Professor Craswell on Parker v Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corp.

Here is the latest from Stanford Law's Professor Richard Craswell.  This is his take on Shirley Maclaine's suits against 20th-Century Fox, a case we have previously posted about here and (more briefly) here.  Other installments in the series from Professor Craswell have included his takes on Frigaliment,  Lumley, Wood v. Lady Duff Gordon, and Alaska Packers.

Professor Craswell provides the following case summary:

In 1965, Twentieth-Century Fox signed Shirley Maclaine Parker to play the lead in a movie based on the Broadway musical, "Bloomer Girl." The contract guaranteed Ms Maclaine at least $750,000; it also gave her approval rights over the movie's director. However, Fox later decided not to produce "Bloomer Girl" ... and then refused to pay Maclaine the guaranteed compensation unless she played the female lead in "Big Country, Big Man", a western set in the opal mines of frontier Australia. This role had no singing or dancing, gave her no control over the director, and was to be filmed on location in Australia. 

When Maclaine turned down this role, Fox said they owed her no money because she could have avoided (or "mitigated") any financial losses by appearing in the western. The California Supreme Court famously disagreed, and ordered Fox to pay the $750,000.

For more on the history and context of this case, see Victor P. Goldberg, "Bloomer Girl Revisited, or, How to Frame an Unmade Picture," 1998 Wis. L. Rev. 1051; and Mary Joe Frug, "Re-Reading Contracts: A Feminist Analysis of a Casebook, 34 American U. L. Rev. 1065, 1114-25 (1985).

 

[JT}