I think you’re getting way too far in the weeds. There can be so many things that occurred behind closed doors that we are not aware of and it would be pretty pointless to conjecture about whether Friedman or light actually had a binding agreement based on one eater article. Clearly Friedman believes they did and light doesn’t seem to agree.
Under traditional common law a contract typically requires offer/acceptance, consideration, and a “meeting of the minds”.
Respectfully, isn’t that kind of what happens on an internet forum? I think it’s an interesting topic, and I’m learning. I feel like your post implies there’s some sort of harm in discussing this, and I’m not sure what the harm would be? From my perspective, I’m simply engaging in some (benign) “arm-chair quarterbacking.”
This isn’t keeping me up at night, so it’s not like there’s any harm to me personally/mentally that way. I certainly am not stating that any of my opinions or guesses are The Truth.
If you think there’s some other harm (to Friedman, Light, et al) from continuing a discussion of this (not that there might anything more to discuss, at this point), please do inform me of that (I mean that genuinely, since it seems like you have legal knowledge, and I do not).
Who knows? Maybe our discussion will be helpful if Eater plans to write a follow up. Or perhaps it will be helpful to some budding restauranteur will know NOT to simply shake on an agreement for something this big.
Yup. At the risk of getting deeper into the weeds, under CA law their conversations plus the texts / emails could in combination be enough to constitute a binding agreement. Or not. We certainly haven’t seen / heard all the evidence that both sides might present. For example Friedman says he has a 20% profit share interest. But if Light says “I offered him 20% but he said no I should get at least 25%, and I didn’t respond” then there’s probably no binding agreement.
Fair enough, I support your internet detective sleuthing!
Moreso thought that with such limited information so many different conclusions and theories could be created.
20% sounds absurdly high for just helping with a lease and early design work.
I started working for ILM in the early(ish) 90’s, just after Jurassic Park’s Oscar win for VFX. I have a polaroid somewhere of me holding it. One of the things I learned was that ILM technically got ‘points’ on the film. But they were called ‘monkey points’, because you’d be about as likely to see them as you would a Los Angeles (or SF) dwelling monkey.
It was the highest grossing film of all time 'til Titanic dethroned it. ILM finally saw the barest trickle of $$ from it about 10 years later, when, after nearly a $1 BILLION in world wide grosses, they could no longer keep 100% of the revenue from showing up as ‘profit’.
And THAT is from, remember, one of the BIGGEST FILMS ON THE PLANET.
99.999999% of studio filmmaking is ‘unprofitable’ because most films are hugely expensive, and require MILLIONS to make, and then millions more (often the same amount or MORE than the cost to MAKE the movie) to market and distribute it. And ‘Hollywood accounting’ is designed to make sure that EVERY INVESTOR GETS PAID as much as possible, since many MANY (most?) films are woefully unprofitable, even in the normal non-hollywood meaning of the word.
It’s also the result of the studio system working with creative people. The studio doesn’t fund the next Avengers film in isolation. It’s part of some package deal, with investors buying into a whole raft of films, the Avengers, sure, but also the weird comedy, the oscar-bait drama, etc. And maybe the director of the Avengers demanded that she be allowed to make her weird art-house film on the studio dime if she agreed to make the world blow up this one last time. “One for them, one for me” is a common sort of deal to secure a name director or star. So yeah. Hollywood accounting seems unconscionable and unreasonable and it probably is, but maybe not quite the way you think it is.
Oh, my internet sleuthing was mainly looking up stuff about oral agreements (and what constitutes a valid agreement)! Your comments (and @cookiemonster and @sk8uno) are super interesting. The context of Horses just got me interested in larger processes that I don’t know much about.
Yeah, I think why I think the Eater article was either unfocused or premature. I mainly seemed like it was reporting some griping from Friedman. I guess that’s kind of interesting gossip, and consumers who have a sensitivity to giving $ (even indirectly) to alleged sexual predators may now avoid the place, but… what was the article hoping to ultimately achieve?
My understanding is that entertainment accounting is (was?) also really complicated b/c you have definite events that won’t happen until sometime in the future (eg., distribution to video, back when that was how the world worked) and you don’t know exactly when those events will occur and have no idea how much those events will earn.
I imagine that it’s gotten only more complicated w/ streaming and (didn’t some high profile actors sue b/c their films didn’t get distributed in theaters during the pandemic, and a lot of the actor’s profit came from that?) w/ entities from some many countries being involved…