It's really hard to keep track of all the lawsuits that sprung from the loins of Crash, the 2005 Oscar winner for Best Picture, but at least another one has been relegated to the annals of Hollywood history.
Financier Bob Yari, who due to Industry rules was removed as a coproducer on the film, has reached a tentative settlement with the law firm that represented him in two Crash-related suits and then hit him up for nearly $400,000 in fees.
Legal eagles for the firm of Christensen, Glaser, Fink, Jacobs, Weil & Shapiro filed a motion to dismiss Monday.
Details of the proposed deal were not made available. Yari hired the firm in 2006 when he sued the Producers Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to challenge the loss of his production credit. (A judge dismissed the complaint in January 2007.)
The firm fought for Yari again when Crash producers Cathy Schulman (who along with director Paul Haggis did accept a statuette in the film's honor) and Tom Nunan sued him for allegedly withholding profits, and again when Yari sued them for supposedly failing to reimburse him for various investments. All of this back-and-forth litigation is scheduled to go to trial June 30.
Obviously, someone's taking Crash's tangled-web metaphor way too seriously.