Rob
Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer began
working on an idea in 1978 that would eventually become the movie
This Is Spinal Tap
in 1984. They performed music gigs and made a 20-minute demo, but were
rejected by studio after studio until the movie was finally made on a
budget of $2 million, and released in 1984.
This Is Spinal Tap
performed modestly in theaters, but found success on home video, and is
now a classic. As the 30th anniversary of the movie approached, Harry
Shearer realized that neither he nor the other three principles had been
paid any residuals, despite conceiving, writing, performing music, and
acting in the film.
Sometimes it takes a malcontent to
disturb something as intractable as Hollywood accounting practices. By
the terms of the contract they signed in 1982 with Embassy Pictures, the
four creators of Spinal Tap are entitled to a portion of income from
the film, including merchandise and music, provided certain benchmarks
are hit. Given the wild afterlife of This Is Spinal Tap, it seems
impossible that anyone with a piece of the movie hasn’t made money. And
yet this is Hollywood, where studios have claimed that some of the
highest-grossing films—hits such as Return of the Jedi, Harry Potter and
the Goblet of Fire, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy—somehow haven’t
turned a profit. As David Zucker, one of the creators of Airplane!, once
said of his own sleeper hit, “It made so much money that the studio
couldn’t hide it fast enough.”
With Embassy out of business, the
theatrical rights to Spinal Tap bounced around from Coca-Cola to De
Laurentiis Entertainment Group to a L’Oréal property named Parafrance
to, around 1990, Studiocanal, a subsidiary of the French company Vivendi
SA. The home-video rights followed a separate path and landed with Sony
Music Entertainment. None of those companies paid the four creators,
and no one did anything about it until Shearer finally lost his
patience. “We were approaching the 30th anniversary,” he says, “and this
low-burning lightbulb begins to go off—‘Hey, wait a minute, what’s
going on here?’ ”
An investigation into the film's
accounting showed that the four were owed $81 in merchandizing income
and $98 in album income. Smelling a rat, Shearer filed a $125 million
lawsuit last year. In 2017, Reiner, McKean, and Guest joined the lawsuit
and raised the amount to $400 million, plus reversion of the copyright
to the name Spinal Tap.
Vivendi, in its response to the
lawsuit, argued that the creators made the film as a work for hire, and
were hence not entitled to the copyright. It seems crazy, given that
there’s plenty of evidence the four of them invented the band years
before making their deal with Embassy, but calling a contribution
work-for-hire is fairly common in copyright cases. In Shearer’s latest
filing, he calls Vivendi’s position on the copyright a threat to scare
him away from pressing his profit case. He also says it’s hypocritical
for the company to cling to a film’s copyright while suggesting, based
on what it claims is the film’s poor performance, there’s no money to be
made with it.
You can
read the details of the story, and some background on Hollywood accounting, at Bloomberg. -
An 1888 anonymous writer to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal voiced concerns about the fashion of the time in a letter headed simply “Bustles.”
