Taylor Sheridan has been accused in a new copyright lawsuit of using a writer’s 2016 pitch to develop his hit Western series Yellowstone.
Taylor Sheridan accused of stealing Yellowstone
Writer Lauren J Salkin filed the lawsuit on Friday, naming Sheridan, 101 Studios, Paramount and Elevate Entertainment among the defendants.
According to 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, but was later told, “Taylor thanks you very much for your interest. Unfortunately, he’s unavailable for TV projects.”
The lawsuit claims that Yellowstone was greenlit at Paramount “within months” of the rejection. The series premiered on Paramount Network on 20 June 2018.
“Sheridan, however, was not ‘unavailable for TV projects,’” the suit reads, “Instead, he and others used Salkin’s copyrighted works to develop Yellowstone. On June 20, 2018, Paramount Network aired its first episode.”
Salkin alleges that Yellowstone copied several “specific expressive choices” from Sovereign Nation. According to the complaint, these included “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.”
The lawsuit also points to casting. Salkin’s lawyers claim she “proposed” Danny Huston and Gil Birmingham for Sovereign Nation in her pitch deck.
Both actors were later cast in Yellowstone and, according to the suit, played “materially parallel structural roles: Birmingham as the tribal political leader whose authority and development strategy run through the casino, and Huston as the outside development power broker who supplies the political or commercial path for that expansion.”
The complaint argues that the alleged similarities extend beyond broad conventions of the Western genre. It states, “When the works are objectively compared, the same coordinated design repeatedly appears: casino-centered institutions organize political power; the same unusual land-development mechanisms propel the conflict; parallel scenes perform the same dramatic functions; and the same actors appear in materially parallel roles. These are not merely convergences of a shared genre. Taken together with access and timing, they support a strong inference of copying.”
The allegations have not been proven in court, and the lawsuit represents Salkin’s claims against Sheridan and the other defendants.
Reps for Sheridan, 101 Studios, Paramount and Elevate Entertainment did not immediately respond to Variety’s request for comment.
