Randy Quaid suing BBM producers

[Fla_Tim]

Here is a link to a Yahoo story about Randy Quaid's suit over his compensation for his role in Brokeback Mountain.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060324/ap_en_mo/brokeback_lawsuit

I suppose I am letting my dislike for the Joe Aguirre character color my feelings about this, but besides knowing the name I couldn't recall anything else he'd been in. Turns out he has had a long career and been in scores of movies, but I didn't see any titles that were particularly gripping since Midnight Express and The Last Picture Show in the 1970's. Seems like he should be thanking Ang Lee for casting him in such a critically acclaimed film.

[Aussie Chris]

He wants $10 million in damages!  Ye Gads!  Randy, Randy, Randy, what would you have asked for if BBM also won best picture???

[Fla_Tim]

10 million works out to 2.5 mil per scene or 1 million a minute. If I'm remembering corrrectly there were the two scenes in the trailer, and the two scenes when he rode to the camp, probably 10 minutes total! 

[strazeme]

What a greedy SOB!  If he thinks he's entitled to $10 miliion (on top of his actual salary) ... how much are Heath and Jake worth?   How much did they actually get?

[iristarr]

I second your emotion -- I'm really disgusted with Quaid for doing that -- he should be grateful to have been associated with such a fine piece of work. But then I always suspected he was a bit of an a-hole, like many of the characters he played.

[Lynne]

I would think the guy needs to look at finding a new agent or whoever negotiates his contracts rather than litigation at this point...There should be a baseline provision with increases based on unexpected earnings.  It seems to me that absolutely NO ONE must have expected much out of BBM, which just pleases me in my own twisted way.

[Fla_Tim]

Yes Lynne, he should have thought carefully before signing up. Now he has a big case of of sellers' remorse, like you I am so thrilled that it has done well in the face of such low expectations. The cast was small, and they all did such stupendous jobs, but there wasn't anything in his performance that made it particularly notable. There are many many actors that could have filled the role and done as good a job.

[juneaux]

Believe it or not I was *offended* when I read this story.  I'm not exactly sure why, though.  Could I really be so protective of a film that I take criticisms of it and the motivations behind its making personally?  I was happily progressing in stage 5.  Now I'm back in attack mode against anything that tries to detract from this beautiful work.  Guess the quote in the movie still applies to me 3.5 months after I first saw it~  Brokeback got me good.

[Phillip Dampier]

Great post, but I am going to move it into the Movie Resources section as it's a news article.  Feel free to keep the discussions going - I just want to make sure more people see this as part of their journey of exploring news about the film.

[Phillip Dampier]

That BBM became a commercial success came in spite of its independent art-house label attached to it as a "Focus" release, which is considered a specialty "label" by Universal.  Had this film been marketed differently, I could have seen it running at gay movie week filmfests at art houses and quietly gone into obscurity, but it was handled better and managed to break through into conventional cinemas.  Yes, it will break the $100,000,000 mark once worldwide audiences are calculated along with rentals and sales of the DVD, but I'm not sure that means ka-ching for the actors involved, especially Quaid who was a minor character anyway.