Dirty Dealing

A rollicking recounting of the landmark case a writer brought against Miramax, whom he accused of stealing his screenplay and turning it into the cult classic Rounders. When a young screenwriter goes online to check out the promotional website for a new poker movie called Rounders, hes shocked to discover how similar it is to a screenplay he wrote a few years earlier and submitted to a number of studios. When he later sees the Miramax-produced film in theaters, he is astonished by the number of overlapping elementsthe protagonist playing Texas Hold em to pay his way through college while deceiving the girlfriend who believes hes quit, the loss of everything he has in a single hand of high-stakes Hold em, a character named Worm, and many other commonalities that form the foundation of what will become his lawsuit against Miramax. He leaves the theater that day feeling that not only has the studio stolen his script, but his life, which had encompassed years of professional poker playing that informed the screenplay he hoped would open the door to a writing career in Hollywood. Against all odds, he proceeds to take on Miramax and the Hollywood system with the help of an ingenious lawyer. Jeffrey Grosso simply has to prove how it could have happened and convince a judicial system that often favors studios over writers that hes a victim of intellectual property theft, which results in a ten-year landmark legal battle against Hollywoods most notorious studio. Part comic legal thriller, part nail-biting poker memoir, Dirty Dealing: Grosso v. MiramaxWaging War Against Harvey Weinstein, and the Screenplay that Changed Hollywood is the entertaining look at one mans fight to get the credit he believes he deserves. Does he have a case or are the similarities just an illusion the mind plays on a creator? Perhaps there are only five stories in Hollywood, as his lawyer points out, and no idea is truly original. You be the judge.