I was watching the 2010 Oscars last night and Roger Ross Williams had just started his acceptance speech for the best documentary short, "Music by Prudence. Out of the blue came some crazy images where a red headed woman in a purple dress just took over talking. Where did she come from? I thought the other guy was speaking.

It turns out the crazy images were caused by Elinor Burkett, who had been a producer of the HBO film.  Burkett claims the movie was her idea and she wanted to focus on the whole band followed by the film but the director wanted to focus on a single person. The fight got so bad that a lawsuit had to be settled out of court.

Williams had only begun to speak about the background of his film, concerning the disabled Zimbabwean singer-songwriter Prudence Mabhena, when he in stepped Burkett with these crazy images interrupting and saying, “Let the woman talk,” and launching into her own tale about Ms. Mabhena’s band, Liyana.

“She pulled a Kanye,” he said. “And it's a shame, because this is such positive, happy film.”

According to a Salon interview, which took place a few minutes after the crazy images of speech, Mr. Williams stated: “Only one person is allowed to accept the award. I was the director, and she was removed from the project nearly a year ago, but she was able to still qualify as a producer.” 

Ms. Burkett said that “What happened was the director and I had a bad difference over the direction of the film that resulted in a lawsuit that has settled amicably out of court. But there have been all these events around the Oscars, and I wasn’t invited to any of them. And he’s not speaking to me. So we weren’t even able to discuss ahead of the time who would be the one person allowed to speak if we won. And then, as I’m sure you saw, when we won, he raced up there to accept the award. And his mother took her cane and blocked me. So I couldn’t get up there very fast.”

I can understand Burkett's supreme frustration, but these crazy images of two people trying to speak, were very confusing. Also according to journalist Jenny Lee’s twitter feed, “Roger Williams struggled to write acceptance speech for 4 days.” I  kept watching him while she was speaking feeling bad for him and totally confused about what was happening.