Olivia de Havilland (left), who took legal responsibility for her portrayal of Catherine Zeta-Jones in Feud
Drama Stephen Frears' 2022 The Lost King, from a script co-written by Steve Coogan, had the noble intention of attempting to right historical wrongs while seeking to clear the tarnished name of our most maligned monarch, Richard III. In the process, however, the film came under criticism for casting a different living villain — a man who was so offended by his portrayal that he sued Coogan and the filmmakers.
Richard Taylor is a former deputy registrar at the University of Leicester, whose lawyers claim he is portrayed as «devious», «weasel», «dismissive», «patronising» and «misogynistic», all of which are true of film character Richard Taylor (Lee Ingleby). in her relationship with an intrepid explorer played by Sally Hawkins.
It can be fun to guess who will play you in the biopic of your life, but what if you get thrown under the bus? It was on this basis that Taylor and many people before him went to court.
Such cases can be extremely difficult to resolve due to the breadth of creative license granted in both the UK and US. Orson Welles sparked a lifelong feud with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst when he made Citizen Kane. However, since it was not intended to be a true biopic and all names had been changed, Hearst could not sue. Instead, he intended to hide the film by all available means.
Mark Zuckerberg, as you know, wasn't a big fan of The Social Network either. As a public figure, he would have a difficult time proving defamation against him because America's First Amendment requires proof of «actual malice.» This protection of free speech means that many libel suits against public figures are dismissed, even when the facts can be proven to be clearly wrong.
Sometimes filmmakers are not so lucky. Here are eight cases that actually went to trial.
Irina Yusupova v. MGM (1933)
The case of the trashy, heavily fictionalized pre-code drama Rasputin and the Empress (1932) caused quite a stir. Since then, Hollywood producers have covered their backs with some variation of the disclaimer: «Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.»
Now it was impossible. slander the “mad monk” Grigori Rasputin, no matter how crudely played by Lionel Barrymore, because he was dead. Alas, MGM ignored the historical researcher's advice that they were on shaky ground with the other characters. Instead, they fired the man and insisted on including a rape scene for shock value.
Lionel Barrymore and Anne Shirley in the film “Rasputin and the Empress” Photo: Getty
The rape victim, «Princess Natasha» (Diana Vinyard), is married in the film to John Barrymore's character, the murderer «Prince Paul Chegodiev», whom everyone recognized as Romanov's aristocrat Felix Yusupov.
Since the latter's real-life wife, Irina Yusupova, never even met Rasputin, she and her husband were understandably offended by the idea that he had hypnotized and raped her. MGM had to pay Yusupova $25,000, remove the rape scene, and remove the film from circulation for decades. In her now censored form, Wynyard's character doesn't make much sense: she's a Rasputin fan in the first half, and just inexplicably recoils from him in the second.
Olivia de Havilland vs. FX for Feud: Bette and Joan (2017)
Neither Bette Davis nor Joan Crawford lived to see themselves caricatured in this eight-episode romp from Ryan Murphy starring Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange about their infamous feud on the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
< p>One surviving old-timer, however, was not having fun at all. A year after her 100th birthday, Olivia de Havilland sued the FX Network and Murphy, angry that Catherine Zeta-Jones's portrayal of Catherine Zeta-Jones had seen herself as a gossipy hypocrite, making sideways snarks about fellow Hollywood royals.
Few expected de Havilland to win her case due to the First Amendment protections mentioned above, but she undauntedly did so, participating in a one-woman crusade against «deliberate lies» and the tarnishing of her carefully guarded reputation.
With each refusal, she continued to appeal, including to the Supreme Court. A California court has already ruled that her image «is not highly offensive to a reasonable person as a matter of law» and that she does not have the right to «control, dictate, approve, disapprove or veto the author's image.» real people.» Olivia de Havilland died in 2020 at the age of 104.
Nona Gaprindashvili vs. The Queen's Gambit (2020)
Nona Gaprindashvili is the world's first female chess grandmaster, awarded this title in 1978. However, according to the final episode of The Queen's Gambit, she had «never encountered a man», and Gaprindashvili argued that this claim was false, sexist and demeaning, since by 1968, when the climax of the series occurs, she had already played with at least 59 male opponents. She sought $5 million in damages, and Netflix agreed to settle out of court in 2022.
Nona Gaprindashvili , left, and Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen's Gambit Andrew Greene vs. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Several lawsuits have dogged The Wolf of Wall Street, including a $300 million fraud lawsuit brought in 2020 by Jordan Belfort, the very man at the center of the case. This actually has nothing to do with the accuracy of its portrayal and everything to do with the fact that the film was financed, allegedly, with ill-gotten gains from a money laundering scheme in Malaysia.
However, a banker named Andrew Green has stated that the character Nicky «Rugrat» Koskoff (PJ Byrne) is clearly based on him, especially due to the wig he wears. He took umbrage at being called a «criminal, a drug addict, a degenerate, depraved and devoid of any morals or ethics» and filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit in 2014. A federal appeals court rejected his latest re-filing. in 2020 ruled that the character was composite and therefore Green was not maliciously defamed.
Andrew Green, left and PJ Byrne in The Wolf of Wall Street Samantha Barbash vs. Hustlers (2019)
Barbash became the real-life inspiration for Jennifer Lopez's character Ramona Vega, an experienced stripper who trains a group of exotic dancers to lure thousands of clients from Wall Street. Barbash, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy, assault and grand theft in 2017, was unimpressed with «Hustlers» and said Vega's character was nothing like her; she also disputed the film's suggestion that she came up with the recipe for the MDMA/ketamine cocktail used to poison male targets. Unfortunately, because she published her own memoir to correct the film's inaccuracies, and because of her numerous media appearances, the court treated her as a public figure, and her $40 million lawsuit for exploitation of her image and libel was dismissed.
Linda Fairstein vs. Netflix in When They See Us (2019)
Linda Fairstein was the Manhattan prosecutor in the Central Park Five case, which in 2014 overturned the wrongful convictions of five men for the 1989 rape of Trisha Meili, resulting in a $41 million settlement. Ava DuVernay's four-part Netflix series featured Felicity Huffman's Fairstein as the titular villain, the personification of everything wrong with the American criminal justice system.
As soon as the series premiered in 2019, #CancelLindaFairstein began trending on Twitter, prompting a boycott of her crime novels. She was dropped by her publisher and forced to leave several boards.
Linda Fairstein (left) and Felicity Huffman in «When» They see us
In September 2023, it was ruled that Fairstein's ongoing libel case against Netflix could proceed, presuming there was credible evidence of malice. A federal judge ruled that the show's creators «reverse-engineered storylines to attribute to Fairstein actions, responsibilities and viewpoints that were not hers and that are not supported by a substantial body of defendants' research materials.» Also found were script notes from Netflix staff suggesting that they «[emphasize] the more negative aspects of Fairstein's character to create dramatic tension and achieve narrative goals.»
Jerry Heller vs. Straight Outta Compton (2015)
Heller was NWA's manager, played by the tenacious Paul Giamatti in the 2015 biopic. That same year, he filed a $110 million lawsuit against Universal, claiming that he never gave permission to use his name or image, that he was misrepresented, and that the script stole details from his memoir without consent.
Jerry Heller (left) and Paul Giamatti in the movie Straight Outta Compton
The film made Heller a key architect of the band's breakup, using him as a source of conflict between Ice Cube, Eazy-E and Dr Dre, and portraying him as a sleazy operator who took advantage of them — all of which Heller denied was true. However, most of his libel suits were dismissed. After Heller's death in 2016, his estate accepted a final copyright claim, but it was dismissed in 2018 as lacking merit.
Mark Schiller Against Pain and Gain (2013)
Michael Bay's Pain and Empowerment (2013) was trumpeted as a true story, despite the fact that it was lavishly fictionalized and darkly played for laughs. Nothing came from Mark Schiller, the real-life kidnapping victim who was tortured by a trio of android-stuffed gym bunnies (played by Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Mackie and Dwayne Johnson).
Schiller was renamed Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) in the film — perhaps a hint that Paramount was already a little uncomfortable with its portrayal of him as a «criminal» (in the words of Wahlberg's character) who deserves all the punishment he gets. A Miami court found merit in the businessman's case, including his lawyer's argument that it's unlikely that anyone in the audience bothered to watch the end credits until the classic disclaimer. Paramount paid an unspecified amount to settle the case in 2016.
Свежие комментарии