The Reader was one of the critical smashes of 2008, broke the $100m mark at the global box office and had an awards season run that saw Kate Winslet carry off the Oscar for best actress. Now the author of the book upon which the film was based is suing Hollywood studio the Weinstein Company, claiming he has not been paid a penny in the subsequent three years.
Bernhard Schlink, whose 1995 novel Der Vorleser (The Reader) examined the difficulties postwar German generations have had comprehending the Holocaust, claims he is owed at least $1m. He signed a contract with the Weinstein Company, which is co-owned by the Oscar-winning film mogul Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob, in 1998 and says it should have guaranteed him between 2.5% and 5% of the movie's gross receipts, says the Hollywood Reporter.
Schlink, who filed his suit at the Los Angeles superior court yesterday, says he has received no money from the Weinsteins whatsoever and only one profit statement, in violation of his legal rights. "The statement is false in that it greatly understates the receipts, overstates the costs and expenses, and does not correctly follow the terms of their deal with Miramax," the lawsuit alleges. It claims breach of contract, fraudulent concealment, money had and received, breach of implied contract and accounting. The Weinstein Company was unavailable for comment.
Schlink's book was translated into English in 1998 and became the first German book to top the New York Times bestseller list. Stephen Daldry's film adaptation was nominated for five Oscars, but only Winslet came home with an award. She starred opposite Ralph Fiennes as a former Nazi concentration camp guard who finds herself on trial for her crimes many years later. The film spans several decades and features Winslet's character in middle age in the late 1950s, during which she embarks on an affair with a 15-year-old boy, and later life as she faces prison in the mid-90s.
It is not the first time the Weinsteins have woken up to news of a lawsuit against them. Last year they were sued for $50m by the makers of 2005's Hoodwinked! for supposedly sabotaging the delayed animated comedy Escape from Planet Earth "through a potent combination of hubris, incompetence, profligate spending, and contempt for contractual obligations" and by documentary film-maker Michael Moore for $2.7m in profits from the anti George W Bush polemic Fahrenheit 911, which Moore claimed he was owed but never received. The Weinstein Company disputes the claims, both of which are set to reach court later this year. "The Weinsteins have paid everything they should have paid," the brothers' lawyer Bert Fields told the Hollywood Reporter last year when asked about the Fahrenheit 9/11 case. "Mr Moore has received a huge amount of money from this film and we believe he is overreaching. He should be ashamed of himself." As for Escape from Planet Earth, Fields said: "The pleading contains little more than false, gratuitous, slanderous, preposterous and totally irrelevant personal attacks on TWC and its principals. Plaintiffs were let go after they refused to make the picture which TWC wanted. They were paid in excess of $2m which is what was called for by their contract."
