MEAN HOLLYWOOD

 When you hear the name Neil Simon, what's the first show that comes to mind? The one that is likely the most performed, with the most TV spin-offs? OK, set that aside for a few minutes.

Now, let's pretend you're a writer with a book to promote. You've made the rounds of the morning news shows, answering the same questions you heard the day before on another network. Your tome has gotten good reviews, and is selling as well as could be expected. 

Or $1 per reader.

But you've run through the publisher's advance. It's too soon to write a sequel, and the topic you've covered in all your books -- which can be described as the shittiness of adolescence -- has just about run its course. You know what would hit the spot right now? A check for $400,000, courtesy of a major movie studio and the most famous actresses/writer on TV. You ask: Can we skip the meeting and go straight to signing the contract?

Such is the life of Rosalind Wiseman, the author of Queen Bees and Wannabes, which you might know better by its film adaptation Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey. Wiseman's life appears to have a happy ending. Mean Girls, the $130-million-grossing movie! Mean Girls: The Musical, the $124-million-grossing Broadway show! Mean Girls: The Movie of the Musical, the coming-to- you-soon picture that will probably take in at least as much as the stage version!

Tina Fey takes the bows.

If only Ms. Wiseman had read the contract she so merrily signed. By putting her name to Paramount Pictures paper, she lost all the rights to any movie or theatrical version of her book. That $400,000 she received over 20 years ago is the only dough she ever saw from the Mean Girls projects -- a seemingly-endless cash cow for the studio and her former bestie Tina Fey. You think the writer of books about mean girls would have seen this coming. 

Anybody with a passing knowledge of the movie industry knows how these things go. They'll offer you "points" on the "back end" when the movie turns a "profit" -- which, on a $17-million budget, Paramount claims Mean Girls never has done. And if you look at similar complaints by other writers, it appears that no movie in history has ever made money. You'd think if the movie business was so unprofitable, there would be something called Paramount Pharmaceuticals or Walt Disney Weaponry.

Wiseman has hired lawyers to straighten out this unfortunate situation. Paramount's legal department is likely on the case, too, providing the plaintiff with a magnifying glass free of charge to read the small print on her $400,000 contract. I'm not claiming she has only herself to blame; this is typical Hollywood business we're talking about. Had Wiseman demanded X-percentage of every box office dollar of all Mean Girls projects, Paramount and Tina Fey would probably have gone ahead with their own version of the Queen Bees book, changing it just enough to get away with it. Any attempt on Ms. Wiseman's part to get compensation would have gone nowhere. 

Abandon all royalties, ye who enter here.

You can hear Paramount's lawyers tell the judge, "Your Honor, after Ms. Wiseman turned down the studio's generous offer, they and Ms. Fey decided to create their own storyline. After all, Ms. Wiseman can't claim to have invented the concept of so-called 'mean girls'. Frankly, Paramount and Ms. Fey offered the plaintiff close to a half-million dollars and a screen credit strictly out of courtesy." A Hollywood ending, indeed.

OK, let's return to Neil Simon. The average person probably associates the legendary playwright with The Odd Couple. Broadway show. Hit movie. Three different sitcom versions -- four if you count a Saturday-morning cartoon series starring a cat and dog. At least one New York revival. Probably performed more by local theater groups than anything else of Simon's, who could have lived comfortably from its success had he never written anything else.

Or so you'd think. A couple of years after The Odd Couple premiered in New York, Simon sold the rights to a movie studio for around $150,000 -- a handsome sum equal to over $1,290,000 today. But in doing so, he was forfeiting all future profits from all productions -- the movie, the sitcoms, their home video releases, the local rep productions, the revival with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, everything. (In fairness, would you have seen any of those things coming down the pike?)

You mean don't
remember this?

This fiduciary foolishness is why Simon rewrote The Odd Couple for two women, a Broadway show that came and went faster than a dust bunny being swept by Felix Unger. At the turn of the 21st century, he tried again with Oscar and Felix: A New Look at The Odd Couple, with updates including websites, emails, and the Pigeon Sisters being Latino. It never went beyond its Los Angeles production. 

If you couldn't guess, the studio that owns the original incarnation of The Odd Couple is Paramount Pictures. I wonder if they've made a profit from it yet.

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