Jennifer Lopez Sued

Jennifer Lopez, the 35-year-old singer-actress, who recently signed on to play Sue Ellen Ewing opposite John Travolta's J.R. in a film based on the hit TV series, has become one of the targets of a lawsuit brought by a disgruntled writer who's claiming J.Lo's production company and UPN stole one of his ideas.

Television writer Jack Bunick filed a suit against Lopez's Nuyorican Productions, CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. Apr. 11 in New York stating that he came up with the original idea for what became the now canceled UPN show South Beach, on which Lopez served as an executive producer.

Bunick is certainly covering all of his bases--UPN is an entity of CBS Corp. All was owned by Viacom until the firm split into CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. (technically two separate publicly traded companies) in 2005. Cable networks such as MTV and Nickelodeon fall under Viacom Inc. jurisdiction and the UPN and CBS networks reside under CBS Corp.

(Just let the legalese wash over you like a warm bath…) The point is, Bunick apparently found it necessary to sue Viacom Inc., as well, for the alleged sins of its fathers.

According to the Associated Press, the suit reads that Bunick wrote a pilot script in 1999 for a show he envisioned calling South Beach Miami and that he sent a copy to a UPN executive in 2000 but never heard back from her. Bunick said that the main theme of his script was that "the main character is from Brooklyn…and he is, in many ways, out of his element in South Beach, Miami."

yahoo entertainment