Paramount Insists That It Owes Buchwald Nothing

Paramount Pictures Corp. formally disputed humorist Art Buchwald’s claim that the film studio owes him and producer Alain Bernheim anything at all, let alone $14.6 million in net profit from its 1988 hit comedy “Coming to America.”

“Art Buchwald and his attorneys have finally shown their hand, and it is empty,” said Paramount attorney Charles Diamond, following the filing of a 28-page brief in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday.

The Paramount brief outlines the studio’s arguments against a raft of financial claims that Buchwald’s lawyers filed on the columnist’s behalf in a 114-page “Statement of Contentions” last week. In that brief, Buchwald attorney Pierce O’Donnell maintained that the entire Hollywood system--in which studios promise net profits in standard “boilerplate” contracts but rarely ever deliver--is patently unfair.

His clients, O’Donnell said, are victims of that system, in which all seven major studios--20th Century Fox, Columbia/Tri-Star, MGM/UA, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal and Disney--practice the same kind of accounting.

At the heart of the Buchwald vs. Paramount dispute is $300 million in gross revenue that the Eddie Murphy comedy earned. Paramount maintains that the film has yet to earn a net profit. Buchwald won a court victory last winter when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Harvey Schneider found that his claim to authorship of a story that became the basis for “Coming To America” was true and that he and Bernheim, his producer, were to share in net profits.

It was then that Paramount lawyers revealed that the movie has earned no net profits because the film’s expenses and its gross profit agreements with star Eddie Murphy and director John Landis precluded the accrual of any net profits.

In his response, Diamond simply referred to Judge Schneider’s own language in which he called the dispute “primarily a breach of contract case . . . which must be decided by reference to the agreement between the parties and the rules of contract construction.”

Buchwald’s contract simply defines net profits in such a way that expenses have eaten them up before he had earned anything, according to Diamond.

“Art Buchwald, having decided that he can’t live with his deal with Paramount, is relegated to having to ask the judge to make a new one for him by throwing out the terms that are favorable to Paramount, but keeping the ones that are favorable to Art Buchwald,” he said.

O’Donnell called the Paramount response “old wine in old bottles.”

“They have not denied our claim that Paramount has reaped over $73 million in hidden profits from ‘Coming to America,’ ” he said. “The studio is hiding behind its one-sided, grossly unfair contract-of-adhesion which Paramount consistently misinterprets as its excuse for charging tens of millions of dollars in unauthorized and excessive expenses to the motion picture.”

Trial on the accounting and contract issues in the case is set for July 9.