Desperate to avoid bad publicity for their Oscar shoo-in “The King’s Speech,” movie moguls Harvey and Bob Weinstein paid $500,000 in hush money to squelch a multi-million lawsuit during the run-up to the Academy Awards, bombshell court papers claim.
The brothers shelled out the dough to animated filmmakers Brian Inerfeld and Tony Leech — who made the 2005 Weinstein hit “Hoodwinked” — in hopes of staving off a $54 million-plus fraud lawsuit and to get the men to agree to private mediation after the Academy Awards, according to the documents.
“The Weinsteins, knowing that they had been guilty of incompetence and fraud…did not want to take the chance that their reputations would be sullied by the truth at the time that the voting for the Oscars was under way,” Judd Burstein, the lawyer for Leech and Inerfeld, blasted in a lawsuit filed today in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Harvey and Bob Weinstein made the payout after consulting with famed trial lawyer David Boies, the lawsuit claims. The mediation talks subsequently fell through.
The Weinsteins couldn’t immediately be reached for a comment.
The newly-filed suit claims that the “out-of-contro”’ Weinsteins “sabotaged” the Leech-Inerfeld flick “Escape From Planet Earth” through “a potent combination of hubris, incompetence, profligate spending and contempt for contractual obligations.”
According to the suit, the Weinstein Company inked a deal for the $30 million animated, alien space flick in 2006, on the heels of the release of “Hoodwinked,” the animated takeoff of Little Red Riding Hood that took in $140 million in gross profits.
But the Weinsteins badly botched the new project — which was expected to make as much as $50 million for Leech and Inerfeld’s team — with a series of production delays, in-fighting and “egregious,’’ cost overruns brought on largely by Harvey’s incompetence, the suit claims.
At one point, the Weinstein Company had “wasted so much of their investors’ money’’ on the movie that it went behind the filmmakers backs and secretly took out a loan — and promised the new lenders the profits that already belonged to Leech and Inerfeld under their deal with the Weinsteins, papers allege.
“The Weinsteins are a real life version of Bialystock & Bloom,” the suit blasts, referring to the fictitious theatrical fraudsters depicted in “The Producers.”
“Escape” was originally slated to be in theaters by January, 2009.
But a meddlesome Harvey Weinstein was so erratic, the suit alleges, that he green-lighted and then halted “Escape” several times; called in outside workers; ordered 17 script rewrites and even fired his brother, Bob, from the project.
At one point, during a 2009 story reel screening with Inerfeld, Harvey Weinstein and their kids, Weinstein “proceeded to fall asleep,” the papers claim.
Then, Harvey, a diabetic “attempted to consume an entire bowl of M&M candies” and fought a Weinstein exec who tried to take the treat away.
“When [the exec] sought to retrieve the bowl of candy out of obvious concerns for Harvey Weinstein’s health, he fought to keep it, and in the tumult the M&Ms scattered all over the floor. Then, instead of watching the reel, Harvey Weinstein got down on his hands and knees and began eating M&Ms off the floor,” the papers claim.
When it came to casting the movie, Harvey “could not keep the characters straight” and at one point insisted on signing Alec Baldwin as one of the leads. Baldwin had already turned down the role, but Weinstein tried to get him again — at less money than he was originally offered.
Weinstein also approved Jessica Alba for a role, then changed his mind and said he wanted Jennifer Garner, but failed to deliver Garner, the suit claims.
Inerfeld, meanwhile, had signed Kevin Bacon and Greg Kinnear to the project for the “extremely modest” rates of $50,000 and $100,000 respectively, plus back-end payouts.
But Weinstein thought Bacon was “too expensive” and paid him $25,000 not to be in the movie, the court documents alleged.
Meanwhile, the suit claims Weinstein never paid the filmmakers the millions they were owed under their contracts. He then fired them after Leech and Inerfeld discovered the secret financing pact in order to “insure that [the Weinsteins] would not run into trouble with their lender.”
Leech and Inerfeld want the $50 million they estimate they would have made on “Escape,” plus another $4 million for three other Weinstein projects — “Fraggle Rock,” “Conundrum,” “Doomstar” and “Dragons” — for which they had deals.
Lawyer Boies, who was involved in the $500,000 payment, blasted the suit as “irresponsible and baseless” and “an attempt to extort millions” from the Weinsteins.
Leech and Inerfeld “threatened to attack” Weinstein and his studio “unless they paid $5 million, an amount that bore no relationship to any possible amount in dispute,” Boies said.
“When their demands were refused, this lawsuit and their accompanying press campaign resulted,” Boies said. “Plaintiffs and their counsel should be ashamed of themselves.”
Another Weinstein lawyer, Bert Fields, called the suit completely frivolous” and said Leech and Inerfeld’s conduct was “unethical and reprehensible.”
“The pleading contains little more than false, gratuitous, slanderous, preposterous and totally irrelevant personal attacks” on Weinstein, Boies said, adding that Leech and Inerfeld “were let go after they refused to make the picture” the Weinsteins wanted.
He said the filmmakers were paid “in excess of $2 million.”
“They then threatened to ‘go public’ with false assertions .. unless they were paid money to which they were not entitled,” he said. “I can’t wait to get them under oath.”
Burstein, the lawyer for Leech and Inerfeld, shot back: “The notion that they paid the money even though the allegations were false is absurd. ”
“On that theory, they would have paid money to delay a lawsuit alleging that they robbed a bank in Kansas wearing Easter Bunny suits.”