Michael Bezjian/Getty Images Hollywood breaks hearts. Absolutely. Regularly. And guaranteed by the crack of Sunday morning box-office estimates.
But does Hollywood cause heart attacks? Did it cause Brittany Murphy's, as her widower, Simon Monjack, attests?
Right. As in, wrong.
Let's start from the top: On Wednesday, the Daily Beast reported Monjack was "only days away" from filing a wrongful death lawsuit against Warner Bros., a complaint that supposedly will allege that the studio fatally stressed out the 32-year-old actress when it fired her from the planned sequel to Happy Feet. Said Monjack: "They killed her."
Warner Bros. fired back saying, one, Murphy wasn't fired, as she'd never been hired, and, two, any suggestion that Murphy's death was its fault was "demonstrably false, reprehensible and defamatory."
We're clear on, and not unsympathetic to, the studio's position. But curious nonetheless, we asked a couple of lawyers if there was precedent for a company being found liable for literally, if figuratively, breaking someone's heart.
Take a wild guess what they said.
"I have never heard of a case of this kind," Shawn Chapman Holley, an attorney who's repped the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Mike Tyson, told us via email, "and I would be very surprised if it were to withstand judicial scrutiny."
Another legal eagle, William H. Newkirk, who specializes in wrongful-death suits, was likewise dubious of Hollywood being found at fault in, or even being asked to answer for, Murphy's Dec. 20 death.
"I won't say Simon won't find a lawyer to file his claim," Newkirk said, "but not one to win the case…I just can't imagine this meets the criteria of California law."
We imagine if you rolled your eyes, shook your head or otherwise reacted with disdain when you read about the could-be lawsuit, you are not surprised by these opinions, although probably still disgusted by the story. Monjack does seem to specialize in eliciting that emotion.
And to be sure, it seems the height of something—scapegoating? irresponsibility? absurdity?—to pin a fatal heart attack on a career gone south, and to not only assign blame, but to seek affirmation from the courts, to lobby a jury to declare, "Yes, folks, that's right, Happy Feet 2 did it."
An interesting twist, though, is that while Newkirk told us he's never heard of anybody successfully litigating a lawsuit like the one Monjack's proposing, he's heard plenty of somebodies talk about filing lawsuits that seem just as outrageous.
The somebodies invariably are mourners, and once heads clear, their threats cool.
"People, because of grief, come to lawyers all the time, and want to do something," Newkirk said. "People threaten lawsuits in retaliation for hard feelings, borne out of grief and personal loss. I think that's what this is."
We're not going to guess at Monjack's motives. We're going to hope they're pure, if clouded by grief. The Brittany Murphy story is sad enough as is. We don't need to imagine craven postscripts. And nobody needs to entertain, or be threatened by, a lawsuit that argues the wrong point.
Hollywood's a heartbreaker, not a heart breaker.
(Originally published Jan. 29, 2010, at 5 p.m. PT)
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Before the shocking death, before the scandal, there was a promising career. Relive it all in our Remembering Brittany Murphy gallery.