Ken Caillat, the sound engineer and producer who worked on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, is suing the the hit Tony-winning play Stereophonic for allegedly ripping off his memoir, Making Rumours.
Published in 2012, Making Rumours found Caillat recounting, from his unique perspective in the control booth, the famously fraught creation of Rumours. Stereophonic, for its part, similarly tells the story of a band on the verge of pop stardom, making an album in 1976 amidst intra-band infighting and break-ups.
The similarities between Stereophonic and the Fleetwood Mac story have been widely noted, though playwright David Adjmi has maintained that he drew on an array of influences. But Caillat’s new suit, obtained by Rolling Stone, rebuffs that assertion, claiming the play “copies the heart and soul of Making Rumours, and is substantially similar.”
Reps for Stereophonic and Adjmi did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
The suit says Stereophonic “presents a nearly identical story arc as Making Rumours” and alleges that, in setting the play in a studio, the audience is positioned as if they’re watching the events unfold “from the perspective of the engineers and producers.” To that end, the suit notes that Stereophonic features two sound engineer characters, one of whom is named Grover and whom Adjmi has desired as the “stealth protagonist of the play.”
Just like Caillat hadn’t worked with Fleetwood Mac before making Rumours, the suit notes that Grover is “new to the band depicted” in the play. Additionally, Grover is promoted from sound engineer to co-producer during the play, just as Caillat was promoted during the making of Rumours. (The other engineer-turned-producer on Rumours was Richard Dashut.)
The lawsuit goes on to allege that Stereophonic lifts specific scenes, and even snippets of dialog, from Making Rumours. In one scene from Making Rumours, Caillat recalls an interaction with Christine McVie where she pushed him and Dashut to act a bit less like sound engineers and more like producers. Caillat remembers McVie saying, “We don’t want to have to come in and listen every time we try out something different. We want you guys to start paying attention to tempos and keys and tuning and other important things and help us out here.”
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In Stereophonic, the suit claims the character Holly tells Grover, “I don’t have time to come in there and ‘have a listen’ every bloody time we lay something down… Why can’t you be listening to us and paying attention to what’s going on in here? You start paying attention to the tempo and the key and the instruments and give us a little fucking help.”
Another example cited in the suit is Grover’s use of the same “unique catchphrase” Caillat used at the start of recording sessions, “Wheels up.” And the complaint claims that Stereophonic “copies” a pivotal scene from Making Rumours where Buckingham gets angry at Caillat and chokes him.
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The suit argues that Adjmi “implicitly acknowledges having read Making Rumours, calling it an ‘excellent book,’ but incredulously proclaims that ‘[a]ny similarities to Ken Caillat’s excellent book are unintentional.’” It further notes that Adjmi was previously accused of copyright infringement for his show 3C, which was a parody of the sitcom Three’s a Company; while that suit went nowhere because 3C was protected as parody, Caillat’s suit argues Stereophonic “is not a parody or other fair use of Making Rumours.”
Caillat is seeking unspecified damages, including profits earned from the production. He claims that the play is “harming the downstream market for adaptations of Making Rumours,” including an effort to turn the book into a film. Noting that, in May, Adjmi revealed that he was aiming to turn Stereophonic into a movie, the claims, “A movie version of Stereophonic would not only continue to infringe upon Plaintiffs’ copyright, but also undermines the potential for Plaintiffs to make their own film.”
