Thursday October 5 8:47 PM ET

Judge Sides with Writer in 'Queen of Swords' Duel

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An aspiring screenwriter has won the first round of a legal duel over the new TV show ``Queen of Swords,'' which she says was hijacked into syndication by Paramount Pictures two decades after she first sold the idea to ABC.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge Thursday ordered a halt to further broadcasts of the hourlong action drama, about a swashbuckling masked heroine, unless writer Linda Lukens receives a screen credit as the creator of the show.

Paramount denies her allegations and will appeal the judge's order, a spokesman for the Viacom Inc.-owned company said. Under California law, a preliminary injunction of this nature is automatically stayed on appeal, the spokesman said.

But Lukens' attorneys disputed this, insisting Paramount could be held in contempt for airing the show again without crediting Lukens, unless the appeals court expressly decides otherwise.

Lukens sued the show's producers and Paramount, whose television group distributes the series, claiming the ``Queen of Swords'' was lifted from her own work on a TV drama that she has been developing under the same title for years.

The writer claims both she and the executive producer for the series were represented by the same literary agency, the Broder/Kurland Agency, which also is named in the lawsuit.

In his ruling, Judge Morris Jones said a comparison of Lukens' work to the series, which premiered in the United States this week, revealed ``striking similarities indicative of misappropriation'' and that Lukens was likely to prevail on the merits of her case.

Besides having the same title, both Lukens' work and the Paramount-syndicated TV show involve an avenging, masked aristocrat who, inspired by the unjust death of her father, fights evil with the help and guidance of a gypsy mystic, according to the lawsuit. Her work is set in colonial New France; the series in Spanish colonial California.

Lukens' attorney, Anthony Kornarens, said his client came up with the idea in the late 1970s and sold a treatment for the show to ABC, where she co-wrote a script that never was produced. After rights reverted to Lukens, she reworked the script and sought to further develop the project before it was ''misappropriated'' and landed at Paramount, Kornarens said.

``This is something she's been working on for a long, long time.''

According to her attorney, Lukens' resume includes a number of little-known entertainment projects, including a production credit for a 3-D women's wrestling movie made for pay-per-view television.