Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy Battles His Toughest Foe: Copyright Lawyers

The studio hoped it was launching a franchise at the time, but soon after the premiere the project got tied up in a series of byzantine lawsuits. Ownership of the intellectual property has passed between Disney, Tribune Media Services (who distributed the newspaper comic strip since its debut in the Detroit Mirror in the early 1930s), and Beatty himself. Here’s where it gets fun.

In order to keep hold of the rights, Beatty must, periodically, get back into his yellow duster and appear somewhere as the character Dick Tracy. And Turner Classic Movies is more than eager to help him with this ruse.

Indeed, they’ve done it before. The first time was in 2010. A California judge ruled that “commencement of principal photography of his television special on November 8, 2008 was sufficient for him to retain the Dick Tracy rights.” That 30-minute special (which you can watch here) has some outdoor photography and schtick, but is mostly “Dick Tracy” chatting with film critic Leonard Maltin. (The project was shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.) The show aired once and that was that, but, thankfully, made its way to YouTube, where the strangeness of it all has become something of a phenomenon to comedy podcasters. 

But for this latest escapade in legal shenanigans, Turner Classics is leaning into it a bit more. While the show is not yet streaming on its TCM Watch app, three Dick Tracy movies from the 1940s (Dick Tracy, Dick Tracy vs. Cueball, and Dick Tracy’s Dillema) were just added. And with capturing material to YouTube a little easier these days, a high resolution version is, at least for now, viewable. (And appears at the bottom of this page.) 

So what happens in this television special, beyond outfoxing The Suits? Matt Singer of ScreenCrush summarizes it thusly: 

TCM host Ben Mankiewicz invites film critic Leonard Maltin over to his office as he prepares for a Zoom call with the famous comic strip and movie cop, Dick Tracy. Tracy (Beatty) calls Mankiewicz and Maltin on Zoom—Beatty is seated in a black void while wearing Tracy’s trademark yellow hat and overcoat — first to compliment Mankiewicz on an interview he did with Beatty for TCM some time earlier. Then “Dick Tracy” explains his issues with the movie Beatty made about him in 1990, while he watches clips from the film. A good five minutes of this 30 minute show were literally just Warren Beatty dressed as Dick Tracy watching the Dick Tracy movie while muttering things like “Yes! Yes, that’s good!” and “No! No! That’s terrible!”