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I'm doubtful. If Jarmusch did steal it, granted, it's a shame, but those interview snippets are causing me to doubt Martin a bit...

``This was the idea I really loved," says Martin, who peppers his conversations with references to memorable movie plots and favorite scenes. ``I'd always chosen work over relationships and thought, why not have a protagonist whose girlfriend just walked out on him and is trying to figure out why?"

Between this, a rather generic idea to 'really love', and the strongest evidence offered to the public being a pink envelope and talking to a cat (which, despite Martin's astonishment, is not a highly original idea), the issue seems like it could be largely coincidental.

-Toilet Dcuk

Yeah, I think it's gonna be hard for Martin to prove it but he seems to think he's got the evidence to back up his claim. If memory serves, there was a similar claim for the authorship of Syriana and it got thrown out. I find it a little hard to believe that Jarmusch would rip somone off like that but stranger things have happened.

and he stated that the film was about a workaholic who was trying to figure out why his girlfriend left...
Murray's character is far from a workaholic and he doesn't seem too devastated by the break-up (not to mention that he was pushed into the investigation)

I think it's BS... but who knows

Fletch F. Fletch wrote:Yeah, I think it's gonna be hard for Martin to prove it but he seems to think he's got the evidence to back up his claim. If memory serves, there was a similar claim for the authorship of Syriana and it got thrown out. I find it a little hard to believe that Jarmusch would rip somone off like that but stranger things have happened.

I think the big deal with this case is that Martin copyrighted various revisions of his script, whereas in the Syriana script case that wasn't done. It will be interesting to see how this plays out but my gut tells me the truth is somewhere in the middle. Jarmusch hasn't really hasn't delivered a complete, full length, new script since Ghost Dog which is well approaching a decade ago. It wouldn't suprise me if his agent passed the script by him and he used it to "inspire" Broken Flowers.

Gerald Peary does a nice job rebutting the Boston Globe article: http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid17211.aspx