On May 28, 1991, France\u27s Supreme Court, the Cour de cassation, rendered its long-awaited decision in Huston v. la Cinq, a controversy that opposed the heirs of film director John Huston against the French television station Channel 5 and its licensor, Turner Entertainment. Defendants sought to broadcast a colorized version of Huston\u27s black and white film classic, The Asphalt jungle. Plaintiffs, John Huston\u27s children and Ben Maddow, who collaborated with Huston on the film\u27s screenplay, asserted that broadcast of a colorized version violated Huston\u27s and Maddow\u27s moral right of integrity in the motion picture. The central question before the Cour de cassation, however, concerned not the substance of the integrity claim, but plaintiffs\u27 entitlement to invoke it.
Under French law, the moral right to preserve a work\u27s artistic integrity is an incident of authorship. Upon creating the work, authors are invested with exclusive moral and economic rights. While economic rights may be transferred, moral rights are both inalienable and perpetual. Thus, a film director who has granted all economic interests in her work nonetheless retains the moral rights to oppose violations of the work\u27s integrity and to receive authorship credit for her work. Under U.S. law, by contrast, film directors do not enjoy rights tantamount to, or even approaching, their French counterparts. Most significantly, under U.S. copyright law\u27s works made for hire doctrine, employees, or in most circumstances, commissioned creators who participate in the elaboration of a motion picture, are not considered authors : the film\u27s producer is deemed the author.
The problem in the Huston case therefore was: Who is the author of the film? If the French courts applied the U.S. law concept of authorship, then John Huston would not have been ruled the author, and accordingly, he and his heirs would lack any moral rights. If, however, the French courts applied the French concept of authorship, then John Huston\u27s status as an author would have been recognized; accordingly, he and his heirs would have been the beneficiary of the moral right of integrity. Thus, first and foremost the Huston affair presented an international conflicts of laws controversy
