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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 - 1 Comment »
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Arianna Update: Class Act(ion)

Journalist and union organizer Jonathan Tasini, who was also a HuffPo blogger for five years, has filed a class action lawsuit against Arianna Huffington and Huffington post for $105 million — a third of the value of the sale of HuffPo to AOL. Jeff Bercovici, writing for Forbes, has a couple of great pieces up on the lawsuit here and here.

Also, here’s a copy of the filed complaint if you like to read things written in legalese.

The interesting angle in this lawsuit, which may just give them a legal leg to stand on, is that the filing is based on common law, not contract law — which makes the fact that the bloggers agreed to write for free irrelevant to the case (at least, according to the attorneys for the plaintiff — we’ll see what a judge thinks once all the arguments have been heard).

What it boils down to is that the case alleges that Huffington Post built something of value on the backs of unpaid labor, and that the labor that contributed to that has a fair expectation of compensation now that it’s been sold for a ton of money.

In other words, basically what a lot of HuffPo bloggers have been arguing since the sale, but now a class-action suit’s been filed making exactly that allegation.

Tasini, by the way, was previously the lead plaintiff in the landmark 2001 case New York Times Co. vs Tasini, which dealt with newspapers re-using the work of freelancers for inclusion in electronic databases without additional compensation.

The plaintiffs won that case. We’ll see how things go with this one. It’s good to see the HuffPo bloggers have Tasini in their corner, though, and I expect it’s at least a bit of a relief for those who have been frustrated by Arianna’s refusal to offer any compensation to her corps of unpaid labor to at least have the suit filed so they’ll get their day in court.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon