Writer Gary Wolf is in a 20-year battle with the Walt Disney Company, trying to get what he believes to be a promised 5% of the receipts from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Unfortunately, he lost some crucial decisions, and earlier this month a California court of appeal sent part of his case back to trial.
In the process, Wolf's saga has become a cautionary tale for young writers who get courted by Hollywood.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? History of a lawsuit
In 1980, Disney head Ron Miller picked up the movie rights to Wolf's book Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, a surrealist spoof of crime noir thrillers like Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. In 1983, Wolf signed a then-standard writer's agreement that he would receive 5% of the gross profits from any movie based on his book. However, no one worked out exactly what the phrase "5% of the gross profits" actually meant.
The legal bits locked down, script writers Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman went to work altering the book for the silver screen. In addition to a name change, Roger and his pals went from being actors who posed for a comic strip to being a full-on cartoon characters who interacted with their human counterparts.
The result was the biggest moneymaker of 1988: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? made a still-stunning $330 million at the box office, and even more from promotional tie-ins. Wolf figured he was in the money, right?
Not so fast, Sunshine: the Mouse House said that Wolf wasn't allowed any cash from promotional tie-ins, such as character walk-arounds at Disneyworld or the collectors' cup that Disney franchised out to Burger King and McDonald's. Estimating that the Mouse House pulled over $120 million for those promos, Wolf claimed that he wanted a piece of those royalties as well, totalling about $6 million.
Disney even blocked a request by Wolf to subject the company's books to independent audit, to determine whether or not he had been fairly paid.
"Mr. Wolf was paid everything he was owed and then some — a lot — and now he wants even more," said Disney attorney Marty Katz during opening arguments, claiming that Wolf earned about $2.5 million from film-related merchandising. "There's a consistent pattern of Mr. Wolf, through his attorneys, trying to get something that they didn't bargain for."
Disney also decided that they had overpaid Wolf for the past 10 years, and that he owed them somewhere between $50,000 and $1 million.
"This case is about self-serving, catch-me-if-you-can Hollywood accounting by the defendant," said J. Larson Jaenicke, Wolf's attorney. "For 10 years, he has tried to resolve his differences with this company, and he finally decided he had no choice. If he was going to get paid fairly, he had to file the lawsuit."
"Five percent of nothing is still nothing," huffed Katz. "Not a single studio in this town pays (royalties) on promotional agreements other than for monies received."
First strike went against Wolf in 2003, when a California court ruled that the right to collect contingent compensation from Disney didn't create a "fiduciary" relationship with the studio. This meant that Wolf couldn't sue for punitive damages, which could mean 10 times the original claim, a blow to anyone else who wanted to use that strategy as possible leverage in future claims.
"It's a major problem," Neville Johnson, a lawyer who often brings accounting claims against studios, told The Hollywood Reporter. "It's not a good case for us."
Wolf won in 2004, when an appeals court ruled that "gross receipts" can include the value of tens of millions of dollars worth of noncash promotional consideration. However, Wolf only got $180,0000 from the decision. Disney appealed, but in 2005, Wolf won that decision as well. The damage award came out to somewhere between $180,000 and $400,000; the discrepancy due to whether Disney had in fact overpaid Wolf.
Since then, the case has ding-donged between courts and, with this latest decision, will continue to do so.
However, the California legislative and legal system is aware of "Hollywood accounting." In the past year, juries returned multi-million dollar verdicts against Warner Bros. and NBC, in favour of producer/former studio head Alan Ladd Jr. and the creators of Will & Grace. The Writer's Guild is also backing a bill in the California Legislature aimed at regulating self-dealing transactions among movie studios. That bill cleared its first hurdle in April.
(Next up: a recent history of Disney lawsuits, from Winnie the Pooh to Jeffrey Katzenberg)
Dominic von Riedemann - Dominic is the Animated Film Feature Writer, and winner of 11 Suite 101 Editors' Choice Awards.
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