DRAFT PROPOSAL FOR RIGHTS OF AMERICAN FILMMAKERS
RICHERT RICO LAWSUIT AIMED AT WGA AND CLASS ACTION LAWYERS TO DEMAND ACCOUNTING FOR MISSING BILLIONS FOR WRITERS, ACTORS AND DIRECTORS
This letter is from the Lead Plaintiff in a class action lawsuit created to get foreign taxes collected abroad for hundreds of thousands of American writers, actors and directors — both union and non union — money that was collected for them in Europe and around the world.
In 2010 at the time of settlement between the Guild and its own members the media declared: “I04 million for writers in Richert lawsuit.”
But William Richert said afterward that number was preposterously low, and he’s been fighting union leaders and his own lawyers ever since.
This letter is the opening public salvo in a RICO broadside, and it applies to an entire industry.
Dear Mr/Ms Writer Actor Director Lawyer:
Having spent the past 14 years lashed to the mast of a class action lawsuit involving 200,000 American writers actors and directors, I gotta forgive myself for stiff fingers and creaky, even painful, sentences as I climb down.
My new news is that recently I got a new idea how to get justice and money for my fellow union and freelance class action plaintiffs, tho they themselves barely know who they are.
As a direct result of the RICHERT VS WGA 2010 settlement, as a screenwriter you should have been receiving WGA foreign levy checks for your movies sold overseas — ditto if you are a director; the checks should match.
I can attest as Lead Plaintiff that my films, a short list which serve as a template in my role representing union and non union screenwriters whose works have sold abroad — have still not been accounted for as required by the settlement. And there is no oversight of the settlement whatsoever except by the WGA itself, since the lawyers have walked off the case and I am not allowed to represent the class “in pro se.”
Therefore millions in foreign taxes collected in Europe and abroad for American screenwriters have never been accounted for by the WGA, and the settlement bearing my name has been used in a broad based scheme of “catch and kill” carried out by an unlikely band of profiteers among unions and studios, watching each others backs, amounting to a backroom theft of billions from individual artists.
This kind of thing could only happen in an earlier Hollywood, probably, but it has encumbered-plundered “Sister” Guilds throughout the movie world. At my last hearing, the Australian Writer’s Guild sent a lawyer on behalf of Peter Jackson and 64 other Australian screenwriters.
But every WGA-associated guild on earth is presently shafting its members under the aegis of basically unknown documents and court rulings.
It is no accident that the settlement has not produced any audit of the previous 20 years before the settlement; years when DVDs were selling in the millions, and WGA writers were getting cuts of large box office at theaters via foreign levies — years not accounted for — years when there was a secret percentage split between the WGA and Hollywood's "sister" major studios, an undisclosed “scheme” written by Carl Gottlieb, then treasurer at the WGA, based on a secret contract between the WGA and the major studios which gave the studios 92% of the foreign taxes intended for directly for American artists alone.
“Foreign levies” exist because decades ago lawmakers across Europe realized that American distributors were taking virtually all the profits belonging to screenwriters actors and directors when their works were sold abroad. To protect those who could not protect themselves, they enacted laws to give Americans a tiny piece of every sale, to ensure that the artist would at least get something.
But in the years before 2002 the studios took all this money for themselves, saying as copyright owners they were the creators too; this, the very opposite of what Europeans intended.
In 2002 Carl Gottlieb engineered what he called a “scheme” to get WGA members (and non members, totally unknown to them) 8% of what the studios were taking — not much benefit for screenwriters; studios had no rights to this money.
Oddly, a theft this large is almost invisible to the victims.
Unknown to you (I bet) a class action lawsuit was filed to right these wrongs; I was chosen as Lead Plaintiff in the class action on behalf of all screenwriters. (!) I still am. 14 years later.
Back then class attorney Neville Johnson said nobody would ever object to the gravity of the settlement because nobody could figure it out. I admit I still have not figured it all out; but I’ve figured out enough.
WILLIAM RICHERT VS WGAW ET AL, was settled in 2010. I was promised a full accounting of who gets what with my independent film THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK, providing the class action template as required of the Lead Plaintiff in a class action.
But no accounting has occurred. To this very day the major studios continue in the dark to receive 50% of the money sent from Europeans to Americans for the sales of their films on video and broadcasting. They are lawfully entitled to nothing.
Almost none of this has this been made public, which violates the ‘full audit’ promises made to me regarding the at least 2.5 billion in foreign levies disbursed from Europe since 2002 — owed but not sent to WGA members, along with those roughly 200,000 writers/actors/directors who are not union members at all.
At one point the WGAw lawsuit was ‘bundled’ with the DGA and SAG settlements, which are similarly foul.
Announcing the 2010 settlement VARIETY proclaimed: RICHERT LAWSUIT YEILDS 104 MILLION FOR WRITERS.
Yes maybe; where is the rest of the money?
Where is the transparency I was promised 11 years ago by prominent lawyers and even judges to induce and convince me to sign the settlement with my name alone on it?
Mine was and is a heavy unasked-for responsibility, since — preposterously and unbelievably — I was then and now the only screenwriter named in the long litigation. No doubt the few writers who actually paid attention to this during these years were afraid to piss off the Guild. Bad use of fear.
As Lead Plaintiff I asked for a hearing in 2014 where I told a LA Superior court judge, in open court, that this entire class action was a swindle to get the 'guilds' and the studios off the hook for felonious long term theft from 105,000 ‘titles’ involving at least 200,000 writers directors and actors.
At the hearing I managed get on the court calendar, judge Mary Strobel told me I could not represent the class “In Pro Se” and I needed to get a lawyer, and I did find a lawyer — who turned out to pursue the same kind of deal Neville had made. This was not acceptable.
But the passage of time that buried the truth has also provided a backhoe to dig it up.
There has now been over ten years of fraudulent concealment, among other charges, moving the fraud-based civil lawsuit into RICO criminal territory. RICO allows for a single plaintiff to sue in a racket, and this is a racket.
As the single named writer in this lawsuit, I am duty bound to uphold the law.
BACKGROUND OF MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR SWINDLE THAT MANIPULATED LA SUPERIOR COURTS INTO PROTECTING A RACKET
Late afternoon in September 2005 my ‘super lawyer’ Neville Johnson called me at home to say that a ‘huge scandal’ had been uncovered at the WGA.
He told me with umbrage that the Writers Guild of America had been diverting millions of writer’s foreign taxes to the major studios for decades, and the facts had been concealed from the members; worse, they were taking the funds meant for non-union writers and directors and actors as well.
Neville Johnson had just won a14.75 million dollar court judgment on my behalf for a soybean coffee company I started with River Phoenix. It made the LA Law Journal front page.
Also I had a personal knowledge of fraud at the WGA based on my case with John Wells and Aaron Sorkin over THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT and THE WEST WING credit phony arbitration. I already knew the guild had problems with blatant lies hidden behind legal protections meant for ‘real’ labor unions; at the WGA more than a few ‘labor’ producer-writers have a net worth in the hundreds of millions. Not your average AFL-CIO salaried blokes.
In 2005 Neville told me on the phone that I would be one of at least 1,000 screenwriters involved in a class action to get the money due the writers, both union and non-union. By 2010 the WGA lawyer upped that number to over 200,000 involved in 105,000 “titles” the WGA oversaw.
I agreed it was preposterous and unbelievable the Writers Guild was taking money meant for non-union writers; non-union and freelance is what most American writers are.
The very next day in the NY TIMES Johnson’s law firm announced the class action “Richert Vs WGA” with me named as the lead plaintiff.
I remain today the only writer plaintiff named in a lawsuit affecting tens of thousands world wide. My lawyer had lied to me.
There were no other writers’ names in the original complaint, and no other writers or directors have joined this class action in all these years. Early on, after I began fighting the coverup-settlement, Neville added the names of the heirs of two dead screenwriters to the complaint.
That first week I figured out I was in some kind of setup I couldn’t understand but anyway seemed very suspicious. I wrote Mr. Johnson and demanded he take my name off the lawsuit.
But then I changed my mind after a visit from a famous screenwriter who was also briefly President of the WGA.
A week or so after the class action was announced in the NY TIMES, the LA TIMES and VARIETY, Eric Hughes (AGAINST ALL ODDS) stopped by our apartment in Santa Monica with a stack of documents, including a $500 check made out to Charles Bukowski for his film, which had never been delivered or cashed – and now of course the poet was dead.
Hughes himself, who has written accurately and extensively about all this, is now also dead. I am obviously not dead so I can write this, but the WGA is patient.
Hughes had copies of contracts made between the WGA and the studios without any kind of writer knowledge or oversight, contracts never agreed to by screenwriters or directors, certainly not non-union screenwriters, which basically gave the ‘majors’ — Sony, MGM, Disney, Fox, Universal, Warners et.al. — 92% of all our money for years, amounting to millions and millions never got to either members or non-members.
After I send my instant letter of resignation Neville Johnson wrote the Judge that his firm would continue the lawsuit, representing the writers themselves. Eric Hughes said the lawsuit was ‘fetid’ and I should stay out of it. I did the opposite. Thinking about Bukowski — and my own films — I realized that there would never be any kind of justice if I quit. Come what may, I decided Bill Richert would stay in this lawsuit. This led to 14 years of labor for somebody who likes to pretend life should be a holiday.
To this very day those contracts negotiated by the Guild’s Carl Gottlieb have never been seen in court. (Carl is a collaborator of Rob Reiner who was part of the “pre-arbitration panel” at the WGA in 1995 that gave Aaron Sorkin his unshared credit on THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT and THE WEST WING. Today Carl is listed among a number of my FB friends. Maybe he’ll turn state evidence.)
Before being paid off in a six-figure settlement by the guild, the WGA residuals expert Teri Mial talked about shredding thousands of members’ and non-members’ checks adding up to millions of dollars.
But this damning evidence never got noticed or written about except by me, and the WGA said I was a malcontent angry about the Sorkin case. Any reporter saying anything publicly was contacted by WGA lawyers.
During these years of hearings and all the hundreds of letters/filings I wrote, I could not forget that after the 2007 WGA strike there were lots writers who might have survived a lot better and even continued writing if they got the full amounts of the money owed to them, me included. But until today with the networks of social media, there was no way to sound the alarm. I felt lots of times like the character in BODY SNATCHERS but getting the word out is even harder when it involves screenplays and taxes, which many people think are equally difficult to begin with.
The WGA sold out its devoted members, roped in unaware freelance writers, and, to my way of thinking, made deals with their greedy devils within.
— As for a billion or more in not identified foreign levies: during a most lucrative decades like the 80’s and 90’s, when the sales were fresh and the profits where high, the studios took the MGM Lion’s share of money for writer’s and divided the loot among themselves. That money is still not accounted for so the forgivers don't know who or what to forgive.
I figure those thousands of writers who never heard of this before may want to know what happened here, and I will as I am able continue sharing my experience and information. Like many of my contemporaries, my limited time is stretched to the limits, which is why I'm using this opportunity to tell as much as I can.
Part of the delays and gaps in my protests these 14 years were due to various near-deadly sickness (like cancer, bummer) — which has finally been subdued this year but was a major factor for lengths of precious time, when a one-person team is unable to play; or plea, the game suffers.
QUICK-ISH HISTORY OF COMPLEX CASE; THE PLAINTIFF NEVER CLAIMED TO UNDERSTAND ALL OF IT, BUT MOST OF IT
Back in 2007 or so Neville was ready to settle the very day the court ‘certified’ the class action; I refused to accept his terms for the class he’d asked me to represent, and rigorously held to my role as Lead Plaintiff during what became several years of questions and court hearings before I finally agreed to sign off on the proposed settlement in 2010.
I spent weeks immersed in Google searches on subjects I totally avoided during my years in school. I got dizzy headaches but took notes.
Because of my furious but lawful court pleas I sent to the Judges, I was able to persuade 3 LA Superior Court judges to hold hearings for the record; Off the record Neville told the lawyer Kaplan that I was his worst nightmare. Visa versa.
I finally did sign the settlement, but only after 3 days of meetings with Johnson’s partner Paul Kiesel where the famed expert lawyer told me that under class action laws, as Lead Plaintiff my film THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK INDIE was to be used as the template for both union and non-union members of the WGA/DGA/SAG ‘guilds’ and that the settlement would provide complete transparency accounting within 90 days.
To verify the settlement was fair and had “teeth” Paul Kieisel went over the agreement line by line in his Beverly Hills office during 3 separate days of meetings. In detail he explained the meaning of the legal language to me in front of my wife and Jonathan Lawton (PRETTY WOMAN) who was also acting as witness. (Later on when I demanded that Neville Johnson be fired and demanded also that new lawyers be engaged, Johnathan hid out in a Glendale Motel as he was afraid the guild was following him.)
But after the settlements were signed there was no accounting of THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK as template for all foreign levies due to US artists – certainly there was nothing of the transparency of the kind that was artfully promised me as the Named Plaintiff to induce me to sign the settlement; the broken promises meant that I, along with the other 200,000-plus writers/directors/actors from 105 titles in the class I lawfully represented, was now bound by a settlement that was not only fraudulent at its inception, but was now basically institutionalized by the courts. No doubt the number of those touched by the settlement has grown these past years.
(Judge West retired from the bench before finishing the case and joined the consulting firm of Joel Grossman, who was the expert witness for the WGA. He also told the lawyers that my protests led to 'uncharted territory.')
The fraud in WGA/SAG/DGA foreign levies meant for thousands has continued unabated since the settlement was signed. No non-union writers or directors have ever gotten a fair notification that their rights were under assault and most of their money was going to studios without their knowledge or permission. WGA members were never fairly told the substance of the case; never really able to defend themselves. Freelancers had no idea whatsoever.
In order to discredit me, both David Young and Dan Petrie wrote letters to the 20,000 union-related members about how the Richert lawsuit was bogus, and that it was only settled to somehow uphold and protect the rights of writers etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, I was blacklisted.
Union screenwriters are actually scared of David Young and union retribution. I wrote an essay for VARIETY against the 2007 strike and Peter Bart got lots of angry calls and did not publish my follow-up he’d asked for.
My fight and role in dealing with the unions and studios in court has not endeared me to anyone.
Somehow, even with my somewhat reclusive character, I have become an active repository of the arcane but ancient rights of authorship and reward.
It is still infuriating to somebody like me who spent hard years putting a movie together to watch WGA insiders plunder my work and the work of others; all absolved and then perpetuated in a ‘settlement’ underhandedly crafted by lawyers who had only recently represented those same studios connected to the lawsuit, but who came to advise both the WGA and our own class lawyers – men like Robert Hadl.
Robert Hadl is a former studio attorney/executive who also advises both Neville Johnson and the WGA, and he was the man who informed Neville Johnson of the ‘scandal’ at the WGA foreign levy ‘scheme’ – a scam which Carl Gottlieb also claims credit for – and almost laughably, Hadl also advised the WGA during the years of class action litigation.
At the time Carl Gottlieb enacted his self-described ‘scheme’ at the WGAw regarding foreign levies the Major Studios were actually taking 100% of Americans’ foreign levies, claiming that under copyright ownership they were the ‘owner-authors’ and therefore entitled to writer’s money — actors and directors, too. This was an obvious outrage, but WGA union or non union members were informed of this.
Although he boasted about his success, which was not told to the membership until years afterward, Gottlieb only managed to secure 8% of the writers money. The Richert 2010 class action cut the studio’s share to 50% — even so, that is just 42% less crummy.
Neville has listed Hadl as his advisor, and I photographed Hadl with the WGA’s ‘outside’ counsel Tony Segall when Hadl appeared to be lecturing Segall after a hearing.
A famous class action lawyer told me it was ridiculous that Neville only got 1.5 million for a case that the Hollywood Reporter said made writers 100 million while the LA Law Journal said 60 million – in any event a class action lawyer is entitled to 1/3 of recovery or 30 million at the very least.
It was WGA expert insider-crusader Eric Hughes who first described how the case was a union/studio ‘catch and kill’ with a payoff to the class lawyers to protect the major studios and unions from future lawsuits and save billions in future judgments while keeping all the past revenue.
I was set up as a class action bag man for American screenwriters stolen royalties in a ‘complex law’ situation where I am called a liar and a union buster by the defendants instead of a man playing his court appointed role. But they picked the wrong guy. Now I am doing what I have to do; writers are the original whistleblowers. I’ve managed to retain much of my anger even among the roses we grow in Portland.
After the settlement I suddenly started getting intermittent foreign royalty checks with no background information on them; I even got checks from LAW AND DISORDER which I co-wrote and produced in 1973 or so – and also THE HAPPY HOOKER, but missing were other films like WINTER KILLS and JIMMY REARDON and SUCCESS.
In short the settlement was never enforced. The class lawyers had quit. There was still no real accounting and the union controlled the accountants anyhow – firms like KPMG and others worked with the WGA for years.
Only after the settlement did I get my first check for THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK INDIE. Except for SAG, this was a non-union picture. It was also a template: evidence that the WGA was collecting for tens of thousands of nonunion films they would not admit to or disclose to the independent writers and directors until the settlement was signed and protected them.
While I did get a few of the DGA checks, these should have matched and been concurrent with the WGA checks, but they were not.
In 2012 Neville Johnson went to court to ask for more money to confront what he told the judge was ‘fraud’ in SAG among other things. I wrote a long strenuous objection to Neville’s demands, saying he’d only done one or two depositions regarding the WGA – and no depositions whatsoever before he settled with DGA/SAG.
Judge Wiley basically agreed with me;) that Neville owed his clients continuing representation; (that rather incredible 2012 court transcript is attached.) Neville said without an additional payment he would have to leave the case because his small law firm couldn’t continue without more money.
After reading my brief opposing Neville Johnson/Paul Kiesel, instead of threatening to have me thrown out of court as he did in my first hearing with him, the Judge allowed me to speak for almost 5 minutes in the 2012 hearing.
However, tho the subject had recently been page one, this time Dave McNary at Variety didn’t record anything I said at this hearing; and nobody in the press even bothered to attend our last hearing in 2014 where I told the Judge that I – and my class – had been swindled by the union and our own lawyers. And we were not alone; this class action touches virtually everyone who’s sold a film in Europe or South America or dozens of other countries with writer unions.
Importantly, the Australian Writers Guild did send a lawyer to that hearing, talking about how Peter Jackson and 64 other Aussie writers were owed a fortune. But they were sent away as I was, to get another lawyer. Never heard from them again.
The Director of the Australian Guild once called me from Sydney and told me that Carl Gottlieb had called her very sleazy names. She told me that she and others were threatened by the LA WGA, she said. When I asked her to repeat this out loud, I stopped hearing from her.
It is attention-grabbing if not nauseating every time I think that while certain distributors stole 100% of the money due to me for a single film, the WGA and Columbia, Warners, Disney, Fox, Universal etc. took 92% of my foreign levies for several movies for decades – and the ‘majors’ have continued to take 50% of all writers’ money since the settlement, money intended solely and exclusively for writers and directors and actors according to European laws.
Once again: The WGA and Major Studios were found in court to be rightfully guilty of swindling tens of thousands of writers for dozens of years. Yet there were almost zero depositions: none whatsoever at the DGA or SAG.
These powerhouse “Guilds” were not prosecuted and were not required to produce the missing money. Instead, their organized union-studio theft was legalized by a not-enforced settlement in a courtroom fraud based on false presentations or erroneous evidence given in court by members of the California Bar.
This class action should be returned to the Federal courts where it began, but in a RICO venue.
EARLIER
The RICHERT VS WGA case was first presented to Federal Judge Margaret M. Morrow but moved to civil courts based on the false WGA protestation that I was a “member in arrears” at the WGA– a nonexistent member category purposefully invented to keep me under WGA control. In fact my lawyers and the WGA all knew that I almost famously quit the guild over the Richert/Sorkin AMERICAN PRESIDENT “arbitration” and I quit paying dues in 1995. All parties knew this, except the Judge. So the whole case was moved to the LA Superior court because the lawyers lied to the judge. I know it sounds absurd; we have clear evidence the court was lied to.
It is preposterous on its face: The WGA and the Major studios had nothing to do with my indie movies or your movies, or the films of thousands of others, and yet they are continuing this organized crime against American screenwriters et.al – maybe today! – without involvement or investment in making or writing or directing them — these corporate entities are collecting more money than I have made from most of my movies.
Who knows how many writers and directors might have been able to survive in their chosen art form and paid their rent if they’d gotten the thousands that was withheld from them?
I don’t know if you’ve gotten WGA foreign levy money with corresponding DGA checks for any of your films – since they are paid out together but I assure you that if you did get foreign levy checks, you didn’t get what was due you.
There is no indication anywhere in this entire litigation that the major studios were ever getting a cut from the WGAw’s money for writers.
So here is my idea, and where it might be of interest to you economically help to represent my class of 105,000 titles + 200,000 + writers and directors and actors (including writer-lawyers.)
It has now been more than 10 years since the settlement was signed into continuing fraud.
We can know there was fraud because Neville Johnson told 2 judges there was fraud, and the Lead Plaintiff told 4 judges there was fraud – while during all these years as Lead Plaintiff I was thwarted or blocked in my role as lead plaintiff, while I was personally vilified and blacklisted by the WGA -- .
During this entire saga I kept blowing my whistle like a factory lunch horn, and even if the artists didn’t hear, the whistles are all documented.
Except at the first filing in federal court, this billion-dollar swindle has been designated a civil and not a racketeering matter.
But 10 years of fraudulent concealment by union leadership against their membership is a crime under RICO, I believe, since RICO was created partly because of union misfeasance (David Young was a teamster organizer before being beatified into the WGA as its highest-ever paid Director. How a trucker union enforcer came to represent the lineage of James Agee et.al. should be explained by John Wells).
Thus my conceivable notion: I want to sue these fraudsters in a federal court under federal labor corruption and whistleblower laws. Ten years of a pattern of fraud and racketeering have passed.
In the class action RICHERT VS WGA/DGA/SAG both the plaintiff and defense paid various experts to help conceal underlying wrongdoing. It is preposterous that in all these proceedings, no executive from the wGA was ever called to witness, and no mention was ever made about the actual studios who took 92% of foreign royalties intended for American artists.
It’s time the WGA leaders themselves were called to the stand on this. Their lawyers were not called under oath to tell the whole truth, or any portion of it.
Whistleblowers are rewarded and protected these days. And it’s about time somebody put some kind of Brando up against David Young’s thugs. (You’ll excuse the Brando comparison, but you remember On The Waterfront was also about union thugs. I have nothing against most unions, which are necessary in righteous fights against greed. However, in this instance, I have been, in all possible ways, a whistleblower against union and studio racketeering.)
I MAY NOT HAVE THE NUMBERS RIGHT, BUT Since the sums involved here over several decades of deceit and money going to the studios without writers knowing amounted to an estimated 2.6 billion in almost 12 years ago. Even then, the number was adjusted by the felons.
FROM LAW RESEARCH: “In addition to criminal prosecutions, RICO also permits civil suits by private citizens (plaintiffs) who have suffered financial harm, whether harm to their business or damage to their property, because of racketeering. Racketeering is a genre of organized crime in which the perpetrators set up a coercive, fraudulent, or otherwise illegal scheme (a racket) to repeatedly collect money or other profit. ...
“The racket exists as both the problem and its solution, and it is used as a method of extortion.The RICO civil provisions contain five basic elements: injury, person, enterprise, pattern of racketeering activity, and interstate or foreign commerce.
“The defense bar’s use of RICO also threatens a principle at the core of our justice system: the right to petition the courts for redress the First Circuit has explained, “Civil RICO is an unusually potent weapon—the litigation equivalent of a thermonuclear device. The very pendency of a RICO suit can be stigmatizing and its consummation can be costly.”
Triple damages and legal fees is a consideration that might energize help in this situation. Forensic auditors can also be engaged.
If you help me and our class of roughly 200,000 writers plus actors and directors behind the 105,000 titles or more the WGA is getting money for, and help US writers directors and actors file a whistleblower RICO charge, and then separately represent the entity of our class action in a demand for enforcement of the current settlement against the union and the studios, you might profit mightily from your effort and recovery. Plus you get attorney's fees 3X.
Maybe thinking a simple paragraph as an entry to a rousing RICO case against the WGA and Neville Johnson/Paul Kiesel sounds naive, but the essential charge of a continuing criminal/fraudulent enterprise via Federal RICO statutes can fit into a small paragraph on a government form. And among my hundreds of angry pages, I think we might find dozens of small paragraphs already written to help fill in the blank if required.
Another historical aspect of this is that in no law journal have I been able to find any kind of class action where the Lead Plaintiff was forced to fight both his lawyers and the defendants as being mutually corrupt. We might find a curious judge. In one phone call Neville raised my eyebrow when he asked if I thought he was colluding with Tony Segall at the WGA.
A lawsuit demanding justice for a writer-director-whistleblower against the major Hollywood unions and studios – in cahoots – would draw attention to these crooks who took from thousands of unaware writers and directors and actors.
It might finally reimburse those tens of thousands of freelancers who never joined any kind of union or ever agreed to relinquish their once and future rights included in those 105,000 titles (a number WGA lawyer Tony Segall claimed back in 2012.)
I might add without complaining that I have only recently begun a return to health. I am nearing 79. During these courtroom years I was hospitalized for internal bleeding and later for prostate cancer. Unfortunately this led to many years of being unable to function fully under stress. But now I am finally back in shape enough to make further last efforts in a longstanding battle against people who steal from the defenseless. And who can defend himself/herself against something one doesn’t know exists – like theft of foreign levies.
It may even be possible to trace some of these foreign levies back to the distributors and see what grosses these films made, and who might have been selling them illegally in Europe and elsewhere. Maybe this exposure is the greater fear of the studios.
I realize this kind of case is not your specialty (since it is nobody’s specialty and hasn’t been tried in court to my knowledge) but the crime is organized (for sure) and continuing, and if the actual facts become known there could be tens of thousands of joiners to a new lawsuit.
Much of the reporting on this case hitherto originated at the Hollywood Reporter with Jonathan Handel, a lawyer journalist who only recently admitted he was a lawyer for SAG. For years he was also a misinformant and stalwart for corruption in his REPORTER.
Under the usurpation of the possibility of a fair union representing writers’ rights, the backroom dealings of producer John Wells, treasurer Carl Gottlieb and former teamster David Young the WGA ignored its duty to original writers in favor of transactional greed, awarding credit to those insiders who could wrangle it, “credit” being the term for owned intellectual property.
The WGA enforces the copyright of any writer who signs a union agreement; they protect the studios as much as their writers. “Credit” identifies intellectual property. The executives in LA ought to study the international laws protecting creators of IP and the dire penalties for stealing it when caught.
I have personally discovered how US courts will not interfere in credits “assigned” by the WGA; judges say they are not literary critics or assayers. Thus the final ownership of your work is decided by the union. This privilege leads to plunder.
The WGA big fish thrive in the 100 days adding up to a year during a strike, but the downriver spawning is dried up. The WGA brags that it has created “500 writer-producers” but that only means that 500 writers are now more controlled than every by their union, acting as agent and tax collector and credit arbiter collector of dues.
Now also producers, some WGA screenwriters in NY were asked to turn in their hours while overseeing themselves.
This is the land of Syd Field, not Dalton Trumbo; James Agee, not Carl Gottlieb.
Former President Patrick Verrone said one of the reasons for the 2007 strike was that he wanted Guild writers to be producers and entrepreneurs.
The WGA has now become the best maker of reality shows, especially now that they are insisting that reality is written too. Look how THE APPRENTICE turned out.
The powers the WGA has given itself under their backroom conservatorship are no less grabby than the ones Britney’s father had when Britney Spears was harming herself.
Verrone and Young made studios the enemy, even though most of the WGA leadership have lucrative producing deals with studios, and these owner-producer-writers are the only ones who could possibly benefit from the debilitating union strikes for more “shares” of a pie they mostly already own.
David Young has presided over the loss of hundreds of otherwise loyal agents to writers, many of whom really needed their agents. In my years at WMA and ICM I observed that “packaging” scripts with major stars, as some agents were able to do, upped the money and helped get the film made. Apparently the WGA will now do that job themselves. I don’t know how many stars will be glad to get scripts from the WGA.
Since the 2007 WGA strike — which diverted attention from the foreign levy case in court — thousands of freelance writers have been displaced one way or another by the “creative disruption” the WGA called a “list of demands.”
“Spec script” deals are so infrequent that one of them got a front page in the LA Times a few years ago. Haven’t heard much about them since.
Your thoughts about this will be appreciated.
Thanks!
All best,
Cheers
Bill Richert
PS. You might note that one of Neville's law partners showed up in the 2014 transcript to say I was the only writer objecting to the settlement -- but contradicting him strongly was a lawyer for the Australian Writer's Guild representing 64 Aussie writers including Peter Jackson who went to court in support of my motions.
PAGE 8 FROM HON.JUDGE WILEY HEARING AUGUST 22, 2012 BC339972
MR. JOHNSON: Okay. Then I'm going to be making
a motion that this court appoint counsel to come in and represent the class henceforth, which will not be me, but needs to advise you of problems and issues as they arise, because the situation that exists now is that probably a hundred million dollars a year comes into these two unions, the unions' attitude is we want to give no information
to the public, let alone our constituents here, our actual union members, as well. And that's why the court has
been supervising in the federal case the ASCAP situation
for some 60 years for issues relating to that, as well.
THE COURT: I'm happy to give you a hearing date for that motion.
MR. JOHNSON: Okay. Give it to me now, please, and we'll set a time. THE COURT: What would you like?
MR. JOHNSON: I don't know. 60 days?
Mr. Johnson never requested any such hearing; the next court hearing was called at my request and took place in 2014.
FOLLOWING WAS SENT IN 2009 JUST BEFORE I AGREED TO SIGN THE SETTLEMENT
To: DK HOLM
HOW THE HOLLYWOOD SISTER UNIONS DGA, SAG AND WGA ORGANIZED NEW MEDIA AND BROUGHT THE INTERNET INTO LINE WITH THEIR OBJECTIVES TO LOCK ALL AMERICAN SCREENWRITERS INTO THEIR JURISDICTION
A VIEW FROM THE FUTURE
THE PSYCHE SNATCHERS
If you’re a writer who’s ever sold anything and you got any of your work on a digital medium, chances are the WGA’s got you -- and has had you – or your money, for the past 20 years. (Ditto if you’re an author, director or actor.)
True, the Writers Guild of America shares most of that money with the major US studios, a generous act you probably never agreed to, or even heard of.
Virtually all American writers and authors of screenplays books and poems made into film or television or sold as VHS or DVDs have amassed royalties in their names for decades, unbeknownst to them.
Since the 1980’s films and television shows and other works based on American books and poems have been taxed throughout Europe by laws enacted to make sure the underlying artist of successful works got a piece of the action, no matter how little.
Called “foreign levies,” the WGA and DGA and SAG have been collecting these funds for years – millions and millions for writers who have nothing to do with unions -- in cahoots with the major US studios they publicly call “the enemy” – but the WGA and DGA never really admitted or got close to an accounting until they were taken into court 3 years ago by William Richert in Richert VS WGA.
The thrust of the 2006 lawsuit for Fraud at the WGA was that for at least 18 years the WGA has been collecting tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign deposits for non-union as well as union writers but never declaring the money, keeping it instead and refusing to say where it was kept, or even by whom it was kept , behind the union
walls of silence.
The WGA paid hundreds of thousands of member and insurance dollars to whistle blowers to accused high officials of misdeeds.
The WGA will pay millions to its outside lawyers and the plaintiff’s lawyers to prevent further disclosures, using the settlement to stop any investigation.
But none of this effort to conceal by a corrupt union seemed to matter to the lawyers representing William Richert, who protested in letter after letter about the way the attorneys were representing Subclass 3.
Subclass 3 is that group of writers – all current 12,500 WGA members and those unnamed thousands of non-union screenwriters, novelists, biographers, political writers, poets and others for whom the WGA has been holding and collecting money.
The future will reveal these misdeeds.
RICHERT RICO LAWSUIT AIMED AT WGA AND CLASS ACTION LAWYERS TO DEMAND ACCOUNTING FOR MISSING BILLIONS FOR WRITERS, ACTORS AND DIRECTORS
This letter is from the Lead Plaintiff in a class action lawsuit created to get foreign taxes collected abroad for hundreds of thousands of American writers, actors and directors — both union and non union — money that was collected for them in Europe and around the world.
In 2010 at the time of settlement between the Guild and its own members the media declared: “I04 million for writers in Richert lawsuit.”
But William Richert said afterward that number was preposterously low, and he’s been fighting union leaders and his own lawyers ever since.
This letter is the opening public salvo in a RICO broadside, and it applies to an entire industry.
Dear Mr/Ms Writer Actor Director Lawyer:
Having spent the past 14 years lashed to the mast of a class action lawsuit involving 200,000 American writers actors and directors, I gotta forgive myself for stiff fingers and creaky, even painful, sentences as I climb down.
My new news is that recently I got a new idea how to get justice and money for my fellow union and freelance class action plaintiffs, tho they themselves barely know who they are.
As a direct result of the RICHERT VS WGA 2010 settlement, as a screenwriter you should have been receiving WGA foreign levy checks for your movies sold overseas — ditto if you are a director; the checks should match.
I can attest as Lead Plaintiff that my films, a short list which serve as a template in my role representing union and non union screenwriters whose works have sold abroad — have still not been accounted for as required by the settlement. And there is no oversight of the settlement whatsoever except by the WGA itself, since the lawyers have walked off the case and I am not allowed to represent the class “in pro se.”
Therefore millions in foreign taxes collected in Europe and abroad for American screenwriters have never been accounted for by the WGA, and the settlement bearing my name has been used in a broad based scheme of “catch and kill” carried out by an unlikely band of profiteers among unions and studios, watching each others backs, amounting to a backroom theft of billions from individual artists.
This kind of thing could only happen in an earlier Hollywood, probably, but it has encumbered-plundered “Sister” Guilds throughout the movie world. At my last hearing, the Australian Writer’s Guild sent a lawyer on behalf of Peter Jackson and 64 other Australian screenwriters.
But every WGA-associated guild on earth is presently shafting its members under the aegis of basically unknown documents and court rulings.
It is no accident that the settlement has not produced any audit of the previous 20 years before the settlement; years when DVDs were selling in the millions, and WGA writers were getting cuts of large box office at theaters via foreign levies — years not accounted for — years when there was a secret percentage split between the WGA and Hollywood's "sister" major studios, an undisclosed “scheme” written by Carl Gottlieb, then treasurer at the WGA, based on a secret contract between the WGA and the major studios which gave the studios 92% of the foreign taxes intended for directly for American artists alone.
“Foreign levies” exist because decades ago lawmakers across Europe realized that American distributors were taking virtually all the profits belonging to screenwriters actors and directors when their works were sold abroad. To protect those who could not protect themselves, they enacted laws to give Americans a tiny piece of every sale, to ensure that the artist would at least get something.
But in the years before 2002 the studios took all this money for themselves, saying as copyright owners they were the creators too; this, the very opposite of what Europeans intended.
In 2002 Carl Gottlieb engineered what he called a “scheme” to get WGA members (and non members, totally unknown to them) 8% of what the studios were taking — not much benefit for screenwriters; studios had no rights to this money.
Oddly, a theft this large is almost invisible to the victims.
Unknown to you (I bet) a class action lawsuit was filed to right these wrongs; I was chosen as Lead Plaintiff in the class action on behalf of all screenwriters. (!) I still am. 14 years later.
Back then class attorney Neville Johnson said nobody would ever object to the gravity of the settlement because nobody could figure it out. I admit I still have not figured it all out; but I’ve figured out enough.
WILLIAM RICHERT VS WGAW ET AL, was settled in 2010. I was promised a full accounting of who gets what with my independent film THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK, providing the class action template as required of the Lead Plaintiff in a class action.
But no accounting has occurred. To this very day the major studios continue in the dark to receive 50% of the money sent from Europeans to Americans for the sales of their films on video and broadcasting. They are lawfully entitled to nothing.
Almost none of this has this been made public, which violates the ‘full audit’ promises made to me regarding the at least 2.5 billion in foreign levies disbursed from Europe since 2002 — owed but not sent to WGA members, along with those roughly 200,000 writers/actors/directors who are not union members at all.
At one point the WGAw lawsuit was ‘bundled’ with the DGA and SAG settlements, which are similarly foul.
Announcing the 2010 settlement VARIETY proclaimed: RICHERT LAWSUIT YEILDS 104 MILLION FOR WRITERS.
Yes maybe; where is the rest of the money?
Where is the transparency I was promised 11 years ago by prominent lawyers and even judges to induce and convince me to sign the settlement with my name alone on it?
Mine was and is a heavy unasked-for responsibility, since — preposterously and unbelievably — I was then and now the only screenwriter named in the long litigation. No doubt the few writers who actually paid attention to this during these years were afraid to piss off the Guild. Bad use of fear.
As Lead Plaintiff I asked for a hearing in 2014 where I told a LA Superior court judge, in open court, that this entire class action was a swindle to get the 'guilds' and the studios off the hook for felonious long term theft from 105,000 ‘titles’ involving at least 200,000 writers directors and actors.
At the hearing I managed get on the court calendar, judge Mary Strobel told me I could not represent the class “In Pro Se” and I needed to get a lawyer, and I did find a lawyer — who turned out to pursue the same kind of deal Neville had made. This was not acceptable.
But the passage of time that buried the truth has also provided a backhoe to dig it up.
There has now been over ten years of fraudulent concealment, among other charges, moving the fraud-based civil lawsuit into RICO criminal territory. RICO allows for a single plaintiff to sue in a racket, and this is a racket.
As the single named writer in this lawsuit, I am duty bound to uphold the law.
BACKGROUND OF MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR SWINDLE THAT MANIPULATED LA SUPERIOR COURTS INTO PROTECTING A RACKET
Late afternoon in September 2005 my ‘super lawyer’ Neville Johnson called me at home to say that a ‘huge scandal’ had been uncovered at the WGA.
He told me with umbrage that the Writers Guild of America had been diverting millions of writer’s foreign taxes to the major studios for decades, and the facts had been concealed from the members; worse, they were taking the funds meant for non-union writers and directors and actors as well.
Neville Johnson had just won a14.75 million dollar court judgment on my behalf for a soybean coffee company I started with River Phoenix. It made the LA Law Journal front page.
Also I had a personal knowledge of fraud at the WGA based on my case with John Wells and Aaron Sorkin over THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT and THE WEST WING credit phony arbitration. I already knew the guild had problems with blatant lies hidden behind legal protections meant for ‘real’ labor unions; at the WGA more than a few ‘labor’ producer-writers have a net worth in the hundreds of millions. Not your average AFL-CIO salaried blokes.
In 2005 Neville told me on the phone that I would be one of at least 1,000 screenwriters involved in a class action to get the money due the writers, both union and non-union. By 2010 the WGA lawyer upped that number to over 200,000 involved in 105,000 “titles” the WGA oversaw.
I agreed it was preposterous and unbelievable the Writers Guild was taking money meant for non-union writers; non-union and freelance is what most American writers are.
The very next day in the NY TIMES Johnson’s law firm announced the class action “Richert Vs WGA” with me named as the lead plaintiff.
I remain today the only writer plaintiff named in a lawsuit affecting tens of thousands world wide. My lawyer had lied to me.
There were no other writers’ names in the original complaint, and no other writers or directors have joined this class action in all these years. Early on, after I began fighting the coverup-settlement, Neville added the names of the heirs of two dead screenwriters to the complaint.
That first week I figured out I was in some kind of setup I couldn’t understand but anyway seemed very suspicious. I wrote Mr. Johnson and demanded he take my name off the lawsuit.
But then I changed my mind after a visit from a famous screenwriter who was also briefly President of the WGA.
A week or so after the class action was announced in the NY TIMES, the LA TIMES and VARIETY, Eric Hughes (AGAINST ALL ODDS) stopped by our apartment in Santa Monica with a stack of documents, including a $500 check made out to Charles Bukowski for his film, which had never been delivered or cashed – and now of course the poet was dead.
Hughes himself, who has written accurately and extensively about all this, is now also dead. I am obviously not dead so I can write this, but the WGA is patient.
Hughes had copies of contracts made between the WGA and the studios without any kind of writer knowledge or oversight, contracts never agreed to by screenwriters or directors, certainly not non-union screenwriters, which basically gave the ‘majors’ — Sony, MGM, Disney, Fox, Universal, Warners et.al. — 92% of all our money for years, amounting to millions and millions never got to either members or non-members.
After I send my instant letter of resignation Neville Johnson wrote the Judge that his firm would continue the lawsuit, representing the writers themselves. Eric Hughes said the lawsuit was ‘fetid’ and I should stay out of it. I did the opposite. Thinking about Bukowski — and my own films — I realized that there would never be any kind of justice if I quit. Come what may, I decided Bill Richert would stay in this lawsuit. This led to 14 years of labor for somebody who likes to pretend life should be a holiday.
To this very day those contracts negotiated by the Guild’s Carl Gottlieb have never been seen in court. (Carl is a collaborator of Rob Reiner who was part of the “pre-arbitration panel” at the WGA in 1995 that gave Aaron Sorkin his unshared credit on THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT and THE WEST WING. Today Carl is listed among a number of my FB friends. Maybe he’ll turn state evidence.)
Before being paid off in a six-figure settlement by the guild, the WGA residuals expert Teri Mial talked about shredding thousands of members’ and non-members’ checks adding up to millions of dollars.
But this damning evidence never got noticed or written about except by me, and the WGA said I was a malcontent angry about the Sorkin case. Any reporter saying anything publicly was contacted by WGA lawyers.
During these years of hearings and all the hundreds of letters/filings I wrote, I could not forget that after the 2007 WGA strike there were lots writers who might have survived a lot better and even continued writing if they got the full amounts of the money owed to them, me included. But until today with the networks of social media, there was no way to sound the alarm. I felt lots of times like the character in BODY SNATCHERS but getting the word out is even harder when it involves screenplays and taxes, which many people think are equally difficult to begin with.
The WGA sold out its devoted members, roped in unaware freelance writers, and, to my way of thinking, made deals with their greedy devils within.
— As for a billion or more in not identified foreign levies: during a most lucrative decades like the 80’s and 90’s, when the sales were fresh and the profits where high, the studios took the MGM Lion’s share of money for writer’s and divided the loot among themselves. That money is still not accounted for so the forgivers don't know who or what to forgive.
I figure those thousands of writers who never heard of this before may want to know what happened here, and I will as I am able continue sharing my experience and information. Like many of my contemporaries, my limited time is stretched to the limits, which is why I'm using this opportunity to tell as much as I can.
Part of the delays and gaps in my protests these 14 years were due to various near-deadly sickness (like cancer, bummer) — which has finally been subdued this year but was a major factor for lengths of precious time, when a one-person team is unable to play; or plea, the game suffers.
QUICK-ISH HISTORY OF COMPLEX CASE; THE PLAINTIFF NEVER CLAIMED TO UNDERSTAND ALL OF IT, BUT MOST OF IT
Back in 2007 or so Neville was ready to settle the very day the court ‘certified’ the class action; I refused to accept his terms for the class he’d asked me to represent, and rigorously held to my role as Lead Plaintiff during what became several years of questions and court hearings before I finally agreed to sign off on the proposed settlement in 2010.
I spent weeks immersed in Google searches on subjects I totally avoided during my years in school. I got dizzy headaches but took notes.
Because of my furious but lawful court pleas I sent to the Judges, I was able to persuade 3 LA Superior Court judges to hold hearings for the record; Off the record Neville told the lawyer Kaplan that I was his worst nightmare. Visa versa.
I finally did sign the settlement, but only after 3 days of meetings with Johnson’s partner Paul Kiesel where the famed expert lawyer told me that under class action laws, as Lead Plaintiff my film THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK INDIE was to be used as the template for both union and non-union members of the WGA/DGA/SAG ‘guilds’ and that the settlement would provide complete transparency accounting within 90 days.
To verify the settlement was fair and had “teeth” Paul Kieisel went over the agreement line by line in his Beverly Hills office during 3 separate days of meetings. In detail he explained the meaning of the legal language to me in front of my wife and Jonathan Lawton (PRETTY WOMAN) who was also acting as witness. (Later on when I demanded that Neville Johnson be fired and demanded also that new lawyers be engaged, Johnathan hid out in a Glendale Motel as he was afraid the guild was following him.)
But after the settlements were signed there was no accounting of THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK as template for all foreign levies due to US artists – certainly there was nothing of the transparency of the kind that was artfully promised me as the Named Plaintiff to induce me to sign the settlement; the broken promises meant that I, along with the other 200,000-plus writers/directors/actors from 105 titles in the class I lawfully represented, was now bound by a settlement that was not only fraudulent at its inception, but was now basically institutionalized by the courts. No doubt the number of those touched by the settlement has grown these past years.
(Judge West retired from the bench before finishing the case and joined the consulting firm of Joel Grossman, who was the expert witness for the WGA. He also told the lawyers that my protests led to 'uncharted territory.')
The fraud in WGA/SAG/DGA foreign levies meant for thousands has continued unabated since the settlement was signed. No non-union writers or directors have ever gotten a fair notification that their rights were under assault and most of their money was going to studios without their knowledge or permission. WGA members were never fairly told the substance of the case; never really able to defend themselves. Freelancers had no idea whatsoever.
In order to discredit me, both David Young and Dan Petrie wrote letters to the 20,000 union-related members about how the Richert lawsuit was bogus, and that it was only settled to somehow uphold and protect the rights of writers etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, I was blacklisted.
Union screenwriters are actually scared of David Young and union retribution. I wrote an essay for VARIETY against the 2007 strike and Peter Bart got lots of angry calls and did not publish my follow-up he’d asked for.
My fight and role in dealing with the unions and studios in court has not endeared me to anyone.
Somehow, even with my somewhat reclusive character, I have become an active repository of the arcane but ancient rights of authorship and reward.
It is still infuriating to somebody like me who spent hard years putting a movie together to watch WGA insiders plunder my work and the work of others; all absolved and then perpetuated in a ‘settlement’ underhandedly crafted by lawyers who had only recently represented those same studios connected to the lawsuit, but who came to advise both the WGA and our own class lawyers – men like Robert Hadl.
Robert Hadl is a former studio attorney/executive who also advises both Neville Johnson and the WGA, and he was the man who informed Neville Johnson of the ‘scandal’ at the WGA foreign levy ‘scheme’ – a scam which Carl Gottlieb also claims credit for – and almost laughably, Hadl also advised the WGA during the years of class action litigation.
At the time Carl Gottlieb enacted his self-described ‘scheme’ at the WGAw regarding foreign levies the Major Studios were actually taking 100% of Americans’ foreign levies, claiming that under copyright ownership they were the ‘owner-authors’ and therefore entitled to writer’s money — actors and directors, too. This was an obvious outrage, but WGA union or non union members were informed of this.
Although he boasted about his success, which was not told to the membership until years afterward, Gottlieb only managed to secure 8% of the writers money. The Richert 2010 class action cut the studio’s share to 50% — even so, that is just 42% less crummy.
Neville has listed Hadl as his advisor, and I photographed Hadl with the WGA’s ‘outside’ counsel Tony Segall when Hadl appeared to be lecturing Segall after a hearing.
A famous class action lawyer told me it was ridiculous that Neville only got 1.5 million for a case that the Hollywood Reporter said made writers 100 million while the LA Law Journal said 60 million – in any event a class action lawyer is entitled to 1/3 of recovery or 30 million at the very least.
It was WGA expert insider-crusader Eric Hughes who first described how the case was a union/studio ‘catch and kill’ with a payoff to the class lawyers to protect the major studios and unions from future lawsuits and save billions in future judgments while keeping all the past revenue.
I was set up as a class action bag man for American screenwriters stolen royalties in a ‘complex law’ situation where I am called a liar and a union buster by the defendants instead of a man playing his court appointed role. But they picked the wrong guy. Now I am doing what I have to do; writers are the original whistleblowers. I’ve managed to retain much of my anger even among the roses we grow in Portland.
After the settlement I suddenly started getting intermittent foreign royalty checks with no background information on them; I even got checks from LAW AND DISORDER which I co-wrote and produced in 1973 or so – and also THE HAPPY HOOKER, but missing were other films like WINTER KILLS and JIMMY REARDON and SUCCESS.
In short the settlement was never enforced. The class lawyers had quit. There was still no real accounting and the union controlled the accountants anyhow – firms like KPMG and others worked with the WGA for years.
Only after the settlement did I get my first check for THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK INDIE. Except for SAG, this was a non-union picture. It was also a template: evidence that the WGA was collecting for tens of thousands of nonunion films they would not admit to or disclose to the independent writers and directors until the settlement was signed and protected them.
While I did get a few of the DGA checks, these should have matched and been concurrent with the WGA checks, but they were not.
In 2012 Neville Johnson went to court to ask for more money to confront what he told the judge was ‘fraud’ in SAG among other things. I wrote a long strenuous objection to Neville’s demands, saying he’d only done one or two depositions regarding the WGA – and no depositions whatsoever before he settled with DGA/SAG.
Judge Wiley basically agreed with me;) that Neville owed his clients continuing representation; (that rather incredible 2012 court transcript is attached.) Neville said without an additional payment he would have to leave the case because his small law firm couldn’t continue without more money.
After reading my brief opposing Neville Johnson/Paul Kiesel, instead of threatening to have me thrown out of court as he did in my first hearing with him, the Judge allowed me to speak for almost 5 minutes in the 2012 hearing.
However, tho the subject had recently been page one, this time Dave McNary at Variety didn’t record anything I said at this hearing; and nobody in the press even bothered to attend our last hearing in 2014 where I told the Judge that I – and my class – had been swindled by the union and our own lawyers. And we were not alone; this class action touches virtually everyone who’s sold a film in Europe or South America or dozens of other countries with writer unions.
Importantly, the Australian Writers Guild did send a lawyer to that hearing, talking about how Peter Jackson and 64 other Aussie writers were owed a fortune. But they were sent away as I was, to get another lawyer. Never heard from them again.
The Director of the Australian Guild once called me from Sydney and told me that Carl Gottlieb had called her very sleazy names. She told me that she and others were threatened by the LA WGA, she said. When I asked her to repeat this out loud, I stopped hearing from her.
It is attention-grabbing if not nauseating every time I think that while certain distributors stole 100% of the money due to me for a single film, the WGA and Columbia, Warners, Disney, Fox, Universal etc. took 92% of my foreign levies for several movies for decades – and the ‘majors’ have continued to take 50% of all writers’ money since the settlement, money intended solely and exclusively for writers and directors and actors according to European laws.
Once again: The WGA and Major Studios were found in court to be rightfully guilty of swindling tens of thousands of writers for dozens of years. Yet there were almost zero depositions: none whatsoever at the DGA or SAG.
These powerhouse “Guilds” were not prosecuted and were not required to produce the missing money. Instead, their organized union-studio theft was legalized by a not-enforced settlement in a courtroom fraud based on false presentations or erroneous evidence given in court by members of the California Bar.
This class action should be returned to the Federal courts where it began, but in a RICO venue.
EARLIER
The RICHERT VS WGA case was first presented to Federal Judge Margaret M. Morrow but moved to civil courts based on the false WGA protestation that I was a “member in arrears” at the WGA– a nonexistent member category purposefully invented to keep me under WGA control. In fact my lawyers and the WGA all knew that I almost famously quit the guild over the Richert/Sorkin AMERICAN PRESIDENT “arbitration” and I quit paying dues in 1995. All parties knew this, except the Judge. So the whole case was moved to the LA Superior court because the lawyers lied to the judge. I know it sounds absurd; we have clear evidence the court was lied to.
It is preposterous on its face: The WGA and the Major studios had nothing to do with my indie movies or your movies, or the films of thousands of others, and yet they are continuing this organized crime against American screenwriters et.al – maybe today! – without involvement or investment in making or writing or directing them — these corporate entities are collecting more money than I have made from most of my movies.
Who knows how many writers and directors might have been able to survive in their chosen art form and paid their rent if they’d gotten the thousands that was withheld from them?
I don’t know if you’ve gotten WGA foreign levy money with corresponding DGA checks for any of your films – since they are paid out together but I assure you that if you did get foreign levy checks, you didn’t get what was due you.
There is no indication anywhere in this entire litigation that the major studios were ever getting a cut from the WGAw’s money for writers.
So here is my idea, and where it might be of interest to you economically help to represent my class of 105,000 titles + 200,000 + writers and directors and actors (including writer-lawyers.)
It has now been more than 10 years since the settlement was signed into continuing fraud.
We can know there was fraud because Neville Johnson told 2 judges there was fraud, and the Lead Plaintiff told 4 judges there was fraud – while during all these years as Lead Plaintiff I was thwarted or blocked in my role as lead plaintiff, while I was personally vilified and blacklisted by the WGA -- .
During this entire saga I kept blowing my whistle like a factory lunch horn, and even if the artists didn’t hear, the whistles are all documented.
Except at the first filing in federal court, this billion-dollar swindle has been designated a civil and not a racketeering matter.
But 10 years of fraudulent concealment by union leadership against their membership is a crime under RICO, I believe, since RICO was created partly because of union misfeasance (David Young was a teamster organizer before being beatified into the WGA as its highest-ever paid Director. How a trucker union enforcer came to represent the lineage of James Agee et.al. should be explained by John Wells).
Thus my conceivable notion: I want to sue these fraudsters in a federal court under federal labor corruption and whistleblower laws. Ten years of a pattern of fraud and racketeering have passed.
In the class action RICHERT VS WGA/DGA/SAG both the plaintiff and defense paid various experts to help conceal underlying wrongdoing. It is preposterous that in all these proceedings, no executive from the wGA was ever called to witness, and no mention was ever made about the actual studios who took 92% of foreign royalties intended for American artists.
It’s time the WGA leaders themselves were called to the stand on this. Their lawyers were not called under oath to tell the whole truth, or any portion of it.
Whistleblowers are rewarded and protected these days. And it’s about time somebody put some kind of Brando up against David Young’s thugs. (You’ll excuse the Brando comparison, but you remember On The Waterfront was also about union thugs. I have nothing against most unions, which are necessary in righteous fights against greed. However, in this instance, I have been, in all possible ways, a whistleblower against union and studio racketeering.)
I MAY NOT HAVE THE NUMBERS RIGHT, BUT Since the sums involved here over several decades of deceit and money going to the studios without writers knowing amounted to an estimated 2.6 billion in almost 12 years ago. Even then, the number was adjusted by the felons.
FROM LAW RESEARCH: “In addition to criminal prosecutions, RICO also permits civil suits by private citizens (plaintiffs) who have suffered financial harm, whether harm to their business or damage to their property, because of racketeering. Racketeering is a genre of organized crime in which the perpetrators set up a coercive, fraudulent, or otherwise illegal scheme (a racket) to repeatedly collect money or other profit. ...
“The racket exists as both the problem and its solution, and it is used as a method of extortion.The RICO civil provisions contain five basic elements: injury, person, enterprise, pattern of racketeering activity, and interstate or foreign commerce.
“The defense bar’s use of RICO also threatens a principle at the core of our justice system: the right to petition the courts for redress the First Circuit has explained, “Civil RICO is an unusually potent weapon—the litigation equivalent of a thermonuclear device. The very pendency of a RICO suit can be stigmatizing and its consummation can be costly.”
Triple damages and legal fees is a consideration that might energize help in this situation. Forensic auditors can also be engaged.
If you help me and our class of roughly 200,000 writers plus actors and directors behind the 105,000 titles or more the WGA is getting money for, and help US writers directors and actors file a whistleblower RICO charge, and then separately represent the entity of our class action in a demand for enforcement of the current settlement against the union and the studios, you might profit mightily from your effort and recovery. Plus you get attorney's fees 3X.
Maybe thinking a simple paragraph as an entry to a rousing RICO case against the WGA and Neville Johnson/Paul Kiesel sounds naive, but the essential charge of a continuing criminal/fraudulent enterprise via Federal RICO statutes can fit into a small paragraph on a government form. And among my hundreds of angry pages, I think we might find dozens of small paragraphs already written to help fill in the blank if required.
Another historical aspect of this is that in no law journal have I been able to find any kind of class action where the Lead Plaintiff was forced to fight both his lawyers and the defendants as being mutually corrupt. We might find a curious judge. In one phone call Neville raised my eyebrow when he asked if I thought he was colluding with Tony Segall at the WGA.
A lawsuit demanding justice for a writer-director-whistleblower against the major Hollywood unions and studios – in cahoots – would draw attention to these crooks who took from thousands of unaware writers and directors and actors.
It might finally reimburse those tens of thousands of freelancers who never joined any kind of union or ever agreed to relinquish their once and future rights included in those 105,000 titles (a number WGA lawyer Tony Segall claimed back in 2012.)
I might add without complaining that I have only recently begun a return to health. I am nearing 79. During these courtroom years I was hospitalized for internal bleeding and later for prostate cancer. Unfortunately this led to many years of being unable to function fully under stress. But now I am finally back in shape enough to make further last efforts in a longstanding battle against people who steal from the defenseless. And who can defend himself/herself against something one doesn’t know exists – like theft of foreign levies.
It may even be possible to trace some of these foreign levies back to the distributors and see what grosses these films made, and who might have been selling them illegally in Europe and elsewhere. Maybe this exposure is the greater fear of the studios.
I realize this kind of case is not your specialty (since it is nobody’s specialty and hasn’t been tried in court to my knowledge) but the crime is organized (for sure) and continuing, and if the actual facts become known there could be tens of thousands of joiners to a new lawsuit.
Much of the reporting on this case hitherto originated at the Hollywood Reporter with Jonathan Handel, a lawyer journalist who only recently admitted he was a lawyer for SAG. For years he was also a misinformant and stalwart for corruption in his REPORTER.
Under the usurpation of the possibility of a fair union representing writers’ rights, the backroom dealings of producer John Wells, treasurer Carl Gottlieb and former teamster David Young the WGA ignored its duty to original writers in favor of transactional greed, awarding credit to those insiders who could wrangle it, “credit” being the term for owned intellectual property.
The WGA enforces the copyright of any writer who signs a union agreement; they protect the studios as much as their writers. “Credit” identifies intellectual property. The executives in LA ought to study the international laws protecting creators of IP and the dire penalties for stealing it when caught.
I have personally discovered how US courts will not interfere in credits “assigned” by the WGA; judges say they are not literary critics or assayers. Thus the final ownership of your work is decided by the union. This privilege leads to plunder.
The WGA big fish thrive in the 100 days adding up to a year during a strike, but the downriver spawning is dried up. The WGA brags that it has created “500 writer-producers” but that only means that 500 writers are now more controlled than every by their union, acting as agent and tax collector and credit arbiter collector of dues.
Now also producers, some WGA screenwriters in NY were asked to turn in their hours while overseeing themselves.
This is the land of Syd Field, not Dalton Trumbo; James Agee, not Carl Gottlieb.
Former President Patrick Verrone said one of the reasons for the 2007 strike was that he wanted Guild writers to be producers and entrepreneurs.
The WGA has now become the best maker of reality shows, especially now that they are insisting that reality is written too. Look how THE APPRENTICE turned out.
The powers the WGA has given itself under their backroom conservatorship are no less grabby than the ones Britney’s father had when Britney Spears was harming herself.
Verrone and Young made studios the enemy, even though most of the WGA leadership have lucrative producing deals with studios, and these owner-producer-writers are the only ones who could possibly benefit from the debilitating union strikes for more “shares” of a pie they mostly already own.
David Young has presided over the loss of hundreds of otherwise loyal agents to writers, many of whom really needed their agents. In my years at WMA and ICM I observed that “packaging” scripts with major stars, as some agents were able to do, upped the money and helped get the film made. Apparently the WGA will now do that job themselves. I don’t know how many stars will be glad to get scripts from the WGA.
Since the 2007 WGA strike — which diverted attention from the foreign levy case in court — thousands of freelance writers have been displaced one way or another by the “creative disruption” the WGA called a “list of demands.”
“Spec script” deals are so infrequent that one of them got a front page in the LA Times a few years ago. Haven’t heard much about them since.
Your thoughts about this will be appreciated.
Thanks!
All best,
Cheers
Bill Richert
PS. You might note that one of Neville's law partners showed up in the 2014 transcript to say I was the only writer objecting to the settlement -- but contradicting him strongly was a lawyer for the Australian Writer's Guild representing 64 Aussie writers including Peter Jackson who went to court in support of my motions.
PAGE 8 FROM HON.JUDGE WILEY HEARING AUGUST 22, 2012 BC339972
MR. JOHNSON: Okay. Then I'm going to be making
a motion that this court appoint counsel to come in and represent the class henceforth, which will not be me, but needs to advise you of problems and issues as they arise, because the situation that exists now is that probably a hundred million dollars a year comes into these two unions, the unions' attitude is we want to give no information
to the public, let alone our constituents here, our actual union members, as well. And that's why the court has
been supervising in the federal case the ASCAP situation
for some 60 years for issues relating to that, as well.
THE COURT: I'm happy to give you a hearing date for that motion.
MR. JOHNSON: Okay. Give it to me now, please, and we'll set a time. THE COURT: What would you like?
MR. JOHNSON: I don't know. 60 days?
Mr. Johnson never requested any such hearing; the next court hearing was called at my request and took place in 2014.
FOLLOWING WAS SENT IN 2009 JUST BEFORE I AGREED TO SIGN THE SETTLEMENT
To: DK HOLM
HOW THE HOLLYWOOD SISTER UNIONS DGA, SAG AND WGA ORGANIZED NEW MEDIA AND BROUGHT THE INTERNET INTO LINE WITH THEIR OBJECTIVES TO LOCK ALL AMERICAN SCREENWRITERS INTO THEIR JURISDICTION
A VIEW FROM THE FUTURE
THE PSYCHE SNATCHERS
If you’re a writer who’s ever sold anything and you got any of your work on a digital medium, chances are the WGA’s got you -- and has had you – or your money, for the past 20 years. (Ditto if you’re an author, director or actor.)
True, the Writers Guild of America shares most of that money with the major US studios, a generous act you probably never agreed to, or even heard of.
Virtually all American writers and authors of screenplays books and poems made into film or television or sold as VHS or DVDs have amassed royalties in their names for decades, unbeknownst to them.
Since the 1980’s films and television shows and other works based on American books and poems have been taxed throughout Europe by laws enacted to make sure the underlying artist of successful works got a piece of the action, no matter how little.
Called “foreign levies,” the WGA and DGA and SAG have been collecting these funds for years – millions and millions for writers who have nothing to do with unions -- in cahoots with the major US studios they publicly call “the enemy” – but the WGA and DGA never really admitted or got close to an accounting until they were taken into court 3 years ago by William Richert in Richert VS WGA.
The thrust of the 2006 lawsuit for Fraud at the WGA was that for at least 18 years the WGA has been collecting tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign deposits for non-union as well as union writers but never declaring the money, keeping it instead and refusing to say where it was kept, or even by whom it was kept , behind the union
walls of silence.
The WGA paid hundreds of thousands of member and insurance dollars to whistle blowers to accused high officials of misdeeds.
The WGA will pay millions to its outside lawyers and the plaintiff’s lawyers to prevent further disclosures, using the settlement to stop any investigation.
But none of this effort to conceal by a corrupt union seemed to matter to the lawyers representing William Richert, who protested in letter after letter about the way the attorneys were representing Subclass 3.
Subclass 3 is that group of writers – all current 12,500 WGA members and those unnamed thousands of non-union screenwriters, novelists, biographers, political writers, poets and others for whom the WGA has been holding and collecting money.
The future will reveal these misdeeds.
DESK OF WILLIAM RICHERT
LEAD PLAINTIFF
“IN PRO PER”
WILLIAM RICHERT V. WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST, INC. et. al.
[email protected]
WILLIAM RICHERT DISMISSES LAWYERS NEVILLE JOHNSON AND PAUL KIESEL FROM WRITERS’ CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT
- FROM COURT TRANSCRIPT JUDGE WILEY JR. LA SUPERIOR COURT HEARING MAY 16, 2012:
THE COURT: “I'm directing the court reporter to repeat my remarks. It's not common in CCW that we actually have an issue of courtroom control. It's supposed to be the palace of reason and -- .”
MR. RICHERT: “ -- Well, in this case, it could be the dungeon of a certain kind of insanity, Your Honor, and it's very deeply within the vaults of these three unions…”
- FROM COURT TRANSCRIPT, JUDGE WILEY JR. HEARING AUGUST 22, 2012:
NEVILLE JOHNSON: “There’s no lawyer representing the constituency, the class action...”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA
May 10, 2014
LA attorneys Neville Johnson and Paul Kiesel have been dismissed from the class-action lawsuit WILLIAM RICHERT V. THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA pending court approval of substitution of attorney in a class action, according to lead plaintiff William Richert.
Mr. Richert has been in LA Superior Court as the class representative for the writers of 105,000 film/video titles in his class along with others throughout the world who are unaware they are represented in the settlement, with litigation starting in September, 2005.
“In firing Neville Johnson and Paul Kiesel” I am following congressional mandate for the duties and obligations of the Lead Plaintiff in a class action,” says Mr. Richert.
“I’m taking action after almost two years of the conspicuously absent settlement enforcement by Messrs. Johnson and Kiesel, along with the blatant contempt the WGA has shown for the settlement for the writers class, and the negligent existence of the foreign levy agreements for SAG and the DGA non-union directors.
Placing the announcement on his Facebook page for the writers, actors and directors governed by the class actions, which allow the WGAw to function as a collection society, Mr. Richert asks the artists and journalists following the story to examine and check out the U.S. Court of Appeals decisions about class actions, and the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, so they can become aware of the many rights they have.
Mr. Richert states that it is extremely difficult to undo a negotiated class action lawsuit involving deep-pocket unions or corporations – look at the asbestos class action for years of disputes – but a settlement can be vigorously enforced to the benefit of the class.
“For enforcement we need a lawyer to interpret the clauses to the court, since judges are not cops or investigators. They can only work with what they are given, basically, and they have to trust the lawyers. Of course, 50% of the time they might be lied to. Very rarely are all the lawyers lying 100% of the time, as appears to have happened in these cases.”
Saying he’s just discovered his “settlement class” may include Guilds across the European Union and Australia, Mr. Richert continues:
“Only last week I looked at the WGAw settlement again and saw that the tiny phrase ‘U.S.’ had been removed from the earlier class definition of screenwriters and authors who are purported to be controlled by my lawsuit. This was brought to my attention by a leader in another country’s writers guild.
“That change means my class definition now includes ‘all writers, including members of the WGAw and most importantly, non-members of the WGAw.
“‘Non members of the WGAw’ would mean most of the planet. I have been told that the WGAw is also collecting royalties for the European Union and the Australian Writers Guild, which I didn’t know, and the WGAw didn’t admit. I hadn’t looked at this phrase in a long time, and never noticed that the ‘U.S.’ was missing.
“I looked at the Amended settlement once again because an official of a Writer’s Guild in another country told me that the WGAw settlement was being used to block royalties in Guilds across the European Union – Germany, France, Italy and especially Spain. An international commission of Writers Guilds is preparing to contest the settlement as a whole.
“I object to this ongoing outrageous conduct by the WGAw Officers and Board of Directors under the settlement’s use of my name and class.
“Carl Gottlieb, Secretary-Treasurer, recently sent me a check for $1,300 in foreign royalties for a movie that the WGAw had no contract for, and for which the original amount was upwards of $12,000 before the WGAw split with the studios.
“Amounts owed to me alone, and I’m a slim earner in the Hollywood system, could be in the hundreds of thousands, with only a fraction accounted for.
“Not only is the RICHERT VS WGAw settlement being used against writers throughout the world, but the SAG settlement negotiated by Messrs. Johnson & Kiesel was the core basis of dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Sunny Wise in the Federal court on behalf of Eric Hughes, Ed Asner, Clancy Brown, Dennis Hayden and others, including me.
“The benefits to the classes as defined and created by these 3 lawsuits are grossly derogatory to the classes, are the opposite of fair and reasonable, and the economic, performance and copyrights that the actors, writers and directors possessed under law before the settlements were enacted have been lost to all.
“The settlement themselves are instruments of fraud.
“The union management and Boards of Directors continue to pay gargantuan fees from the members’ funds to lawyers to protect them and their profiteering secret conniving methods,” Mr. Richert says.
THE LAWYER THREATENS THE CLASSES HE REPRESENTS, THEN QUITS
“Something really, really, really bad,” will happen to his clients if he were not paid more money, Neville Johnson told the court of Judge Wiley Jr., with actors Tom Bower and Dennis Hayden in the Gallery.
“The lawyers were deficient,” Mr. Johnson boldly added, knowing he was referring to himself and Mr. Kiesel. Judge Wiley Jr. agreed.
Deficiency is the opposite of what these class action lawsuits are meant to achieve, Mr. Richert asserts, and under law, class action clients are not supposed to suffer a net loss.
The lawyers for the actors – Dan Schecter, Duncan Crabtree Ireland, Bob Bush – and their respective law firms and consultants like EEG – actually paid themselves legal fees and bonuses totaling way more than the $8 million they claim was paid to the actors, without showing any actual accounting, which remains under court seal due to inaction of Neville Johnson, according to Mr. Richert.
Under the direction of David White for SAG and David Young and Carl Gottlieb for the WGAw, with Neville Johnson and Paul Kiesel negligent for all three “sister” guild lawsuits, and them all guided by Robert Hadl for himself and the studios, with compliance from Joe Roth at the DGA; the rights of artists world wide have been reduced to a fraction of true value, and attempts to correct the injustice have been blocked in the courts and ignored in the press.
“At one point I asked to be removed from the case and demanded that my name be taken off. After a meeting in the hallway with Mr. Johnson, I went back into the courtroom and heard Judge West accept my offer. Then on the way out Mr. Johnson leaned over and loudly asked our opponent, Ms. Emma Leheny for the WGAw, if she could supply a new writer as plaintiff. When she said, “Yes, I think I can,” while the Judge pretended to be looking through schedules, I knew I would not be able to withdraw and leave that case to the lawyers and the union writers at he WGAw. So I went back into court and my role, and have stayed ever since.”
Mr. Richert noted that one Executive Director of a foreign guild, who wishes to remain anonymous because of fear of WGAw retaliation, said that a single accounting of interest-only from a tiny group of writers whose royalties were taken by the WGAw amounts to $200,000 – again, that is interest alone.
The amounts due American non-union writers are unknown, but could add up to $500 million or more, and that does not include what is due European writers.
There is no evidence that any of the classes were “adequately represented” in the lawsuit, the key to legitimacy of a class action according to U.C.L.A. professor William B. Rubenstein.
“Our challenge to the medusa heads of the sister-unions in Hollywood, and their major studio overlord partners, is just beginning now that the time limit has passed for compliance at the WGA. I am in discussions with one of the greatest class action lawyers in the known Universe, as they say in Hollywood.
“Once we get approval from Judge Wiley that hiring a real lawyer to represent the class is court approved, we can contract and announce our new class action lawyer.
“Neville Johnson’s promise that something ‘really really really’ bad” will happen to all of us clients if Judge Wiley did not pay him additional fees to represent the classes, could become a rallying cry for film artists across the world – against clandestine union activities against folks the union has no business representing under any circumstances. Ultimately, these are copyright issues and performance right issues thwarted by settlements the unions misrepresented to their members .
“What Mr. Johnson hasn’t reckoned with are the non union not-for-hire writers like me who don’t care a fig about their holy crony vows.”
WGA COLLECTION SOCIETY NOT A LEGAL ENTERPRISE IN A PUBLIC CORPORATION
According to Mr. Richert: In true Verroneian WGA-double-speak, after 60 years the union managed to victoriously upend the dreaded deadly anti-human anti-writer “Hollywood Blacklist,” of the 1950s, a crime against freedoms of all kinds, including freedom of speech engineered by crusading anti-Red evangalesists supported by the Writer’s Guild of America and the Hollywood Reporter, among other lynchers of freedom of speech and writing.
“Some say that the WGA 2007 marching crusade ‘Pencils Down’ was a rewrite of that era, stopping writers from telling the truth by labeling them traitors.
“However, ‘Pencils Up!!’ is the motto of the writers I grew up with, and emulated.
“Like other Verroneian reversals of truth and fact, in 2005 the WGA co-authored the creation of a brand new incarnation of THE BLACK LIST, reinvented as an index of the best screenplays in Hollywood. Now when anybody says ‘Black List,’ it means the opposite of what it once did, as they re-created my lawsuit for fraud as ‘the highly successful foreign levy program.’”
[check WGA website wga.org. WGA ex-president and Board Member Patric Verrone is now running for public office from Pacific Palisades, where his union once distributed threatening leaflets about a cable television executive. Mr. Verrone is running on “I won the strike” platform, which continues his revisionist campaigns, as the strike was a net loss to writers in LA of up to 75% and the jobs are still moving away from LA.]
Look further on wga.org at the WGAw “Audit” to see the single-page accounting for foreign levies – now almost $180 million -- what is actually a number like $1.4 Billion for an unknown number of writers – unknown, and still unaccounted for.
“Using the same obfuscation-grammar zero-sum response legal-sleaze techniques to deceive, David Young and Daniel Pietrie Jr. both wrote devoted, passionate letters to the entire 2009 WGA membership – which basically means all of the movers in Hollywood, producers writers and directors – denouncing the allegations I made before the settlement without mentioning them, using in the letters a kind of old-style organizer malevolence, all directed at the named plaintiff, William Richert.
“These letters, approved by Counsel and the Board of Directors, were only propaganda for the settlement the writers were meant to sign, relinquishing their copyrights 92 percent to the major studios; like saying: this is good for you, fellows/ladies! That bad man Billy Richert was saying mean things about us Hollywood writers, and he should be scorned.
“Since there are so many innocents involved here, and the futures of independent writers, directors, actors and filmmakers are at stake, this long festering case grants unions and studios vast impact across all media, from the theatrical screens to the home screens connecting across the internet, stretching far into the future from deep into the past” says Mr. Richert.
“I only recently got a check for my movie LAW AND DISORDER, non union, made in the early 1970s.
“In addition to absconding with copyrights and royalties for writers worldwide, the personal slurs against me made publicly to the WGAw members by Patric Verrone, Daniel Petrie Jr. and Carl Gottlieb and David Young will be answered duly in time and with the proper lawful response. A union attacking a nonmember (or members) for performing public-interest whistle-blower functions is an actionable Federal offense.
“Corruption didn’t start in Hollywood, it only seems to wind up here,” says Mr. Richert, “like in the proverb: ‘When Jesus is Near, can the Devil be far behind?’”
INFORMATION AND CONTACT
RICHERT VS WGAW
[email protected]
FURTHER CONTACTS TBA
LEAD PLAINTIFF
“IN PRO PER”
WILLIAM RICHERT V. WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST, INC. et. al.
[email protected]
WILLIAM RICHERT DISMISSES LAWYERS NEVILLE JOHNSON AND PAUL KIESEL FROM WRITERS’ CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT
- FROM COURT TRANSCRIPT JUDGE WILEY JR. LA SUPERIOR COURT HEARING MAY 16, 2012:
THE COURT: “I'm directing the court reporter to repeat my remarks. It's not common in CCW that we actually have an issue of courtroom control. It's supposed to be the palace of reason and -- .”
MR. RICHERT: “ -- Well, in this case, it could be the dungeon of a certain kind of insanity, Your Honor, and it's very deeply within the vaults of these three unions…”
- FROM COURT TRANSCRIPT, JUDGE WILEY JR. HEARING AUGUST 22, 2012:
NEVILLE JOHNSON: “There’s no lawyer representing the constituency, the class action...”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA
May 10, 2014
LA attorneys Neville Johnson and Paul Kiesel have been dismissed from the class-action lawsuit WILLIAM RICHERT V. THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA pending court approval of substitution of attorney in a class action, according to lead plaintiff William Richert.
Mr. Richert has been in LA Superior Court as the class representative for the writers of 105,000 film/video titles in his class along with others throughout the world who are unaware they are represented in the settlement, with litigation starting in September, 2005.
“In firing Neville Johnson and Paul Kiesel” I am following congressional mandate for the duties and obligations of the Lead Plaintiff in a class action,” says Mr. Richert.
“I’m taking action after almost two years of the conspicuously absent settlement enforcement by Messrs. Johnson and Kiesel, along with the blatant contempt the WGA has shown for the settlement for the writers class, and the negligent existence of the foreign levy agreements for SAG and the DGA non-union directors.
Placing the announcement on his Facebook page for the writers, actors and directors governed by the class actions, which allow the WGAw to function as a collection society, Mr. Richert asks the artists and journalists following the story to examine and check out the U.S. Court of Appeals decisions about class actions, and the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, so they can become aware of the many rights they have.
Mr. Richert states that it is extremely difficult to undo a negotiated class action lawsuit involving deep-pocket unions or corporations – look at the asbestos class action for years of disputes – but a settlement can be vigorously enforced to the benefit of the class.
“For enforcement we need a lawyer to interpret the clauses to the court, since judges are not cops or investigators. They can only work with what they are given, basically, and they have to trust the lawyers. Of course, 50% of the time they might be lied to. Very rarely are all the lawyers lying 100% of the time, as appears to have happened in these cases.”
Saying he’s just discovered his “settlement class” may include Guilds across the European Union and Australia, Mr. Richert continues:
“Only last week I looked at the WGAw settlement again and saw that the tiny phrase ‘U.S.’ had been removed from the earlier class definition of screenwriters and authors who are purported to be controlled by my lawsuit. This was brought to my attention by a leader in another country’s writers guild.
“That change means my class definition now includes ‘all writers, including members of the WGAw and most importantly, non-members of the WGAw.
“‘Non members of the WGAw’ would mean most of the planet. I have been told that the WGAw is also collecting royalties for the European Union and the Australian Writers Guild, which I didn’t know, and the WGAw didn’t admit. I hadn’t looked at this phrase in a long time, and never noticed that the ‘U.S.’ was missing.
“I looked at the Amended settlement once again because an official of a Writer’s Guild in another country told me that the WGAw settlement was being used to block royalties in Guilds across the European Union – Germany, France, Italy and especially Spain. An international commission of Writers Guilds is preparing to contest the settlement as a whole.
“I object to this ongoing outrageous conduct by the WGAw Officers and Board of Directors under the settlement’s use of my name and class.
“Carl Gottlieb, Secretary-Treasurer, recently sent me a check for $1,300 in foreign royalties for a movie that the WGAw had no contract for, and for which the original amount was upwards of $12,000 before the WGAw split with the studios.
“Amounts owed to me alone, and I’m a slim earner in the Hollywood system, could be in the hundreds of thousands, with only a fraction accounted for.
“Not only is the RICHERT VS WGAw settlement being used against writers throughout the world, but the SAG settlement negotiated by Messrs. Johnson & Kiesel was the core basis of dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Sunny Wise in the Federal court on behalf of Eric Hughes, Ed Asner, Clancy Brown, Dennis Hayden and others, including me.
“The benefits to the classes as defined and created by these 3 lawsuits are grossly derogatory to the classes, are the opposite of fair and reasonable, and the economic, performance and copyrights that the actors, writers and directors possessed under law before the settlements were enacted have been lost to all.
“The settlement themselves are instruments of fraud.
“The union management and Boards of Directors continue to pay gargantuan fees from the members’ funds to lawyers to protect them and their profiteering secret conniving methods,” Mr. Richert says.
THE LAWYER THREATENS THE CLASSES HE REPRESENTS, THEN QUITS
“Something really, really, really bad,” will happen to his clients if he were not paid more money, Neville Johnson told the court of Judge Wiley Jr., with actors Tom Bower and Dennis Hayden in the Gallery.
“The lawyers were deficient,” Mr. Johnson boldly added, knowing he was referring to himself and Mr. Kiesel. Judge Wiley Jr. agreed.
Deficiency is the opposite of what these class action lawsuits are meant to achieve, Mr. Richert asserts, and under law, class action clients are not supposed to suffer a net loss.
The lawyers for the actors – Dan Schecter, Duncan Crabtree Ireland, Bob Bush – and their respective law firms and consultants like EEG – actually paid themselves legal fees and bonuses totaling way more than the $8 million they claim was paid to the actors, without showing any actual accounting, which remains under court seal due to inaction of Neville Johnson, according to Mr. Richert.
Under the direction of David White for SAG and David Young and Carl Gottlieb for the WGAw, with Neville Johnson and Paul Kiesel negligent for all three “sister” guild lawsuits, and them all guided by Robert Hadl for himself and the studios, with compliance from Joe Roth at the DGA; the rights of artists world wide have been reduced to a fraction of true value, and attempts to correct the injustice have been blocked in the courts and ignored in the press.
“At one point I asked to be removed from the case and demanded that my name be taken off. After a meeting in the hallway with Mr. Johnson, I went back into the courtroom and heard Judge West accept my offer. Then on the way out Mr. Johnson leaned over and loudly asked our opponent, Ms. Emma Leheny for the WGAw, if she could supply a new writer as plaintiff. When she said, “Yes, I think I can,” while the Judge pretended to be looking through schedules, I knew I would not be able to withdraw and leave that case to the lawyers and the union writers at he WGAw. So I went back into court and my role, and have stayed ever since.”
Mr. Richert noted that one Executive Director of a foreign guild, who wishes to remain anonymous because of fear of WGAw retaliation, said that a single accounting of interest-only from a tiny group of writers whose royalties were taken by the WGAw amounts to $200,000 – again, that is interest alone.
The amounts due American non-union writers are unknown, but could add up to $500 million or more, and that does not include what is due European writers.
There is no evidence that any of the classes were “adequately represented” in the lawsuit, the key to legitimacy of a class action according to U.C.L.A. professor William B. Rubenstein.
“Our challenge to the medusa heads of the sister-unions in Hollywood, and their major studio overlord partners, is just beginning now that the time limit has passed for compliance at the WGA. I am in discussions with one of the greatest class action lawyers in the known Universe, as they say in Hollywood.
“Once we get approval from Judge Wiley that hiring a real lawyer to represent the class is court approved, we can contract and announce our new class action lawyer.
“Neville Johnson’s promise that something ‘really really really’ bad” will happen to all of us clients if Judge Wiley did not pay him additional fees to represent the classes, could become a rallying cry for film artists across the world – against clandestine union activities against folks the union has no business representing under any circumstances. Ultimately, these are copyright issues and performance right issues thwarted by settlements the unions misrepresented to their members .
“What Mr. Johnson hasn’t reckoned with are the non union not-for-hire writers like me who don’t care a fig about their holy crony vows.”
WGA COLLECTION SOCIETY NOT A LEGAL ENTERPRISE IN A PUBLIC CORPORATION
According to Mr. Richert: In true Verroneian WGA-double-speak, after 60 years the union managed to victoriously upend the dreaded deadly anti-human anti-writer “Hollywood Blacklist,” of the 1950s, a crime against freedoms of all kinds, including freedom of speech engineered by crusading anti-Red evangalesists supported by the Writer’s Guild of America and the Hollywood Reporter, among other lynchers of freedom of speech and writing.
“Some say that the WGA 2007 marching crusade ‘Pencils Down’ was a rewrite of that era, stopping writers from telling the truth by labeling them traitors.
“However, ‘Pencils Up!!’ is the motto of the writers I grew up with, and emulated.
“Like other Verroneian reversals of truth and fact, in 2005 the WGA co-authored the creation of a brand new incarnation of THE BLACK LIST, reinvented as an index of the best screenplays in Hollywood. Now when anybody says ‘Black List,’ it means the opposite of what it once did, as they re-created my lawsuit for fraud as ‘the highly successful foreign levy program.’”
[check WGA website wga.org. WGA ex-president and Board Member Patric Verrone is now running for public office from Pacific Palisades, where his union once distributed threatening leaflets about a cable television executive. Mr. Verrone is running on “I won the strike” platform, which continues his revisionist campaigns, as the strike was a net loss to writers in LA of up to 75% and the jobs are still moving away from LA.]
Look further on wga.org at the WGAw “Audit” to see the single-page accounting for foreign levies – now almost $180 million -- what is actually a number like $1.4 Billion for an unknown number of writers – unknown, and still unaccounted for.
“Using the same obfuscation-grammar zero-sum response legal-sleaze techniques to deceive, David Young and Daniel Pietrie Jr. both wrote devoted, passionate letters to the entire 2009 WGA membership – which basically means all of the movers in Hollywood, producers writers and directors – denouncing the allegations I made before the settlement without mentioning them, using in the letters a kind of old-style organizer malevolence, all directed at the named plaintiff, William Richert.
“These letters, approved by Counsel and the Board of Directors, were only propaganda for the settlement the writers were meant to sign, relinquishing their copyrights 92 percent to the major studios; like saying: this is good for you, fellows/ladies! That bad man Billy Richert was saying mean things about us Hollywood writers, and he should be scorned.
“Since there are so many innocents involved here, and the futures of independent writers, directors, actors and filmmakers are at stake, this long festering case grants unions and studios vast impact across all media, from the theatrical screens to the home screens connecting across the internet, stretching far into the future from deep into the past” says Mr. Richert.
“I only recently got a check for my movie LAW AND DISORDER, non union, made in the early 1970s.
“In addition to absconding with copyrights and royalties for writers worldwide, the personal slurs against me made publicly to the WGAw members by Patric Verrone, Daniel Petrie Jr. and Carl Gottlieb and David Young will be answered duly in time and with the proper lawful response. A union attacking a nonmember (or members) for performing public-interest whistle-blower functions is an actionable Federal offense.
“Corruption didn’t start in Hollywood, it only seems to wind up here,” says Mr. Richert, “like in the proverb: ‘When Jesus is Near, can the Devil be far behind?’”
INFORMATION AND CONTACT
RICHERT VS WGAW
[email protected]
FURTHER CONTACTS TBA
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