Kerala high court allows release of movie

KOCHI: The high court on Wednesday allowed the producer of Mammootty-starrer period drama ‘Mamangam’ to go ahead with the scheduled release of the movie on Thursday. However, the court ordered that no name should be displayed as that of the scriptwriter.
Justice Shircy V issued the order after considering an appeal by director and scriptwriter Sajeev Pillai against producer Venu Kunnapalli.Though Sajeev was the director of ‘Mamangam’ initially, he was replaced after completion of two schedules and the new director had allegedly made changes to the script written by him. At the high court, Sajeev had sought an order to restrain release of the film without providing authorship credits to him. The producer had contended that Sajeev had sold his authorship and that he is not entitled to get credit for screenplay.
Citing Copyright Act, the court said assignment of the work will not exhaust an author’s right to claim authorship. However, it is not possible to ignore the fact that shooting of the film has been completed and it is ready for release, the court said. The author’s claim that his script has been mutilated is to be decided by a trial court based on facts and evidence, the court added while stating that prima facie it is clear that Sajeev is the author of the script.
The court said in the judgment, “As all arrangements have been made by the producer, if the release is postponed for the reason that the name of the scriptwriter is shown as one Sanker Ramakrishnan, definitely the damages that would be caused to the 1st respondent (producer) will be huge… It would be pertinent to mention that in a film industry, the work and effort of so many persons are involved in making a film and if it is postponed, that will definitely cause untold difficulties to all those persons... But the right of the appellant (Sajeev) and his tears are not simple things which could be ignored by this court.”