Shattering the image of the faith-based film industry as a place where the bedrock Christian values of honesty and compassion for one’s fellow man rule, Deadline reports that a new lawsuit alleges that the producers of God’s Not Dead stole the idea for the film from one of their fellow right-wing-baiting filmflam artists.
The filmflam artist in question is John Sullivan, not the co-director of 2016: Obama’s America and America: Imagine The World Without Her who was sentenced to five months in a San Diego reeducation camp by the shadowy forces that control our government, but the other one. Sullivan alleges that the idea for God’s Not Dead was taken from a treatment he wrote in 2009 called Proof, which he describes as “a faith-based Dead Poets’ Society.” In the lawsuit, which was filed in L.A. Superior Court last week, Sullivan and co-plaintiff Brad Stine, an actor who has appeared in a number of faith-based films, allege that God’s Not Dead is “is the Proof film simply slightly modified and re-titled liberally” and “substantially draws upon material from the Proof Treatments, including the genre, mood, pace, themes, settings, characters and plot points.”
Stine and Sullivan are seeking ”at least” $10 million in damages, a fairly hefty sum of the $60 million God’s Not Dead made at the box office. Whether they’ll get it depends on whether they can prove that producer Pure Flix actually promised them the compensation for their treatment and producer credits on the project that their lawsuit alleges it did. Proving that will be made more difficult by the recent death of Pure Flix partner and God’s Not Dead producer Russell Wolfe, who died of complications from ALS two days before the lawsuit was filed and is named several times in the complaint.