Robin Williams movie 'is plagiarism'

A British screenwriter is threatening legal action against the producers of the hit thriller One Hour Photo - claiming it plagiarises a short film he released five years ago.

The movie, about a lonely photo lab technician, played by Robin Williams, who becomes obsessed with a wholesome family while processing their pictures, has already been tipped to win Oscars.

While critics have hailed it as one of the most original Hollywood thrillers in years, John Wrathall, a London-based screenwriter, says it is nothing of the kind.

He claims that the movie bears an "uncanny" likeness to Magic Moments, an eight-minute short film given a worldwide release in 1997.

On the face of it, the two films appear strikingly similar. One Hour Photo stars Williams as Sy Parrish, a lab technician in a suburban hypermarket. Though seemingly harmless, Sy becomes dangerously infatuated with a glamorous housewife, Nina Yorkin, secretly producing duplicates of her family snapshots and mounting them on the wall of his living room.

In one scene, he tries to engineer the break-up of her marriage by substituting a batch of her prints for another set, which includes pictures of her husband frolicking on a beach with his mistress.

In Magic Moments, the lab technician is a woman, Emma, played by the actress Arlene Cockburn. Like Sy, she becomes infatuated with a customer, in this case Neil, played by rising Scottish star Dougray Scott. She keeps his photos on her lounge wall and inserts incriminating pictures of him with his mistress, again at the seaside, in an innocent set of family photos.

The two films also share a similar visual style.

"The similarities between the two films are uncanny," Mr Wrathall said. His film has been seen at film festivals and at cinemas as a short alongside the Belgian film Ma Vie en Rose.

Mr Wrathall does, however, retain a hint of stoicism. "One Hour Photo is a very good film. If there's any 'foul play' involved, it's flattering it should be by someone with good taste."

A spokeswoman for Fox Searchlight, the film's distributors and the company handling its publicity, declined to comment yesterday.

According to a recent New York Times article, the film's writer and director, Mark Romanek, came up with the idea while browsing for photography books two years ago.