Today's LAT story chronicling how a lawsuit over the Mike White film Year of the Dog filed by onetime pal Laura Kightlinger has irreversibly damaged their relationship is just the latest reminder that the soul-devouring entertainment industry eventually gobbles up even the strongest of Hollywood friendships, sparing not even the bonds between formerly struggling, Jack Black-adjacent writer/performers who self-identify as borderline obsessive animal lovers. At issue: Kightlinger claims that the crazy-cat-lady script she once gave to White was appropriated for his recently released crazy-dog-lady movie, an accusation that's led to a breach of implied contract suit, waking nightmares, and nasty recriminations in the pages of their hometown paper. Report the Times:

Now, the two don't speak. "This was an old friend," she said. "He knew how personal it was to me. He would laugh at things that I was doing [rescuing cats] ... and then using it and made it feel like it was his experience." But White maintains that he based his film on his life - not hers.

 

White, who has two cats and two dogs, said the movie "came out of me losing a pet and replacing that pet with a lot of pets and becoming involved in animal rights, becoming a vegan." He noted that he had a cat named Bootlegger, a former stray, who was found dead in the neighbour's yard. "That whole story line came out of my own life," he said. The reason he made a movie about dogs instead of cats was because "dogs are easier to train in movies and easier to [film]." In an anguished e-mail to The Times, White wrote, "I would never do what she's accusing me of doing" and called her allegations "a surreal ... nightmare from which I hope to wake." "The only thing that has ever mattered to me as far as my work was that people thought I was original and that I had integrity," he wrote. "I never cared if they thought I was weird or uncommercial or an acquired taste or whatever. That Laura is seeking publicity for herself by trying to damage what I have spent my career trying to create seems cruel."

Even though we suspect that the relationship is as doomed as a curious beagle who's gotten into a neighbour's unattended bag of slug poison, it's still possible to imagine that the creative pair will somehow settle their differences in a way more fitting than a mundane, prolonged legal battle. Perhaps White will soon return home to discover a ransacked house filled with dozens of rescued shelter dogs and a note from his erstwhile friend recognising that while the scene might seem uncomfortably similar to the one in his movie, she arrived at it all on her own.

• Screenwriters Laura Kightlinger, Mike White fight like cats and dogs over script [LAT]

Tags: brief | laura kightlinger | lawsuits | mike white