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A former sound engineer who coauthored a 2012 memoir about his days working on the Fleetwood Mac album Rumours has filed a lawsuit, along with his coauthor of the book Making Rumours, against the makers of Broadway’s smash hit play Stereophonic, alleging that playwright David Adjmi relied on portions of Making Rumours in the creation of the similarly themed Broadway play.
Stereophonic, the suit states, “copies the heart and soul of Making Rumours, and is substantially similar.”
Stereophonic is perhaps best described as a roman a clef of Fleetwood Mac and the mid-’70s making of what would be their 1977 masterpiece Rumours. The play, which does not use the band members’ names or songs, fashions its characters and situations in ways that align closely to Mac’s classic line-up of Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. The troubled recording of their seminal album, which endured months of romantic break-ups, intra-band feuding and gorgeous pop music-making, has been told and re-told many times through various books, interviews, documentaries and even, in another fictionalized take, the Amazon Prime limited series Daisy Jones & the Six. (The latter, Nicks wrote on Instagram, “made me feel like a ghost watching my own story.”)
But in their lawsuit filed yesterday in United States Southern District Court of New York, the sound engineer-turned-music producer Ken Caillat and his memoir co-author Steven Stiefel assert that elements particular to their book ended up in Stereophonic without permission, perhaps most notably the inclusion of a sound engineer character who provides the play with a perspective from outside the band proper.
As an example, the suit, filed by attorneys with Greenberg Gross LLP, points out that in Stereophonic the character of Grover, based, the suit suggests, on Caillat, rises from sound engineer to producer during the tumultuous and bruising months of recording. “The way the incident plays out and the dialogue that Mr. Caillat describes [in his memoir] are nearly identical to a similar scene in Stereophonic,” the suit claims.
Read the suit here.
Another anecdote from the memoir that the suit alleges found its way to the stage involves sound engineer Caillat, under orders from Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, erasing a guitar take from a tape, only to have Buckingham explode in angry violence after the order is carried out. A similar scene occurs in Stereophonic between the sound engineer Grover and the Lindsey-like character named Peter.
Playwright Adjmi was quoted in a recent New Yorker article about Caillat’s claims (the suit had not yet been filed), saying “When writing Stereophonic I drew from multiple sources – including details from my own life – to create a deeply personal work of fiction.” The playwright told The New Yorker that Making Rumours is an “excellent book” but that any similarities between Stereophonic and Making Rumours are unintentional.
In a May 24 interview with Deadline, Adjmi spoke at length about his inspirations for Stereophonic and his use of imagination to fictionalize real life. Here are some pertinent passages from the Q&A:
DEADLINE: Your play 3C was sort of loosely based on Three’s Company and I think you’re working on something about Brian Wilson. You find inspiration in real-life people and events. Of course this one’s about – well, are we saying Fleetwood Mac? Critics seem to be couching it a bit, but it is….
ADJMI: There’s a skeleton and superficial details that I put in and blended with stuff in order to build my own world, but I think, you know, the superficial details are only like a fraction of what it is. It’s a small fraction. I think people get really caught up with the superficial details but actually the way that I built it and the way I infused this with myself and my own struggles and my own idiosyncrasies and the way that I created a structure and a form for this thing it’s really not like anything….So, I know why people are saying, Oh it’s the Fleetwood Mac story, but I don’t know Fleetwood Mac. I never met them. You know what I mean? There is no beginning and end to a Fleetwood Mac story. You know, this play is its own invention.
DEADLINE: But as you say the superficial details are there. The Lindsey Buckingham character has a brother who’s an Olympian, that sort of thing.
ADJMI: But I’m teasing out those details in order to build dramatic substratum. I don’t know anything about Lindsey and his brother. I just know one little detail and then I sort of said, What if I spin that into stuff and what if I create a whole world around that, and you know, I have no idea what Lindsey Buckingham’s relationship with his brother or his family is like. I wouldn’t begin to assume that I know anything about that person. So, yes, I’m teasing and playing with superficial details that I know and dancing with them in order to create something new.
In addition to Adjmi, the lawsuit names as defendants Playwrights Horizons (where Stereophonic was developed) The Shubert Organization, Sue Wagner, John Johnson, Seaview Productions Holdings LLC, Sonia Friedman Productions Limited, Linden Productions, LLC, Ashley Melone, Nick Mills, and Theatre Communications Group, and seeks a jury trial, unspecified damages for copyright infringement, including profits earned from the production, and a “preliminary and permanent injunction enjoining the copying, publication, release, broadcast, performance, and other exploitation of Stereophonic and the related script.”
While the suit distinguishes between Adjmi’s parodic use of the sitcom Three’s Company as the inspiration for his comedy play 3C – parody constituting fair use – and the non-parodic alleged use of Making Rumours for Stereophonic, no mention is made of previous works of art that fictionalized real people and their biographies in non-parodic ways. One that comes to mind is another ’70s-era rock tale: The Rose, director Mark Rydell’s 1979 film about a Janis Joplin-like character (played by Bette Midler) that was credibly rumored to have used and fictionalized portions of at least two books – Myra Friedman’s 1973 Joplin bio Buried Alive and Peggy Caserta’s 1973 tell-all Going Down With Janis – as uncredited source material. No lawsuits were filed by either Friedman nor Caserta.
Deadline has reached out to a spokesperson for Adjmi and Stereophonic for comment on the lawsuit, and will update this post if and when we hear back.
