Writer George R.R. Martin‘s creative output over the years has been so prolific that one wouldn’t hold it against him for not remembering all of it, but the GRRM remembers. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Game of Thrones creator has filed a suit against a production company that has seemingly been squatting on the film rights to his 1988 novella, The Skin Trade. According to the complaint, Martin optioned the rights to Mike the Pike Productions in 2009 with the stipulation that a film be made in five years ro the rights would return to Martin; as you might have guessed, that did not happen.
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The complaint continues that Mike the Pike Productions assigned the project to Blackstone Manor LLC and that in September of 2014 “contrived the artifice of production” by hiring a limited number of cast and crew to shoot a handful of scenes but with no intention of actually completing the film and eventually releasing it.
“Blackstone’s token Production was insufficient to prevent reversion of the Rights to Martin,” Martin’s attorney Neville Johnson wrote. “Rather, it was the equivalent of a contractor agreeing to build a skyscraper and, on the last day to begin construction — without a foreman, crew, or approved blueprints — having a handful of day laborers take a month to build a gazebo on the construction site instead.”
Blackstone Manor LLC disputes this claim with Martin reportedly filing the lawsuit to content that he does own the rights and has allegedly been threatened with legal action if he were to attempt to do something with them. Martin previously wrote on his blog about The Skin Trade being in development at Cinemax, crediting Mike the Pike Productions with getting the project to the cable network. As we know, that television series never happened, thus the lawsuit.
The original description for Martin’s The Skin Trade reads: “When a string of grotesque killings begins to strike her small town, private detective Randi Wade becomes suspicious. The grisly murders remind her all too much of her own father’s death over 20 years ago. Now there is a killer in town who not only slays his victims, but also takes their skin. Undaunted, Randi prods the police as the murders continue, each more brutal than the last. When a close friend suddenly becomes a target, he is forced to reveal a startling secret about himself and Randi is quickly pulled into a dark world within her own town where monsters exist and prey on the living.”
(Cover Photo by Liam McBurney/PA Images via Getty Images)
