LOS ANGELES, July 10 — As a studio boss in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, Alan Ladd Jr. was admired for his taste, his relationships with top directors like George Lucas and Ridley Scott, and his laid-back management style.
Not to mention his reserve: he once responded to a long-winded movie pitch by merely saying “No.”
Mr. Ladd — now 69, but still known to a large swath of Hollywood as Laddie — remains as laconic as ever in normal conversation. But he is raising his voice in a courthouse cri de coeur over a series of perceived slights by Warner Brothers, the studio with which he was a partner on films like the Oscar-winning “Chariots of Fire,” the science fiction classic “Blade Runner” and the lowbrow but hugely profitable “Police Academy” series.
It’s quite a turnabout for Mr. Ladd, who says his production and distribution deal at Warner Brothers from 1979 to 1985 was so sweet that he could greenlight his own movies, choose the dates and theaters they would play, and even make the studio bump one of its movies for one of his.
All these years later, he is going to trial in state court here this week in a case against Warner Brothers that could focus attention on a variant of that old Hollywood bugaboo, studio accounting.
For an aging producer, and a faded movie star’s son at that, this particular lawsuit — with its overtones of credit, legacy and the deference due a lion of the industry who famously took a risk on “Star Wars” when no other studio would — seems as much an existential battle as a legal one.
The crux of the dispute is how studios account for revenues from the licensing of their movies to cable and television networks here and overseas. Typically, studios negotiate package deals for scores of films, then allocate a portion of the total to each movie.
Profit participants — usually stars, directors, producers and writers — stand to gain or lose depending on those allocations. Mr. Ladd, for one, was entitled to a hefty 5 percent of the gross profits on a dozen movies he had made with Warner Brothers. So every penny of the bottom line credited to other movies reduced the amount available for his.
Fairness, he argues, would require a formula based on box-office results or other objective factors. Yet in one deal, he said, worthless old Tarzan movies were accounted for at $40,000 apiece. And in several packages, court filings show, Warner Brothers took the total license fee and divided it evenly among all the movies in the package, no matter how successful.
Sounding much like his late father, star of the gunfighter classic “Shane,” he said that he felt there was no choice but to take the studio to court. “It just seemed wrong,” he said. “Either you have to sue, or you put your tail between your legs and run for the hills.”
Mr. Ladd said he believed his films had been deliberately shortchanged by Warner Brothers executives, in whose eyes he became a liability once he left the studio’s fold in 1985. (He later served two stints as chairman of MGM, and produced the Oscar-winning “Braveheart” as well as the costly flop “The Phantom” in six years on the Paramount lot before becoming an independent producer in 1999.)
Lawyers for Warner Brothers declined to comment, citing the studio’s policy of not discussing pending litigation. But in court the studio has indicated that Mr. Ladd was treated more than fairly. Its lawyers are expected to use television ratings, for example, to make the case that Mr. Ladd’s decades-old films simply aren’t as valuable these days as he might think. And Warner Brothers will argue that allocations are the result of negotiations with buyers, not unilaterally decided on by the studio.
That the two sides are actually going to trial is something of a shocker. Disputes over license-fee allocation aren’t unheard of; the director William Friedkin sued Warner Brothers over revenue from “The Exorcist” and the producer Saul Zaentz sued MGM over “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” to name two. But both disputes, like most such cases, were settled.
And with good reason. A loss at trial could invite other plaintiffs to come forward. For Mr. Ladd, meanwhile, the case has become all-consuming and somewhat energy- sapping at a time when his attention is needed elsewhere. His next film is “Gone, Baby, Gone,” the first feature directed by Ben Affleck, which Miramax is distributing this fall.
Still, Mr. Ladd — who constantly bridled at his corporate overlords when he was studio chief — makes clear that this is an intensely personal fight.
It began, he said, when he learned that Warner Brothers had been sending another profit participant on “Blade Runner” royalty checks for some time. “But they’d stopped even sending me statements,” Mr. Ladd said. “They said, ‘The movie’s so far in the red, we don’t want to bother.’ ”
So Mr. Ladd paid for an audit, and Warner Brothers later paid him more than $400,000 in what it called a conciliatory gesture, but Mr. Ladd only grew more incensed.
The audit also turned up millions in disputed allocations, which rang another bell with Mr. Ladd: in the early 1990s he had settled a dispute with the studio for $500,000. At the time, Mr. Ladd said, he was flush with millions from the settlement of a contract dispute with MGM, and didn’t want the headache.
The last straw, Mr. Ladd said, came when he was speaking in Boston and someone asked whether he had had anything to do with “Chariots of Fire.” A recent DVD release of the movie, he learned, had omitted his credit from the package. The same thing happened, he said, with “Night Shift” and “The Right Stuff.” And on “Once Upon a Time in America,” he found, the movie itself had been altered to remove his credit. (Warner Brothers says the packages were misprints, and that omission of the credit from “Once Upon a Time” was corrected as soon as possible.)
“Taking someone’s name off the picture — that’s very personal,” said Mr. Ladd, whose lawyer, John Gatti, is also his son-in-law. “My dad was No. 1 at the box office for five or six years, but he didn’t work with good directors, most of his films were black and white, and he faded into the woodwork. Except for ‘Shane,’ it was like he was never here.”
“When they took my name off the pictures, it was like I was never here,” he added. “You can’t take away somebody’s life. That’s what they’re doing. It’s like I never lived.”
