PORTLAND, Ore. (CN) - The 9th Circuit on Tuesday heard the latest chapter in a decades-long saga over the movie rights to Ken Kesey's final novel, "Last Go Round," based on the historic 1916 Pendleton roundup that pitted black, white and Indian bronco riders against each other and brought a rodeo audience to the brink of rioting.
Kesey, the author and drug culture icon immortalized in Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," died in 2001. He wrote the classic books "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion," along with numerous short stories.
In 1984, he wrote the screenplay "Last Go Round" with Irby Smith, a Hollywood producer whom Kesey brought in after his 20-year-old son, Jed, died in a car accident.
Smith later transferred his literary rights to Kesey, but the movie was never made, and Kesey published the story as a 1994 novel titled "Last Go Round: A Real Western."
Kesey LLC, which manages the late author's literary estate, sued Sundown & Fletcher in Oregon District Court in 2006, claiming the company wrongly registered a copyright in 1994 over the movie rights to the book.
Sundown & Fletcher says a short note allegedly typed by Kesey documents that it bought the rights to the screenplay from the writer for $10,000.
"To whom it may concern," begins the note, which is attached to the original complaint. "I have agreed to write a screenplay about bygone rodeo greats Jackson Sundown and Nigger George Fletcher, concerning their historic confrontation at the Pendleton Round Up in 1916. The name of the production company that I am writing for is Sundown Fletcher Inc. and the people I am dealing with are Mike Hagen and MiShelle McMindes."
Kesey's signature is scrawled at the bottom of the page.
Hagen, a former member of Kesey's 1960s group of Merry Pranksters, and McMindes, a former Playboy model and sometimes private detective, formed Sundown & Fletcher to raise money for the movie.
Kesey's 73-year-old widow, Faye, told the court in a 2008 deposition that movie producers were interested in optioning the novel.
"And because other people, namely the defendants, were claiming an interest in the copyright, that made it impossible to go forward," Faye Kesey told the court.
In December 2009, U.S. District Judge Garr King nixed Sundown & Fletcher's (S&F) claims, finding that Kesey LLC held all rights to the book and screenplay.
King wrote that Kesey's 1984 letter was not a binding contract because it is "fatally indefinite, utterly lacking essential material terms, fails to indicate that the screenplay was being created as a 'work for hire' to be owned by S&F, contains no language specifying that any rights whatsoever in the screenplay were being granted or licensed to S&F, and is not even executed by S&F."
The lawyer for Kesey's estate, David Aronoff of the Los Angeles firm Lathrop & Gage, argued Tuesday that the document was not binding.