“The Flying Classroom”, “We’ll bang the drums in the pan” or “Tomorrow the school will be cancelled” – a dispute over the rights to such comedies from the 1960s and 1970s has now been decided in court. The Munich Higher Regional Court on Thursday awarded the claims to remuneration from a total of eight feature films from the company of the late producer and screenwriter Franz Seitz.
The lawsuit focused in particular on royalties of more than half a million euros distributed by a collecting society. An insolvency administrator who looked after the estate of another film producer who died in 2017 had sued. His company, which closed in 1985, had produced the eight plants together with the company that still exists today.
In the first instance, the Munich I Regional Court dismissed the lawsuit in 2021. The plaintiffs argued in the appeals process that the collecting society did not exist when the films were made. Therefore, the rights in this regard have not yet been clarified. The judges did not agree with this conviction. The joint works were created between 1969 and 1974. “The Flying Classroom” is the second film adaptation of the novel by Erich Kästner.