Warren Beatty is being sued over the rights to Dick Tracy, the square-jawed supercop who was created by cartoonist Chester Gould in 1931. Beatty, who bought the rights to the character in 1985, has had some kind of Tracy obsession for much of his career; he used to talk about his lust to don the detective's yellow hat and two-way wrist radio in interviews going back to the 1960s, when talk of a movie based on a comic strip automatically inspired talk about Pop Art and the kind of jolly, mass-market camp typified by the Adam West Batman TV show. When Beatty finally got around to making 1990's Dick Tracy, the film was released in the shadow of Tim Burton's Batman, and Beatty, said by some to be nervous that he was no longer a box office draw for young audiences, consented to a publicity campaign geared around Madonna's role as a singing femme fatale. (In addition to starring as Tracy, Beatty both directed and produced that movie.) In recent years, Beatty has been heard to kick around the idea of doing Dick Tracy II or maybe a TV special, and in 2006 he took Tribune Media Services, which syndicates the comic strip, to court to establish that he still has the rights to the strip. The latest developments stem from Tribune's charges that if Beatty wants to grind out a TV show for no reason except to extend his claim to the rights to the character. The rights may revert to Tribune if the court decides that Beatty has let ten years lapse without making any "productive use" of them.

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