The 2014 movie that got Ron Howard sued for exploitation: “These claims have no merit”
Hollywood history has been littered with people who’ve exploited their peers, colleagues, and more, but never in a million years would you expect to see Ron Howard on that list.
And yet, that’s what happened after a movie produced by his Imagine Entertainment banner, which listed him as one of the producers in the credits alongside his long-time business partner, Brian Grazer, and several others, found itself at the centre of a lawsuit alleging exactly that.
On the surface, it doesn’t make any sense. This is Ron Howard, after all, the most inoffensive man in the industry. Butter would probably get colder in his mouth, and even after seven decades in the business as an actor, producer, and filmmaker, he hasn’t ruffled so much as a single feather. That we know of, anyway.
Directed by Philippe Falardeau, 2014’s The Good Lie starred Reese Witherspoon as Carrie Davis, a counsellor tasked with finding work for a group of Sudanese orphans who spent years in refugee camps before being accepted to be relocated to the United States, where it was warmly embraced by critics.
However, despite presenting itself as a fictionalised drama inspired by the ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’, the thousands of displaced children who suffered during the country’s second civil war, in February 2015, 54 Sudanese refugees filed a lawsuit against Howard’s Imagine, as well as Alcon Entertainment, Black Label Media, and Reliance Big Entertainment.
According to the filing, they were “assisting with the creation of the script on The Good Lie” on the basis that “a non-profit foundation organised and run by the refugees would be the sole beneficiary of any fundraising efforts,” only to take things to court when it was claimed “neither the refugees nor their foundation have been compensated in any fashion for sharing their traumatic personal stories.”
During development, Outlaw Productions’ Robert Newmyer and screenwriter Margaret Nagle “wanted to create a movie with real, personal, and emotional details otherwise unavailable to the public at large,” with the title, The Good Lie, coming from Gam Day Awino, after his friends told a false story to his captors that saved his life.
Newmyer died in 2005, but eight years later, Outlaw sold Nagle’s script to Paramount, which is when Imagine, Reliance, and Black Label came on board, with the Sudanese saying they never consented to the deal, and they only found out about the film being in production from fellow refugees, who’d been hired as extras.
When it debuted in cinemas, they recognised elements of their own stories, leading to the lawsuit. While Black Label initially released a statement saying “the plaintiffs and their attorneys have made claims that are not supported by facts or the law” and that “these claims have no merit,” the case being settled out of court with compensation paid to the refugees would suggest that it wasn’t entirely without merit.
