A retired teacher says Five-O and SNF owe almost everything to him, including tens of billions of dollars.
A retired Beaver Pelt, Iowa, school teacher has sued the creators of the hit television series Hawaii Five-O and the cinema sensation Saturday Night Fever, claiming that both were based on ideas original to him and appropriated without credit or compensation.
O’Dean Thigpen, 89, is asking for $32.7 billion from CBS, which aired Hawaii Five-O from 1968 through 1980, and $29.4 billion from Paramount Pictures, which released Saturday Night Fever in 1977, and an additional $23.8 billion from Universal Music Group, which now owns RSO, the original label for the best-selling soundtrack album.
Thigpen said that shortly after Alaska and Hawaii were admitted as states in 1959, he had begun trying to interest the television networks in a drama titled Alaska Four-9 whose protagonist, Cleve McTavish, would lead a state police force called Four-9 with the assistance of his bright young right-hand man, Benny Wilson. Thigpen said that for the latter role he had suggested Tommy Kirk, who had portrayed the bookish, dreamy Ernst in Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson.
The concept called for the show to open with footage of whale boats plying frigid oceans, single-engine seaplanes landing just offshore from fishing villages, and Eskimo girls in fur-trimmed parkas trudging through slush.
Thigpen said he believed that Cleve McTavish’s signature line would have become part of the national vocabulary:
“Charge him, Benno, possession of stolen shellfish.”
Thigpen said he was stunned when Hawaii Five-0 premiered, not just because he believed himself exploited but also because of the show’s departure from his original vision.
“Those people at CBS were such feckless morons,” Thigpen said. “They goofed around with the whole idea until it just didn’t work anymore, and who in his right mind would choose James MacArthur over Tommy Kirk to play a law enforcement officer?”
Thigpen said his movie scenario was intended as more of a niche-market endeavor.
“While Four-9 was a show intended to appeal to people of all ages,” Thigpen said, “with the movie I was definitely looking to build on one of the youth fads I noticed as a teacher, and Paramount stole my idea and screwed it up, the larcenous idiots.”
At the height of the Clackers fad, in 1971, Thigpen said, he had circulated a screenplay for a teen-oriented dramatic movie called Saturday Afternoon Spectacular that would serve as a breakout role (“no pun intended”) for a bankable young television star like Butch Patrick (formerly of The Munsters) or Ken Weatherwax (formerly of The Addams Family).
Thigpen said the story was about a young man named Tommy Manuro who lived in Moline, Illinois, where everyone worked at the John Deere plant. Tommy and his friends found meaning only in going to the Legion Hall on Saturday afternoons and having Clackers competitions of various kinds.
The story called for Tommy to have a brother who was a Methodist missionary in Africa but who lost his faith and returned to Moline to ponder his future and play with Clackers, Thigpen said, and one of Tommy’s friends would leap to his death from a bridge after his girlfriend was blinded by a fragment from a shattered Clacker.
“For a film like that, you’d need a lot of original music,” Thigpen said. “I envisioned using a brother act that was thought to be past its prime but that could still amaze the world: the Osmond Brothers.”
Thigpen said he had hoped that the Ventures would supply a rock version of Bach’s Great Fugue, All Fugued Up, and that a black female singer, perhaps Shirley Bassey, might contribute a number about knocking two balls together.
“You see what happened,” Thigpen said. “The suits and the hacks ripped me off again and turned out another pile of listless crap.”
Thigpen said he had waited this long to pursue legal remedies because he was ashamed of having been so easily exploited and because he lacked financial resources for a protracted legal struggle against vast corporations, but that he had changed his mind when his granddaughter, Claudia Killcrease, graduated from Harvard Law School in May of this year with joint specialties in litigation and entertainment law.
“She’s got student debt out the wazoo, and she’s the meanest little bitch on God’s green earth,” Thigpen said. “I almost feel sorry for that bunch of thieving clowns we’re taking on. Once Claudia digs in, it’s going to be worse for them than Cleve McTavish and Benny Wilson working them over with Clackers.”
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