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Does a former link to Hollywood mean part in lawsuit? Sure!
(by David Linzee - February 17, 2010)
Saturday’s mail brought me an invitation to a lawsuit. It was a class action, in which Hollywood screenwriters were suing television producers and networks for age discrimination. The producers had already settled for $70 million. Obviously, the best time to join a lawsuit is after your side has won, so I was intrigued. I wondered how the L.A. lawyers got my name. I haven’t so much as set foot in Los Angeles in 30 years.
I had, however, attended UCLA film school. Were they contacting all alumni? No, more likely, since the issue was age discrimination, they had tracked me through the screenplay I wrote in my 40s. A producer had optioned it for a TV movie and taken it all over town, but couldn’t get it made. We never reached the stage where anybody would have been willing to fly me to the coast.
Now I was excited. It wasn’t just getting in on the multimillion dollar payout. It was revenge. No need to convince me I’d been discriminated against! My script was better than 98 percent of the junk on TV. Obviously the only reason they’d turned me down was that they wanted young guys with more hair.
Still, I hesitated. I’d once been a litigation paralegal for a large St. Louis law firm, and I swore that before I’d sue anybody, I’d choose trial by combat. One way or the other, you get it over quickly, whereas a lawsuit takes years, and all that time you’re paying lawyers. My dealings with lawyers over the years have been purely social, making for a much more serene life.
So before I plunged into this suit, I figured I’d better get some advice. Not from a lawyer, obviously. I wanted somebody who’s dumb enough to gives advice for free — a fellow newspaper columnist.
I looked up Bill McClellan on class-action suits. “Little more than legal blackmail,” he called them. (To be exact, he didn’t call them that. He wrote that “a more cynical and less restrained observer than I” would call them that. McClellan seems to be as litigation-wary as I am.)
Disappointed, I turned to Kevin Horrigan, but he was just as negative. He said there was a “class-action suit industry.” Lawyers sought out people with “petty grievances” against large corporations, then harassed the corporations until they got tired of fighting and settled. The lawyers took the largest share of the money for themselves. Once the rest was divided, it didn’t amount to much. Horrigan had just received his settlement check from a class-action suit. It was for 28 cents.
The piece left me feeling indignant. Mine was no “petty grievance.” Think of all the hours of cruising around Beverly Hills in a Ferrari that I’ve been deprived of. The lunches with Jennifer Aniston and Jessica Alba I’ve missed out on. I would not be compensated by a check for 28 cents. I thought I’d better investigate further, on the lawsuit’s website. (Yes, class-action suits have their own websites.)
As expected, the site had a lot of complicated verbiage. But the L.A. lawyers were pretty upfront about the important numbers. They plan to take one-third of the settlement plus costs, which is — I recall from my paralegal days — the standard contingency fee. The minimum payment to a wronged screenwriter, they promised, would be $250.
Reading through the site, I began to take the suit more seriously. I don’t think it’s one of the sleazy class-action suits McClellan and Horrigan were ridiculing. Discrimination against aging actresses gets more media attention, but I don’t doubt that behind-the-camera workers, and even men, get discriminated against, too. Businesses less giddy than Hollywood practice age discrimination. It’s one of the chilling realities of American life. Our culture values “freshness” over experience, and it’s easy to hire young and hungry workers cheap and dispose of them later.
Unfortunately, I also began to doubt that I was the kind of victim the L.A. lawyers were looking for. They were seeking writers who’d gone to Hollywood young and worked their way up in the business, only to find that producers felt they had passed their “sell-by” dates. They got the news in brutal fashion, I expect. Remember Albert Brooks’ movie The Muse, in which he played an aging screenwriter? He drove up to the studio gate and was told he didn’t merit a parking space anymore. He’d be issued only a walk-on pass. “Haven’t you got anything more humiliating?” Brooks inquired. “How about a crawl-on pass?” So he trudged to his meeting with a studio exec, and that’s where the real humiliation began.
You can see how somebody who’d been through that would want to sue. Deserve to win, maybe. I’m not sure; I don’t know enough about Hollywood.
I’m happy to say.
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