Harris Shatner, a cat-tower upholsterer in Queens, alleges that the film Pinocchio stole portions of his life story. "I was swallowed alive by a giant whale for several days," he says. "It was a harrowing experience. My only companion in that terrible darkness was a talking wooden puppet." Regarding the puppet, Shatner admits, "I may have hallucinated that part." He is suing Disney for $12 million, and the author of The Book of Jonah for $5 million.
Cleavis Billingsley, a sex worker in Reno, Nevada, has brought suit against Disney's film Snow White because she alleges it was a flimsy rip-off of her tell-all biography, Chastise Me with Scorpions, in which she recounts a summer she cohabitated with six employees of the Eureka County Mining Company. Billingsley is suing for $6 million. They took an episode of my life I spent in a shotgun shack in the desert, having savage sex with up to seven men at a time, and they made it into something cheap and tawdry. In that stupid movie, those men were all little. Believe me, they were not little."
Cranston Revell, a retired animal trainer, is suing Disney for $7 million for its film Dumbo, which he claims was taken without permission from his own life story, A Loss too Heavy. Revell's trained elephant Jumbo, either operating under the delusion he could fly, or else clinically depressed, managed somehow to climb to the top of a trapeze and throw himself into the center ring. "Jumbo had a lot of guts," Revell recalls, wiping a tear from his eye at the memory. "It took weeks to clean up the mess." Revell is suing for copyright infringement and emotional distress. Currently he is owner/operator of Jumbo Burger in Sarasota, Florida.
William Shakespeare has come back from the dead to sue Disney for one of its most popular features, claiming it plagiarized major plot points from his own history of the arch-villain Richard III, which Shakespeare had originally entitled, The Lyin' King.
