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Was the Idea for ABC’s ‘Quantico’ Stolen From a CNN Documentary? That’s What a New Lawsuit Claims

Oct 30, 2015  •  Post A Comment

A new lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court “claims the idea for ABC’s hit freshman FBI drama ‘Quantico’ was lifted from a 1999 documentary that aired on CNN,” Deadline.com reports.

Deadline says the 35-page complaint filed by filmmakers Jamie Hellman and Barbara Leibovitz Hellman and business exec Paula Paizes alleges that “Quantico” producer Mark Gordon got the idea for the show from “Quantico: The Making of an FBI Agent.”

For the documentary, which tracked a 16-week training program, the filmmakers were given “unprecedented access to the FBI Academy.” Soon afterward, according to the complaint, Paizes and Gordon formed a business relationship and she began discussing a possible movie or TV series with Hellman and Leibovitz.

“Paizes then brought the project to Gordon, and his Mark Gordon Company optioned it,” Deadline reports, based on the complaint. “She introduced him to the filmmakers, later saying in an email that ‘they have a ton of research and can get us inside Quantico and the FBI.’ In May 2002, Leibovitz and Hellman signed a deal with the Mark Gordon Company their Leibovitz-Hellman Productions and ‘provided MGC with the film from the Documentary, information which was not included in the documentary, including all of their notes and transcripts related to the film.’”

The lawsuit reportedly says that the “Quantico Project,” which was first talked about as a possible movie, had a storyline that “included a conspiracy inside the FBI Academy.”

We encourage readers to click on the link near the top of the story for additional details in the Deadline report.

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