Tom Sullivan / TOTS / StudioCanal Situation

[EvilDeadChainsaws]

I'm adding this information as some of you may not already know, there is a situation regarding these Book Of The Dead & Kandarian Dagger 'official' replica props. There are issues around Trick Or Treat Studios (TOTS), the copyright holders of Evil Dead II; StudioCanal, and Tom Sullivan, the original creator of the ED1 Kandarian Dagger and Book Of the Dead. I'm not alleging any wrongdoing, just presenting information as it was presented to me. To start, this is part of Tom's interview with BookOfTheDead.ws;

...I wound up working 28 weeks on The Evil Dead for which I was paid for only 19 weeks... The whole three months of the stop motion animation was done for free by me. Some nice guy huh. I was never asked to create the 'Book of the Dead'. I thought it was important for the actors and the film. Being outside my contract I made a new contract which spelled out my ownership of my props and copyright to my creations which Rob Tapert signed and I still have. It's important for an artist to protect your work. This is what Josh Becker is referring to in his 'Evil Dead Journal'. You can read it in his excellent book 'Rushes', published by Point Blank Press.

While Tom was directly involved in ED1, ED2 and to a lesser extent AOD, he had no involvement with the 2013 remake or Ash Vs Evil Dead, which is why I gather that the designs for both the book and dagger are markedly different to the original trilogy. Tom never got any credit at all on the TV show.

Further to that, that when MGM went bankrupt in 2010, and StudioCanal got the license, it included full rights for the ED2 Book, and Dagger. Tom's friend Patrick Reese said in regards to this;

Tom's contract for both films gave him full ownership of everything he created. Tom even has a written apology from Sam for not getting Tom's permission before letting them use the ED2 BOTD in Jason Goes to Hell. Tom's contract was with Sam and Rob... they sold all the rights to StudioCanal and didn't inform them of Tom's contract.

Tom no longer has the funds or the will to fight this and has all but given up defending his copyrights. He used to be quick off the mark with people selling replicas on eBay, but a quick eBay search today proves this is no longer the case. The last contact I had from Tom was in January 2020, when I asked him about this specific situation. His reply was;

I have discovered that lawyers are frauds and expensively useless. I was stupid to become an artist in a world of thieves.

Over a number of years in the 2000s, Tom sold his own ED1 Book replica though this defunct website DarkAgeProductions.com for $600 each. They are still the finest replicas you can get, especially given that you could get the directly from Tom (see photos here). As of writing in 2020, they haven't been available for some time, although that may change in the future (can't say any more on that). According to Patrick;

...the BOTD replica's are printed using the exact same scans of the pages Tom used for the copyright registration of the book Tom created for the film in 1979... The only page of the book that isn't the original artwork is the last image of the book burning... Tom had to recreate that page from a frame grab from the film because at the end of filming Tom ripped that page out of the book and gave it to Sam Raimi. But if you compare our replica to the film you'll see the reproduction Tom created is almost a perfect match to the original. There is almost a weeks work in that one page because Tom wanted it as close as he could make it.