Word: lugosi
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...years later, the son and the widow of Bela Lugosi, star of the Dracula films, tried to take this doctrine a step further. They argued that this right was essentially property and therefore should pass on to heirs. In a California suit, they asked the courts to stop Universal Pictures from merchandising 70 Dracula products, ranging from jigsaw puzzles to belt buckles, and sought compensation based on the profits. Citing the First Amendment, Universal replied that the design of merchandise is a form of free speech that should not be restrained by anyone's heirs. Besides, said Universal...
After eleven years of wrangling, a trial judge decided in favor of the Lugosis, giving them $70,000 and barring Universal from merchandising Lugosi's likeness. The ruling had quick impact. In New York, where the widows of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were suing three companies for exploiting the images of the comedy pair, a federal judge took his cue from the Dracula decision. He barred the firms from merchandising products like comic books, and liquor bottles shaped in the forms of the actors, and ruled that the plaintiffs should receive a sum of money to be fixed...
...success in the courts, like fame on the screen, can be fleeting. In the past six months, three rulings have dealt heirs of the famous a heavy blow. In December the California Supreme Court reversed the Lugosi decision. It also rejected the claims of a nephew of Rudolph Valentino, who had sued over a fictionalized account of his uncle's life broadcast on ABC-TV. Then in March a U.S. appeals court overturned the Tennessee ruling on the Presley statuettes...
...just to put a program together for women that is economical, and to fight through that stereotype image and myth about the female being the weaker sex and all those things which is a bunch of crap." Arnold sounded a little like Henry Kissinger, a little like Bela Lugosi. He told Hercules about how women have 25-30 per cent fewer muscle cells, how they don't have testosterone, how he never met a woman who was satisfied with her looks. Then...
...SCREEN'S greatest Dracula? Not Bela Lugosi, who gave a lugubrious performance in Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, which was utterly ruined by its failure to abandon the Deane-Balderston play. F.W. Murnau's German silent Nosferatuwas a good deal better, and even today provides one or two chilling moments, but Max Schreck's strutting rat did not have a whole lot of dramatic stature...