Mel Gibson is back in business in Hollywood, with last year’s “Hacksaw Ridge” aiding the actor and filmmaker’s redemption arc. However, it hasn’t taken long for Gibson to fall into one of the industry’s favorite pastimes — lawsuits!
Last year, cameras started rolling on “The Professor And The Madman,” an adaptation of the great book by Simon Winchester, about the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary by Professor James Murray (played by Gibson), whose work became complicated thanks to the participation of Dr. W. C. Minor (played by Sean Penn), an inmate at an insane asylum. Farhad Safinia (who penned “Apocalypto”) wrote the script and directed the picture, and it sounds like the kind of thing where you just get out of everyone’s way, and you’ll probably wind up with a decent movie in the end.
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That’s not what happened, according to THR. Gibson is now suing backers Voltage Pictures for multiple breaches of contract over the movie he’s been developing for decades, and over which he’d have plenty of executive authority through his Icon Productions, including the selection of final cut. Among the allegations is that Voltage failed to provide a budget, shoot “critical” scenes at Oxford University, pay the producing fee for Icon, and perhaps most egregiously, they screened an unapproved cut at Cannes for distributors.
Essentially if you wade through the legal papers below, the bottom line is this: Gibson and Icon want to secure the rights to the film from Voltage. We’ll see how this plays out, but it’s probably going to be a good while until “The Professor And The Madman” hits the big screen.