"Hello, I'm here to read for the role of Edward Cullen."

In the wake of the unnamed actress suing IMDb for revealing her true age, the two major actors guilds have also fired a shot at the website. From a joint statement by SAG and AFTRA:

“Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strongly believe that businesses like IMDb have a moral and legal obligation not to facilitate age discrimination in employment,” said the guilds. “Entertainment industry employers who would never directly ask a potential employee’s age routinely access that information through IMDb and its professional subscription site IMDbPro. IMDb has the power to remove the temptation for employers to engage in age discrimination by accessing this information.”

”IMDb publishes the actual dates of birth of thousands of actors without their consent, most of them not celebrities but rank-and-file actors whose names are unknown to the general public,” they said. “When their actual ages then become known to casting personnel, the 10+ year age range that many of them can portray suddenly shrinks, and so do their opportunities to work.”

In order to understand what’s going on here, I think it’s important to look at this issue from both perspectives. One one hand, it must be incredibly tough to be a 45-year-old actress. Outside of like three roles a decade (all given to Sandra Bullock), Hollywood tends to pin women into two categories: “young hot starlet” or “spinster/Mom.” Obviously, the former pays better and gives you the chance extend your career in a cutthroat industry. On the other hand, as long as IMDb keeps doing this, the two sides will keep fighting about it and it will give me a chance to post banner pics where I pretend Abe Vigoda is reading for roles in teen movies, which is HILARIOUS to me.

So, yeah, both sides make some pretty valid points.

A few days ago, a judge threw out a suit by an EOD soldier against the makers of The Hurt Locker, saying that the film version of the guy was different enough to be “transformative,” and refuting the guy’s assertion that the film had somehow slandered his reputation. But since Hurt Locker writer Mark Boal had been embedded with the plaintiff’s unit (hehehehe…), the suit at least made sense. Today, we learned of Michael Alan Rubin, a California man who is suing the makers of The Hangover II, who he’s never met, saying they stole his life story. Because that makes sense. What kind of lawyer would even take this case?

Rubin is representing himself in the case…

Ahh, it’s all becoming clear…

According Rubin’s federal lawsuit, filed last week in Calfornia, he married a Japanese woman named Tamayo in 2007 in Japan. Together, the couple honeymooned in Thailand and India where differences started arising over Rubin’s financial condition. During the honeymoon trip, Tamayo refused to share a hotel room with the luckless plaintiff.

In India, Rubin says he met a Bollywood producer who gave him work as a leading actor on several films. At which point, Rubin wanted to turn his experience with Tamayo into a feature film, so he wrote a script entitled Mickey and Kirin and allegedly deposited a copy with the Writers Guild of America. He later heard from a Hollywood friend about Hangover II, the story of some Asian misadventures by Americans on the road to a wedding.

“The production of Hangover 2 is not a complete ‘literary’ or ‘artistic’ works of the Hangover Defendants as credited in Hangover 2,” says the complaint. “In fact, the production of Hangover 2 was a result of infringement of the Plaintiff’s treatment ‘Mickey and Kirin’ and exploitation of the private real life of Plaintiff in an insulting manner.” [THR]

“First they stole my life story verbatim! Then they insulted me by changing all of the events and details! And your honor, may it please the court, I’d like to ask that the jurors cover their heads in tinfoil to keep from being influenced by my neighbor’s parrot, who’s always had it in for me, and can change people’s thoughts. He’s very sneaky.”

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Picture unrelated. ...We think.

An unnamed actress is suing IMDB for a million dollars after she says they revealed her age. She says she never revealed her age and that IMDB obtained it from her credit card information and posted it publicly without her permission. Oh come off it, Jennifer Aniston, everyone knows how old you are.

…actress is demanding $1 million from Amazon.com, accusing the company’s popular movie Web site, IMDb, of revealing her age by using her credit-card information.
The actress, who filed the federal suit in Seattle as “Jane Doe,” says she was keeping her age a secret because if Hollywood producers knew how old she was, she’d get fewer roles.
“In the entertainment industry, youth is king,” the suit says.
“If one is perceived to be ‘over-the-hill,’ i.e. approaching 40, it is nearly impossible for an up-and-coming actress, such as the plaintiff, to get work.”
The woman’s exact age isn’t listed in the suit. It says she is living in Texas.
She claims in the suit that IMDb, which is owned by Amazon, got her private information in 2008, when she subscribed to the site’s pay service, IMDbPro.
“Shortly after subscribing to IMDbPro, plaintiff noticed that her legal date of birth had been added to her public profile … revealing to the public that the plaintiff is many years older than she looks,” the suit says. |NYPost|

Yeah, well Dominican shortstops don’t like revealing their true age either, but what happens when you get out there on the casting couch and pull a hammy? These productions have to know what kind of risk they’re getting into. It doesn’t matter how old you think you look, the closer to 40 you get, the more liable you are to blow out a rotator cuff on your producer-handjob arm, and that’s just a bad situation for everyone. I feel bad for IMDB, who were just trying to protect their producers. But good for this broad, who’s probably going to make more on this suit than she ever did on residuals.

Meanwhile, I think the 23-year-old actresses of the world should band together and file a class-action suit against Cameron Diaz for stealing all their roles of “fresh-faced secretary” and “hot, young teacher.”

A Michigan woman has reportedly filed a lawsuit against FilmDistrict, the distributor of Drive, claiming that the film’s trailer promised Fast and Furious-style thrills and failed to deliver.

Sarah Deming has filed a lawsuit against FilmDistrict claiming that the distributors, “promoted the film Drive as very similar to the Fast and Furious, or similar, series of movies.”

I don’t know what she’s suing for, but getting those two hours of her life back may require petitioning God to slow her type-2 diabetes and extra episode of American Idol.

“Drive bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film… having very little driving in the motion picture,” the suit continues. “Drive was a motion picture that substantially contained extreme gratuitous defamatory dehumanizing racism directed against members of the Jewish faith, and thereby promoted criminal violence against members of the Jewish faith.

Deming is seeking a refund for her movie ticket, in addition to halting the production of “misleading movie trailers” in the future. The plaintiff intends to turn her individual case into a class action lawsuit, thereby allowing fellow movie-goers an opportunity to share in the settlement. [THR - and here's the local news story from Detroit, in case you wanted to see misspelled title cards and hear what some random people on the street think about this]

I saw Drive, and I actually had to do some Googling to understand what the hell she was even talking about with the Jewish racism thing. Apparently she means Ron Perlman’s character, who had violence done against him and also happened to be Jewish. Which is a real shame. It’s too bad Drive couldn’t be more of an empowering story of Hebrew identity, like, say The Fast and the Furious. Why, hardly a day goes by that I don’t see a gang of Jews driving by in their tricked-out Toyota Supras making a terrible racket. “Oy, Hoischel, get a load of this meshugganah Honda with his farkakte ground effects,” you’ll often hear them say. Typical Jews, always living their lives a quarter mile at a time.

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You’d think being an intern on Black Swan would be an incredible experience, like getting to judge a pussy-eating contest, but more artsy. …Huh. That sounded much less coarse in my head. Anyway, sadly, according a lawsuit filed by two former interns in a federal court in Manhattan Wednesday, it sounds more like a terrifying brush with living hell, where the damned perform sisyphean tasks like “making coffee” and “taking lunch orders,” while the demons dance around, watching Two and Half Men reruns.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, claims that Fox Searchlight Pictures, the producer of “Black Swan,” had the interns do menial work that should have been done by paid employees and did not provide them with the type of educational experience that labor rules require in order to exempt employers from paying interns.

“Fox Searchlight’s unpaid interns are a crucial labor force on its productions, functioning as production assistants and bookkeepers and performing secretarial and janitorial work,” the lawsuit says. “In misclassifying many of its workers as unpaid interns, Fox Searchlight has denied them the benefits that the law affords to employees.” Workplace experts say the number of unpaid internships has grown in recent years, in the movie business and many other industries. Some young people complain that these internships give an unfair edge to the affluent and well connected.

Whoa, being rich and well connected helps you land better jobs? Someone call the Duh police.

One plaintiff, Alex Footman, a 2009 Wesleyan graduate who majored in film studies, said he had worked as a production intern on “Black Swan” in New York from October 2009 to February 2010.
He said his responsibilities included preparing coffee for the production office, ensuring that the coffee pot was full, taking and distributing lunch orders for the production staff, taking out the trash and cleaning the office.
“The only thing I learned on this internship was to be more picky in choosing employment opportunities,” Mr. Footman, 24, said in an interview.

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