None of Sherlock’s previous adventures had prepared me for what Frank Langella was about to reveal. And while the Tony Award-winning actor was merely portraying the world’s first consulting detective, I was furious with the actor, nonetheless. Yet, I should’ve known
By the time I was sitting in the Nederlander Theatre in the fall of 1987, several pastiches featuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sleuth had entered the pantheon of tales. I had welcomed them when the character entered public domain (or so I had understood) at the beginning of the decade. But Sherlock’s Last Case, the Broadway play written by Charles Marowitz, had gone too far.
Last month, Amazon Prime Video added another original Sherlock Holmes story to the canon. Inspired by Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes novels, Young Sherlock follows a 19-year-old Holmes on his first case. Produced by Guy Ritchie (who also brought Holmes to the cinema in two films), it was the first of a few productions made free from questionable copyright claims.
That’s because on January 1, 2023, the confusing (and oft-controversial) copyright of Conan Doyle’s tales finally came to an end in the U.S. It was then that the 1927 protection that included The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s last Holmes story, expired.
Although those rights just met the fate of Moriarity, Holmes appeared in at least a dozen productions in the 1980s some 40 years earlier. And it’s likely some of those—including the shocking Sherlock’s Last Case and another about a young Sherlock (and not the one you’re thinking of)—were made without express permission. Whether they needed it is a matter best suited for the cunning detective.
Listen to our chat about Sherlock on 1980s Now.
By 1981, the copyright protecting all of Conan Doyle’s works had expired in Canada and in the U.K. (although it was revived in 1996 in the latter country until 2000). By that time, Conan Doyle had been dead for 50 years, which was then the outer limits of copyright in those countries.
Copyright in the 1980s in the U.S., however, was different. Although the laws were modified by the Copyright Act of 1976, the protection granted the pre-1978 works of Conan Doyle would’ve been determined by publication date (and not the life of the author).
Since A Study in Scarlet, the first in the Sherlock series, was published in 1887, it would’ve entered the public domain in the U.S. by 1983 given the most generous application of the then new law (and possibly as early as 1963). That only the first of Conan Doyle’s stories was now in public domain in the U.S. raised an interesting question. Although the subsequent tales couldn’t be used in the U.S. without permission of rights holders was Sherlock the character available without strings? And further, how did the fact all of Conan Doyle’s stories were in public domain elsewhere jive with U.S. distribution?
The answer depended upon whom you asked—that is, if you asked at all.
In the early 1970s, Dame Jean Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur’s last surviving direct descendant, lost control of her father’s rights to Baskerville Investments Ltd. (which—in a Holmesian twist—was owned by Dame Jean’s later brother’s widow). In 1974, American producer Sheldon Reynolds bought Baskerville. Reynolds had first produced a Holmes series in the 1950s and later recreated some of those episodes for another series in 1979.
Then, in 1981, Dame Jean sold the TV and film rights to the Holmes’ stories to American producer Sy Weintraub. It’s unclear how (or whether) Dame Jean had retained those rights following her sale to Baskerville a decade earlier, and its subsequent sale to Reynolds. Nonetheless, the rights secured, Weintraub proceeded to produce two of three planned films featuring Sherlock.
Meanwhile, Granada TV (a commercial network in the U.K.) was completing their ultimately superior series following Jeremy Brett as the detective. They had received the blessing of Dame Jean. They didn’t know that since she had sold the rights to Holmes, lip service was all she could offer.
Granda was also busy producing Young Sherlock: The Mystery of the Manor House, a show that saw schoolboy Holmes solve his first case—decades before Ritchie’s youthful take on the sleuth, and just a few years before Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock would premiere in theaters.
The competing productions came to a head in the early 1980s over the issue of U.S. distribution. Attorneys for Weintraub claimed the TV and film rights Weintraub purchased from Dame Jean gave them ownership over the U.S. use of Sherlock the character. No story featuring the character, they argued, could be distributed in the U.S. without his permission. On the other hand, Granada’s attorney Richard L. Zissu believed that when a series of stories fleshes out a character in the first story, that character is in public domain once that first story is in public domain.
Although Weintraub sued Granada, a technical matter kept the case from proceeding initially, and an out-of-court settlement brought the matter to an end. According to Ian Richardson, who played Holmes in Weintraub’s films, the amount “was enough for Weintraub to cover his costs on both [films] and make a profit, too.” The legal wrangling delayed Granada’s series, which finally premiered in 1984, by a few years. As a result of the agreement, a ruling confirming (or contradicting) Zissu’s position was not obtained.
The mystery of the copyright continued to remain unsolved a few years later. Per Chris Columbus, the screenwriter of Levinson’s 1987 film, producers approached Dame Jean before using her father’s characters “in order to be responsible.” The film’s credits acknowledge her “kind permission” and include a disclaimer director Levinson says Dame Jean had requested. As mentioned above, however, Dame Jean didn’t have permission to give.
That said, neither Weintraub nor Reynolds appear to have sued Paramount and there was no apparent agreement between producers and either of those parties. This bolsters Granada’s legal position: Sherlock the character was in the public domain in the U.S. If so, because Columbus’ story was not an adaptation of an original Conan Doyle work still covered by copyright, it could be made without permission (and seems to have been).
Other 1980s productions feature original (and some zany) stories about Sherlock Holmes. The 1987 made-for-TV movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes, follows a Victoria-era Holmes who is thawed in contemporary America after having been cryogenically frozen a hundred years earlier. (While I don’t recall this one, it sounds awesome.) Earlier that year, Detective Comics no. 527 saw Batman and Sherlock, both of whom have been dubbed “The World’s Greatest Detective,” combine their sleuthing abilities.
Without A Clue followed Dr. Watson (Ben Kingsley), the real sleuth, as he hires a washed-up actor (Michael Caine) to pretend to be “Sherlock Holmes,” a character the movie-version of Watson had created. A 1988 British film, it dodged questions of copyright infringement.
A decade earlier, Sherlock’s Holmes Younger Brother brought a different comedic take. Written, starring and directed by Gene Wilder (in his directorial debut) it would have likely fallen under the fair use defense to infringement as a parody. That said, two actors who had played Holmes and Watson in prior films appear in this one as the iconic pair.
It’s unknown whether any of these, including the tragic Broadway production Sherlock’s Last Case were made with permission. There don’t, however, appear to have been any legal entanglements. And in 1989, the United States Court of Appeals (Second Circuit) confirmed the public domain status of Holmes and his fictional companions—albeit indirectly.
Although the subject of Silverman v. CBS, Inc. was the copyright status of Amos and Andy, the holding of the case was on point. In short (and oversimplifying just a bit), the court ruled that characters within a public domain work were themselves public domain. Nearly twenty-five years later, the Silverman ruling was applied directly to the rights of Conan Doyle’s detective.
In spite of Silverman, the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. (which then and now controlled the remaining rights to Holmes) continued to pursue the creators of new Holmes pastiches for licensing fees. They operated under the contrarian legal theory that because some of Holmes’ tales were still protected under copyright, so too was the character. The character, they’d argue, continued to evolve in the later Conan Doyle stories.
In 2013, the prominent Sherlockian Leslie S. Klinger had had enough and sued the estate to enjoin them from what Judge Posner would call “a form of extortion.” Relying on Silverman, Posner confirmed in Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd. that Holmes, as he existed in the public domain works, was also in public domain. Klinger, however, didn’t end the estate’s business model.
In the years that followed, in 2015 it sued the producers of film Mr. Holmes and in 2020 it sued the producers of the Netflix film Enola Holmes. Those cases likely privately settled. Per Mitch McCullin, the author of the novel upon which Mr. Holmes was based, “It is cheaper for corporations to settle than go to court.” Klinger, it seems, has put an end to that.
Gratefully, however, a Baskerville-type fog fell upon the rights to Conan-Doyle’s stories as they existed in the 1980s. The ambiguity that arose during that era of evolving copyright law gave us some interesting Holmes pastiches—free from the “you’ve got a nice Sherlock Holmes story there, would be shame if something happened to it” maneuvers of future rights holders.
The real crime in the 1980s was the heartbreaking conclusion of the 1987 Holmes-adjacent play that shook me to my Holmesian core. The mysterious villain of Sherlock’s Last Case was not a descendent of Moriarity, as it seemed, but his longtime partner Dr. Watson. He wanted Holmes dead. I’ll never forgive Langella for that.
