In 1991, a square-jawed lawyer named Barry Capece, under the limited partnership called Beers ‘R’ Us, opened a nightclub in downtown Houston. The place had the atmosphere, as he put it, of a “Las Vegas bordello” — lava lamps, disco ball, a ’60s playlist and, as a sort of centerpiece, one of those endlessly reproduced velvet portraits of Elvis Presley. Capece named his club the Velvet Elvis. Later, he was sued by the Presley estate.
Years ago, I found a filing for this lawsuit in the results of an absent-minded Google search. Hosted by the archive CourtListener, the circuit court’s opinion simulated a kind of online eavesdropping, a transcript of conversations held several states and decades away. Descriptions of Capece’s lounge, pitched as “the first cigar bar in Houston,” seemed to capture his kitsch grill-master mien. “Its décor includes velvet paintings of celebrities and female nudes, including ones of Elvis and a bare-chested Mona Lisa,” the opinion recounted. Other decorations included “cheap ceramic sculptures, beaded curtains and vinyl furniture. Playboy centerfolds cover the men’s room walls.”
The grounds against Capece read like disgruntled Yelp reviews: “The menu includes ‘Love Me Blenders,’ a type of frozen drink; peanut butter and banana sandwiches, a favorite of Elvis’s; and ‘Your Football Hound Dog,’ a hot dog.” The district judge’s snide ruling in Capece’s favor bordered on art criticism: “The image of Elvis” on velvet “has transcended into an iconoclastic form of art,” one that “surpasses the identity of the man represented in the painting.”
At the time, I’d been looking up velvet paintings, after a few junk-store hauls spurred a low-grade interest in the genre. On black velvet, you could find taxonomies of dogs playing poker and Elvises of every variety, but also more eccentric subjects: matadors battling members of Kiss, Jesus driving an 18-wheeler, lions hitting a bong, the “Beetlejuice” cast drinking Coca-Cola. It was a mass-produced art form that could also skew jarringly specific, as if tailored to one guy’s exact pathologies. In a sense, Capece’s lawsuit had a similar appeal: corporate, but so sweetly deranged it outstripped the dreary form.
Searching for cases became an idle interest. Like most U.S. institutions, courts coddle the rich, and the public record mostly reflects this. But shards of the unhinged ingenuity that defines so many American endeavors poke through. Trial lawyers are storytellers, and competitive ones at that. Each side accumulates details supporting their arc, explaining away those that don’t, editing along the strict stylization of law. “At trial, I’m the playwright, director, actor,” a lawyer who specializes in tractor-trailer crash claims once told me. “The whole thing’s a production.”
Nowhere is this more obvious than the civil system, where the performers are often private attorneys whose skills range from Michael Clayton to — more often — Lionel Hutz. If this sounds overstated, consider that every personal-injury lawyer with a bad highway billboard has written hundreds, if not thousands, of court documents.
Some of the prose comes laced with moral outrage. In the late ’70s, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders sued the Pussycat Cinema, a porn outfit, over its recent flick, “Debbie Does Dallas”: “a gross and revolting sex film,” a decision in the lawsuit declared, “whose plot, to the extent that there is one, involves a cheerleader at a fictional high school, Debbie, who has been selected to become a ‘Texas Cowgirl.’” Others have more humor. After Hormel Foods claimed that a hog named “Spa’am” in “Muppet Treasure Island” linked its fare with “evil in porcine form,” a judge concluded that it merely poked “a little fun at Hormel’s famous luncheon meat by associating its processed, gelatinous block with a humorously wild beast.” (The cheerleaders won; Hormel did not.)
At their funniest and most poignant, complaints showcase both the limits of recourse against the powerful and how our own competing, often misguided self-interests can collide disastrously with reality. In 2002, a Montana man sued MTV’s parent company, claiming plagiarism. The network’s new show about guys who punch one another and bike into Porta Potties, he argued, had copied his name: Jack Ass. In 2008, a woman sued Wikipedia’s parent organization over an entry that called her the “dumbest” literary agent. Later, FarmVille’s creators were accused of tricking players into making payments by way of taking an IQ test. (All three cases were dismissed.)
The justice system can seem like a faceless monolith. But beneath the veneer of legal solemnity, the paper trail left by trucking disputes or chicken-fat injuries amounts to a kind of living library, an archive of corporate overreach and personal foibles, transcribed in every register imaginable by people — biased people, with weird hangups and charming habits — telling the stories of their lives through their most tragic, selfish or trivial problems.
It turned out, Capece couldn’t solve his. After he won in district court, the Presley estate appealed. A higher court sided with the King, ruling that the club didn’t count as parody. The same couldn’t be said of one of the court decisions, which partly hinged on a witness whose expertise entailed visiting Graceland “between 40 and 50 times.” Offended by the nude décor of the club, the judge wrote, the witness and other fans mourned its association with the famously restrained star. Case closed, I guess.
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