IP Picks🔎: A Dystopian Drama Imagines Queen Wallis Simpson
➕ The next 'Barbie', Maui fire dramas and a lighthearted 'Murder She Wrote'-like procedural
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
I've been fascinated by The Blind Side controversy – Michael Oher, the Black football player whose story about being taken in by a wealthy white family as a teen was told both in the bestselling Michael Lewis book and then the Oscar-nominated film of the same name that garnered Sandra Bullock her best actress trophy in 2010. Oher and the Tuohy family always presented the story as if he had been adopted, but in a petition filed in a Tennessee court Oher claims he was misled and that instead of being essentially adopted, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy had been appointed conservators over his affairs (think Britney Spears). He wants the conservatorship dissolved, and also accused them of not fairly sharing the proceeds they got from the film.
The Tuohys have denied Oher's claims. They say they split the money evenly five ways (one share each to them and their two biological kids and one share to Oher) and deposited the money in a trust when he didn't cash the checks. They also say Oher tried to shake them down for $15 million before filing the suit. (The Tuohys are very wealthy — Sean sold his company for about $200 million a few years ago.)
I think the controversy has resonated beyond the usual interest in a good scandal because it mirrors the "white savior" debate about the movie in a life-imitates-art/art-imitates-life way. The court case will have to resolve who is right and who is wrong here, but already we've learned lots of interesting things. (I will say it doesn't appear from what we know so far that Lewis or the studio did anything improper.)
As always, I’m particularly interested in the window into the movie’s finances. Lewis received $250,000, plus 2.5 percent of "defined net proceeds" for the option on the book. (He says he split that 50/50 with the Tuohys and that after taxes and fees, his take-home was about $70K.) Lewis received another $700K or so (after taxes and fees) in net proceeds, also split 50/50 with the Tuohys. So Lewis' overall take from the movie was somewhere between $1.5 and $2M (before taxes/fees) and the defined net proceeds were around $550M. (If $1.4M was Lewis' 2.5 percent take before taxes/fees, then 1 percent would be around $560,00 and the total would be around the $550M mark.)
In an interview in The Washington Post, Lewis tried to turn the blame on Hollywood accounting for the dispute. “Everybody should be mad at the Hollywood studio system,” he told the Post. “Michael Oher should join the writers strike. It’s outrageous how Hollywood accounting works, but the money is not in the Tuohys’ pockets.” Lord knows Hollywood accounting is awful, but I'm not sure that's the problem here. Lewis got a pretty good deal for the option and compared to other horror stories about Hollywood accounting, the net proceeds number seems in the ballpark. Regardless, Oher’s suit doesn’t claim the deal was unfair. It claims the Tuohys didn’t equitably share the proceeds. (Also, this is probably the last we’ll hear from Lewis on this for a bit. He’s said he’s eschewing more commenting because he wants to write about it himself.)
What jumped out at me was how Oher wasn't independently represented. The Tuohys were repped by CAA (the same agency that reps Lewis, who is also a childhood friend of Sean Tuohy), but Oher only had a local Memphis attorney, a friend of the Tuohys and seemingly without Hollywood experience, representing him. This strikes me as both a financial and artistic problem. Oher appears not to have gotten any money for his participation in the film — broadly what might be covered under a "life rights" payment — beyond what Lewis and the Tuohys shared. Oher has also long expressed discomfort with how he was depicted in the film, claiming he wasn't as intellectually slow or naive about football as portrayed.
It's not clear exactly how much filmmakers consulted Oher or listened to him, but I'm pretty sure better and independent representation would've given Oher a bigger voice in how he was portrayed. (I don't think the filmmakers did anything wrong on the fees. To them, Oher had representation and the Tuohys had a legal conservatorship. But the narrative problems are more stark in the film than in the book, which doesn't lean into the white savior trope as heavily.)
I have a couple of takeaways. For filmmakers, this is a reminder that adapting real people's stories can bring a host of unpredictable problems. No matter how much you think all the subjects are on board and okay with the projects, you never know how they're going to change their minds during filming, when the movie is released or even long down the road, though certainly an upfront life rights payment to Oher might have mitigated some of his hard feelings.
My second takeaway is: get your own lawyer. A good lawyer – experienced in Hollywood, and independent. Oher doesn't seem to have anyone whose job was to look out for his interests and only his interests. There are too many prima facie conflicts of interest here to make me comfortable — the Tuohys and Lewis sharing the same agency, the Tuohys' family friend serving as Oher's attorney (not to mention that Alcon, the production company behind the film is owned by the Tuohys’ Memphis neighbor, Fred Smith, the FedEx CEO). I don't know if these problems and the bad blood between Oher and the Tuohys could have been totally avoided — it really feels like there's a lot more going on in this relationship than the money — but they certainly might've been mitigated if Oher had had truly independent representation from the start.
On to this week’s picks, which include a couple of early suggestions on Maui fire projects and a charming new amateur PI procedural. The full rundown :
A legal drama about the Oregon kids suing the U.S. government over climate change.
A lighthearted mystery set in Louisanna centered on a crime-solving older Black woman, a church-going small-time bookie.
A dystopian drama set in an alternative universe where the Germans won WWII, former King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson are on the British thrones, and female writers are considered subversives.
A comedy that’s a revisionist take on classic fairy tales with Barbie potential
A drama about the surfing legend organizing relief efforts on Maui
A dramedy about a 20-something heiress who buys her beloved summer camp and decides to run it herself.
