses that Gray, understanding that the union’s decision is binding, chose to stay silent rather than lodge a claim. Gray wanted Singer to get a writing credit and share in that bonus, the studio says.
And since Gray alleges he wrote several scenes without entering into an agreement with Paramount, it argues that he infringed on its copyrights. The sequences he penned “exploit substantial protected expression owned by [Paramount] from Top Gun — most significantly, the character of Maverick himself,” the complaint states. With the lawsuit, Gray has “effectively admitted to infringing [Paramount’s] copyright in Top Gun and defrauding” the company over his involvement in the film.
Last month, the court rebuffed Gray’s bid for a court order that he was a joint author of a screenplay, which could’ve entitled him to a share of profits from the film, while advancing his copyright infringement claim.
Gray’s credits show that he was a staff writer on an episode of Shantaram and was Singer’s writer’s assistant for The International. He’s mostly worked as a digital artist, including on The Magicians, Defiance and Two and a Half Men.
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