I have to cover news, and sadly, not every story can be puppy dogs and ice cream and Zac Efron getting peed on. This one is much less fun. You may remember Transformers 3 extra Gabriela Cedillo, who was left with brain injuries after an accident on set. Her family sued Paramount, and now the LA Times is reporting that she received an $18.5 million settlement.

Gabriela Cedillo, 26, was driving a car in a background scene when she was struck in the head by a stunt vehicle that broke lose from a cable during filming.
The accident on Sept. 1, 2010, left Cedillo with permanent brain injuries. The Chicago resident had a portion of her skull removed and suffers from memory problems, seizures and is blind in one eye, according to her attorneys.
Cedillo sued Paramount Pictures in October 2010 alleging that the accident was negligently caused by a poor welding job and that Paramount had reneged on an agreement to cover medical costs. This week a Cook County judge approved the settlement.
“They led everyone to believe they were going to take care of her medical bills. They didn’t and she was forced onto a public aid,” Todd Smith, a Chicago attorney who represented Cedillo, said in an interview. “While they make their billions of dollars in gross revenue from the movie, taxpayers are paying medical bills for her.” [LA Times]

The woman, now 26, has permanent brain impairment.  “She lost about a third of the top of her head,” Smith said. Her initial bills totaled $350,000 in 2010. [NBCChicago]

A source tells Deadline that the lawsuit filed in October 2010 would have gone on longer if Michael Bay’s name hadn’t been thrown into the legal mix. But the possibility that the director and his Platinum Dunes production company suddenly were to be pulled in as defendants apparently lit a fire under Paramount to speed a settlement. Today’s news comes after a year and a half of legal maneuvering, including attempts by the studio to move the case from Illinois to California, as well one already failed mediation. Then Paramount approached Cedillo’s attorneys early this year seeking a second mediation. It took just a couple more meetings between the lawyers for the settlement to be reached in late March. [Deadline]

You’d hope with a movie that grosses more than a billion dollars worldwide that you wouldn’t have to sue the studio to get a big settlement out of them for lopping off part of someone’s head, but hey, I guess lawyers gotta eat.

Jeez, you two, get a log flume!

By now you’ve probably heard all about John Travolta getting sued for two million dollars by a masseuse claiming “sexual battery,” saying Travolta groped “his scrotum and the shaft of his penis.” To paraphrase the late great Robert Schimmel, I’d suck John Travolta’s dick in front of my mother for two million dollars. I admit the story is ridiculously tabloidy and sounds pretty far-fetched, and a lot of it sounds like a bad letter to Penthouse, but I couldn’t ignore some of the gems in there.

Such as…

-”There was an overweight black man preparing hamburgers, who meekly said ‘hey.’”

“Come to the East Village’s hottest new night club, Hamburgers. There’s overweight black men preparing hamburgers, naked jockeys on trapeze, and blind sherpas with nerf bow guns….” /Stephon.

-When the masseur says he reminded Travolta that sexual acts in exchange for money were illegal, the actor’s rebuttal is stated as, “Come on dude, I’ll jerk you off!” The suit also describes Travolta’s genitalia as “roughly 8 inches in length” with pubic hair that was “wirey and unkempt.”

8 inches, whoa! Do they even make them that big? That’s quite generous for a smear campaign. Meanwhile, my own pubic hair has been described as “perfectly coiffed, and as slick and smooth as a freshly-groomed fur seal.”

- “(Travolta) began screaming at Plantiff, telling Plantiff how selfish he was, that (Travolta) got where he is now due to sexual favors he had performed when he was in his ‘Welcome Back Kotter’ days; and that Hollywood is controlled by homosexual Jewish men who expect favors in return for sexual activity.”

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The Hollywood Reporter today has one of those stories that sheds light on the scummy underbelly of Hollywood, where shady producers and once wide-eyed rubes sue each other over bounced checks and broken promises, all because they couldn’t agree on who should control a project. And the real loser in all this? You and I, the viewers, who’ll probably never get to see Beverly Hills Ninja 2 now, starring David Hasselhoff. No, really, that was the jumping off point. Multiple people thought it would be a good idea to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making a sequel to the worst movie from Chris Farley, a guy with the charisma to carry an entire film by himself, starring David Hasselhoff, a guy who couldn’t even hold a hamburger.

Last year, Mitchell Klebanoff, who co-wrote the original and was tapped to direct the follow-up, won a lawsuit against  Korean investors who bought rights to the franchise from Sony. An arbitrator in the dispute determined that the investors hadn’t properly terminated him as a director and awarded him nearly $262,000.

A person can make a quarter mil for not directing a David Hasselhoff movie!? That settles it, I’m going to find my guidance counselor and kick him right in the nuts. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t direct a David Hasselhoff movie.

More recently comes a lawsuit from Jay So, who, in perhaps the saddest part of the lawsuit, was once a scholarship student and a best picture-winning graduate of AFI, who says he was unlawfully terminated by investors and stiffed on his promised $100,000 producing fee. For trying to produce Beverly Hills Ninja 2. Starring David Hasselhoff. (Really, I can’t stress this part enough).

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Joining a brave tradition of human rights crusaders such as the lady who sued the makers of Drive because it wasn’t enough like The Fast and the Furious, a Michigan man (the Drive lady was also from Michigan, incidentally) has filed a class action lawsuit against AMC theaters alleging that snack prices are too damn high. No word yet on how many other moviegoers have signed on, but if the complaint doesn’t have butter smears on it by the end it will be a miracle.

Joshua Thompson loves the movies.
But he hates the prices theaters charge for concessions like pop and candy.

Funny, I love crab, but I hate picking it out of those annoying shells. Won’t you join my class action suit against the ocean?

This week, the 20-something security technician from Livonia decided to do something about it: He filed a class action in Wayne County Circuit Court against his local AMC theater in hopes of forcing theaters statewide to dial down snack prices.
“He got tired of being taken advantage of,” said Thompson’s lawyer, Lionel Hutz Kerry Morgan of Wyandotte. “It’s hard to justify prices that are three- and four-times higher than anywhere else.”

Actually, it’s super easy to justify. Theaters have to pay movie studios up to 80% of the ticket price, so the high-priced concessions are where they make their money back. If you don’t like it, stick a Coke in your purse like everyone else. I eagerly await Thompson’s follow-up lawsuit, The People vs. Hey, What’s Up With Airline Food?

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Julie Taymor’s dispute with the producers of Broadway’s Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark continues this week with a 46-page complaint filed Friday that’s as contentious as it is long. Taymor, who was fired from the show last March, is still seeking back pay, and more importantly for our purposes (the purposes of not being super bored), her complaint sheds some light on the internal Turn off the Dark emails (see what I did there?). There’s a lot to parse, but the gist of it is, Taymor (at least, according to Taymor) was doing her best to make the story work using Bono and Edge’s songs, but not surprisingly, some of their lyrics didn’t make a lot of sense, and they were never around to help re-write them. The complaint quotes an email from Taymor begging for their help working on the song.

A lot is happening. It is getting clearer. The show is running more smoothly. But clarity in the last third is still the issue. We are working hard on it. A major rewrite of LOVE ME KILL ME is happening. But we all believe that the BOY FALLS needs a major rethinking or rejiggering of the lyrics. . . . [I]t is too baffling for the audience. It does not clearly state where Peter is or is going.

On December 19, Taymor again wrote to Bono and Edge:

It is nine pm in NYC. I am just about to sit down to a home cooked meal. I have been at it on [Spider-Man] nonstop. Glen has as well. We are writing lyrics, lines of dialogue, changes in music–all in service to the ending, to clarity. We know what the story is, we understand the stakes–but we do not have the lyrics to support it. I would like to talk to you before midnight my time– after I eat– to go over the situation and beg for lyrics. We need you. It is not easy to change anything but now I think it is a matter of lyrical and musical changes — and perhaps cutting a scene or two from a second act.

Jeez, who would’ve ever thought the guy who once wrote “I want to reach out and touch the flame where the streets have no name” would have such a hard time telling a coherent story, huh? At some point after that, Bono and Edge (who, yes, is indeed referred to as “Edge” throughout the complaint and in private emails) started working with Taymor’s writing partner Glen Berger on a rewrite behind Taymor’s back, a plan they called “plan X.” I absolutely cannot get enough of two grown men calling themselves “Bono” and “The Edge” working on a super secret rewrite of a musical about Spider-Man that they’d named like it was the f*cking Enigma machine. Anyway, they apparently planned to tell Taymor about the plan one night, but Bono showed up drunk with supermodels instead:

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