A writer says Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan stole the idea for the wildly successful show from a pitch she sent his company in 2016.
Lauren J. Salkin filed a federal copyright suit on Friday against Sheridan, Paramount, 101 Studios, and Elevate Entertainment.
In court documents obtained by Variety, Salkin alleges that she pitched her own sprawling Western drama, Sovereign Nation, to Sheridan’s management company, Elevate Entertainment, in 2016, and was turned down.
“Taylor thanks you very much for your interest. Unfortunately, he’s unavailable for TV projects,” the court filing says she was told.
But just months later, the suit says, Sheridan’s deal with Paramount for Yellowstone was announced.
“Sheridan, however, was not ‘unavailable for TV projects.’ Instead, he and others used Salkin’s copyrighted works to develop Yellowstone,” the complaint claims.
The court filing goes on to document “specific expressive choices” that Yellowstone allegedly took from Salkin’s rejected pitch.
Those choices, the suit says, include “a tribal casino functioning as the institutional center of political and development power; a signature confrontation staged in the tribal chairman’s casino office over expansion beyond reservation boundaries; the use of trust land, the absence of zoning restrictions, and a 99-year lease structure as the concrete mechanism for that expansion; and recurring master-plan imagery deployed to dramatize the struggle for territorial control.”
Salkin also claims to have suggested specific actors for roles in her pitched show, two of whom became members of the Yellowstone cast, playing materially similar roles.
Danny Huston and Gil Birmingham were in Salkin’s pitch for Sovereign Nation, suggested for “materially parallel structural roles” to the ones they play in Yellowstone.
Huston played a foil to Kevin Costner’s John Dutton, trying to acquire and develop the Dutton Ranch in the show’s first two seasons.
Birmingham played Tribal Chairman Thomas Rainwater on all five seasons of Yellowstone and his character has been spun off onto CBS’s Marshals.
The suit argues that the parallels “are not merely convergences of a shared genre. Taken together with access and timing, they support a strong inference of copying.”
Paramount, 101 Studios, Elevate Entertainment, and representatives for Sheridan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
