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California Court of Appeal Greenlights New Trial In Columbo Net Profits Case
A character trademark of the TV detective Columbo, portrayed by actor Peter Falk, was to unbalance a homicide suspect he had been questioning by seemingly walking out of the room only to turn back to the suspect to ask "just one more thing." The 1971 agreement between Universal City Studios and the successful TV series' creators William Link and Richard Levinson permitted Universal to be a distributor of Columbo "photoplays." The agreement refers to "photoplay" several dozen times in such references as "anthological photoplays," "episodic photoplays," "pilot photoplay," "feature-length photoplay" and "television photoplays." But the contract parties failed to include "just one more thing" when negotiating their 17-page memo deal and two-page rider: a definition of the key term "photoplays."
Columbo had two successful network runs, on NBC from 1971 to 1978, and on ABC from 1989 to 2003, grossing a total of around $600 million. Years later, Universal was claiming the TV series hadn't yet earned net profits. In 2017, Link's Foxcroft Productions and Levinson's Fairmount Productions sued in part for breach of contract on the ground that the meaning of "photoplay" was ambiguous in the 1971 agreement, which thus didn't allow Universal to pay itself $160 million in distribution fees for acting as a distributor of the series' episodes and deduct the fees before "net profits" would be paid to Link and Levinson.
In 2019, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury decided Universal breached the 1971 agreement. (Levinson died before the trial began.) However, the trial judge, Richard J. Burdge, had given the jurors no definition for "photoplays" and there was no extrinsic evidence as to the negotiating parties' understanding of the term.
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