SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA 

   COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES, CENTRAL CIVIL WEST

RICHERT, an individual, Plaintiff V.

WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA WEST, INC.

and Osmond v. Screen Actor's Guild, Inc.)

Assigned for all purposes to the Honorable Carl J. West

Hearing Date:  October 3

Time:             1:30 P.M.

TO PLAINTIFF'S ATTORNEY NEVILLE JOHNSON, HIS FIRM, AND DEFENDANT AND HIS ATTORNEY OF RECORD

PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that William Richert, in pro per, respectfully moves this Court to allow Lead Plaintiff to VOID SETTLEMENT AS WRITTEN BASED ON DISCOVERY OF FRAUD AND BREACH OF SETTLEMENT AND RE-SET ENTIRE SETTLEMENT

FURTHER PLAINTIFF ASKS THE COURT FOR PERMISSION REPRESENT THE CLASS OF ALL AMERICAN WRITERS OWED FOREIGN LEVIES IN PRO PER AS A NON UNION WRITER UNTIL NEVILLE JOHNSON IS OUT OR REINSTATED AND PAUL KIESEL IS OUT OR REINSTATED OR A NEW LAWYER IS ASSOCIATED INTO THE LAWSUIT.

                      The motion is made with reference to the following facts:

1.)  Your honor, fraud has been discovered at the WGAw and according to the attached letter from Nick Kurtz as dictated by Paul Kiesl, this voids the entire settlement RICHERT VS WGAW et al. and also the WGAw has published false and defamatory information to the general public about the settlement and the Lead Plaintiff in order to discredit both, which a Class Action is intended to prevent and remedy at its core.

2.)  Tony Segall is a central figure in the fraud has been part of the WGAw fraud at the heart of the class certification from its inception, in the courtroom of Judge Morrow, and he and Emma Leheney and the Daniel Scott Schecter lawyer gave false and misleading information to Judge Morrow about the Lead Plaintiff’s membership status, which lead to a non union Plaintiff becoming the representative for all 18,500 WGAw and WGAe members, when I started out suing these very unions for the many thousands of American writers and book authors who belong to no union at all, and who far outnumber the union members bound by this settlement.

3.)  Plaintiff knows you are the only man who can void it and that you helped guide the process with great effort and patience and endurance and Plaintiff knows you can remove him from the case with a check mark, and Plaintiff asks that you remember he is not a lawyer and never asked for the job of class representative, and is only attempting to write like a lawyer and act like a lawyer and direct himself so, being a member of all three classes and Plaintiff asks the court to view this entire motion with the awareness that it is indeed a prayer and a wish.

4.)  Class Plaintiff respectfully asks the court to re-set the case to the original complaint which is about faud and does not include the representation of any WGAw and wGAe members by the plaintiff, so that WGA union signed members may again have the ability to file a lawsuit of their own.

5.)  In the unlikely event this settlement actually is voided, Class Plaintiff further requests that you associate into the case a lawyer for the Writer Class as well-versed in the system of Class Actions as Mr. Paul Kiesel, who has advised LA Judges on the inner working of such lawsuits, but who was not associated into the case, and Mr. Neville Johnson, a brilliant lawyer and thinker and fighter for the underdog, but one who has not communicated with the lead plaintiff during most of this period and therefore cannot be said to have represented the class adequately.

6.)  Plaintiff pleads that his deposition be taken and included in the court docket.

7.)  Plaintiff pleads that the re-filed lawsuit include the names of actual defendants including but not limited to John Wells, DavidYoung, Patric Veronne, Carl Gottlieb, Daniel Petrie Jr., Ari Rubin, Sally Burmester, Aaron Sorkin along with studios Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures et. al. Lawyer for defendant WGAw should not be granted exception from prosecution as he and Carl Gottlieb, presently secretary-treasurer of the WGAw, claim to be architects of the foreign levy program – which did not exist before this lawsuit was filed and cannot be said to exist now.

8.)   

Some on the WGAw Board of Directors wre aware of criminal acts on the part of WGAw headquarters employees, like Teri Mial, and approved union payoffs to cover up embezzlement.  Those on the WGAw Board of Directors during the 1990-2011 period may also be included as defendants if the court decides.

9.)  WGAw class asks that the SAG and DGA be re-connected so that those actors and writers who made movies not covered by any kind of union contracts for decades, owed astronomical amounts of money they can use right now in this economy -- are not silenced by the settlement of any one case.  The SAG settlement, now being examined by the Depart of Labor  according to VARIETY went unexamined and unknown by thousands of actors who were never given any information about any kind of lawsuit involving them as SAG chose only union-centric means to reach them.  But they are the true majority of actors owed money by the SAG union and the SAG settlement not only excludes all of these actors but allows SAG to keep the money it took.  These actors should not have to file another six year lawsuit to get to the place we are today. 

10.) Among the actors recently contacted by SAG members among themselves, not a single SAG member was aware of the settlement or had been told about it by the union. The union appears to have misled the court about the mailing. Thus I have been joined by former SAG President Ed Asner and hundreds of other actors sending a message to the Department of Labor, as reported in VARIETY.

11.) As Joel Grossman was one of the original signers of the foreign levy agreement the Class Plaintiff says was illegal, the Plaintiff asks that he be removed from the settlement as arbiter of any kind for writers.

12.) Class Plaintiff asks that Robert Hadl be removed as legal advisor to Neville Johnson and Paul Kiesel as he is advisor to the Defendant WGAw.

13.) Class plaintiff respectfully asks the court to consider the importance of this lawsuit to the Los Angeles community as a whole.  The 2007 WGAw strike against the entire entertainment industry may have been an attempt by the union to keep non union writers from speaking to union writers, thus disabling the ability of writers to speak openly without recrimination or public exposure as a “scab” by union hard-line on-liners like Niki Finke.

14.) Class Plaintiff asks the court to consider the rights of all actors and writers and directors living in Los Angeles whose rights to work are interfered with by unions when strikes are created without merit, led by the same men who hid the foreign levies until this suit was filed by Mr. Johnson, as the WGAw strike for reality show writers etc. hurt the local economy with a loss of 2.9 billion even cutting some court programs.

15.) The Class Plaintiff is but a stand-in for not only the writers touched by this case to date but all American writers in the future who might want to put videos on the internet or sell indie movies abroad, and this is a giant number of Americans as evidenced by you tube and the 500 million + who might put videos on Facebook’s new service.

16.) Class Plaintiff wishes to advise the court that the document presented to the court in 2009, MOTION TO DISMISS MOTION TO DISMISS has disappeared from the court docket, and asks that the document be replaced and re-examined if the court has time.

17.) If you decide not to replace the Plaintiff’s lawyers as you may do since they are “Superlawyers” familiar with the case and are men you know and trust as “Honorable men,” then I ask that you urge them to fight harder for their clients, the artists of America.

[§50] Dismissal or Compromise Requires Court Approval

A class action shall not be dismissed or compromised without court approval. SeeRule 23(e), FRCP; In re Jiffy Lube Sec. Litig., 927 F.2d 155, 158-159 (4th Cir. 1991) discussed the factors a court may consider in determining whether a proposed settlement should be approved. These factors include the question of whether the settlement was reached as a result of good-faith bargaining at arm’s length, without collusion, on the basis of: (1) the posture of the case at the time settlement was proposed; (2) the extent of discovery that had been conducted; (3) the circumstances surrounding the negotiations; and (4) the experience of counsel. See also Flinn v FMC Corp., 528 F.2d 1169, 1173 (4th Cir. 1975), cert denied, 424 U.S. 967 (1976).

Your Honor, if the above motion above seems confusing at first, please consider that in all this time there are people who still don’t understand the scope of the matters under consideration here, including economist consultants who’ve worked for almost a year without getting anywhere, let alone the tens of thousands of union and freelance artists and craftsmen involved working in Los Angeles and around the world.

My lawyers told they never read the foreign levy agreements either.

I have read them, as you know.

Here is what the WGAw said about this case and this plaintiff in a widely read declaration published in The Hollywood Reporter, which has a readership not much connected to non-union writers:

Is it appropriate that the Guild is collecting and disbursing foreign royalties? Why or why not? (DGA, SAG and WGA are doing this. On behalf of members and non-members. Foreign royalties are different from residuals, and are not mentioned in the collective bargaining agreements.) Is the Guild doing a good job at this? Why or why not? What if any improvement is needed?

The foreign levies program has been unfairly tarnished by critics, and more worrisomely, poorly explained to members. Foreign levies are a special tax on media colleted by 17 different countries, which for many years was given wholesale to the studios. In the late 1980s, the WGA and DGA worked together to garner 50 percent (25 percent per Guild) of that money for the members -- the creators of the media these governments taxed. This was a big win and a worthy program, one that has won some $90 million for writers.

The tarnishing occurred when a non-member filed a lawsuit against the WGA for also collecting monies belonging to non-WGA writers. The irony of this lawsuit is that the Guild never wanted this role in the first place -- the requirement to distribute money to members and non-members was imposed upon the WGA by these governments who had no interest in dividing the money themselves. The lawsuit was settled out of court, but the upshot is that the WGA is now saddled with the costly burden of tracking down non-members to give them European tax dollars. I have nothing but respect for the WGA’s role in this program, and I wish we could better educate all members and observers to what occurred.

Your honor, this is precisely what you asked Mr. Segall to assure the WGA would NOT do, and it sends a chilling message to future class litigants, as intended.

Unions of bygone days used techniques like this to discredit and shame their opponents, but a Class Action deserves the truth and should not be subject to the kind of illegal tactics or intimidation that prompted the lawsuit to begin with.

Like the character written by Budd Schulberg -- whom I represent and whose heirs are owed money – said in that famous scene in ON THE WATERFRONT, a movie about union corruption, you said you would look out for the writers in my class and I plead with the court to keep its promise.

When Tony Segall fights about ‘collections” it’s really a way to avoid revealing the names of the major studios who’ve been taking the lion’s share of the artist’s money – 92.5% - nothing new to Hollywood.

What is new is a lawsuit about money which is between entities – like unions and studios – with neither side admitting who’s doing it or even who’s in charge of it, although John Wells says it’s a successful program.

John Wells says the union paid ou 90 million, Neville Johnson says he got 100 million for the writers – and still no evidence of either.  None, not anything, and now my lawyers are willing to give the union another six months to stall when we all need money, including social services in LA.

Your Honor once said this case has “a bad look to it” and you were right. 

While Neville Johnson talks tough in the present declaration about the union it was announced in the Hollywood "trades" he's working as co-counsel with Tony Segall in a case about a writer fighting UNIVERSAL, which is also a signer of the foreign levy agreements.  This indeed has a bad look to it, and appears to be a conflict of interest, and it’s a continuation of the same game with the same players.  When the union screams in protests about revealing the “collection” they’re trying to keep the identity 21 years of partnership secret.

I believe Mr. Johnson’s statement that this court is the writer’s only hope places undue burden upon the court, if the court will excuse a writer’s observation, since the court is really dependent entirely upon what is presented to it and therefore relies profoundly on the Plaintiff’s and Defendant’s lawyers as much as their clients do.

There should be no loaded secrets or unanswered questions involving the fates of so many Americans.

As I told Judge Highberger, both sides were aware that I was not a WGAw member when that was accepted by Judge Morrow and you.

I’m not the person to say to you that Class actions are a legal tool designed by Congress to help those smaller than the institutions that harm them, who can’t afford to act alone.

Presently I am pleading under the Congress’ intention that a lead plaintiff in a class action is the Attorney General for his/her class, hiring lawyers, conducting discovery, and injured in a major way by the defendants.

Thus I am signing the release given me by Neville Johnson which removes him as my counsel and I am agreeing to substitute myself as Attorney General for my class, acting in pro se, until new counsel can be associated into my case by the court or the present counsel re-born.

Both Mr. Johnson and Mr. John Wells say the money paid out is either 100 million or 90 million which, according the usual class action standard of treble and I have tried to understand it, should mean that the lawyers divide 30 million more or less, with no complaint from the Plaintiff.

However, if Plaintiff has gotten less time from the lawyers because they were paid less, or because they wanted to help the complex court system keep the 40% savings Paul Kiesel may have helped engineer for the LA court system, then Plaintiff asks that the lawyers get full amount or whatever portion of the 40% time savings keeps this case from getting the money out and naming trusted union leaders who stole be returned.

Plaintiff hopes the court understands that he appreciates the huge amount of documents – number in the millions with thousands of plaintiffs – the court normally has to cope with.  However, there are people who need more information and help and this case has got to have been much less complex than most in terms of volume.

My lawyers are seeking to give the WGAw another six months to do what they they haven’t even begun yet after a year and haven’t done in the past six years, and the WGA has even begun to exclude the “collection” part of the foreign levy program which is the part that tells us who got the money and how much.

I realize I have not been the most popular fellow in this courtroom.  Screenwriters are notorious for being kept off movie sets, but you might say this is a reality show, as I find myself in a position never asked for, which I cannot abandon as it involves the artists who shape our culture.

Evil men cannot be maintained in high position hurting innocents no matter how hard it is to remove them.

As Neville Johnson and Paul Kiesel wrote:                          

In the words of class member Tennessee Williams: Your Honor, we “have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Class Champion – Writers & Heirs

Assigned for this lawsuit and related cases SAG and DGA.

Cc fellow class members union and not

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER WGA statement

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER Johnson/Segall together

Undelivered Charles Bukowski Check

Substitution of Attorney Neville Johnson

Kurtz letter re Fraud Discovery

The above documents to be presented in court

On October 3 at 1:30 PM at Superior Courthouse

Commonwealth LA


THE ARTICLE BELOW PROVIDES A LITTLE HISTORY ON THE ISSUE

UNION CORRUPTION UPDATE

Monday, July 02, 2007 -- Vol. 10, Issue 14

For Influential Leaders & Important Decision Makers:

Information on America's most corrupt & aggressive unions

SCREENWRITERS (WGA)

Film & TV Writers Union Sits on $20 Million in Back Royalties

It’s a scandal right out of a movie plot.  And it’s more than a little ironic that the people allegedly being scammed make a living writing movie plots.  A Los Angeles-based union, the Writers Guild of America, West (WGA), has been deliberately withholding and/or siphoning off about $20 million in accumulated royalty checks to which screenwriters or their estates are legally entitled – or so a class-action suit filed in Los Angeles federal court in September 2005 alleges, a suit recently sent back to a state court.  In the nearly two years since, accusations continue to fly.  The guild stands accused by four parties of sitting on a huge pile of revenues from foreign levies rather than distributing them to their rightful claimants.  Worse, though not the subject of the suit, the union may have funneled far greater sums of money to major studios and producers, and keeping some of it.  Guild officials insist they want to mail all checks to their proper recipients, but can’t find them.  A number of writers, led by ex-WGA member William Richert, say this is a fish story, another example of creative accounting, Hollywood-style. 

American movies and TV programs attract large audiences abroad.  And audiences in other countries, like those in our own, often record movies onto tapes, DVDs and computer hard drives.  The problem is that our copyright law doesn’t necessarily apply to theirs.  The U.S. allows employers who commission copyrighted work to claim authorship of that work.  In other words, we do not adhere to a system of droit moral (i.e., the moral rights of authors).  But the rest of the world doesn’t see eye-to-eye with us on that one.  Back during the 1980s, foreign governments, especially in Europe and South America, placed levies (i.e., taxes) on the sale of blank videocassettes and, later on, blank DVDs and computer hard drives.  The idea was to compensate screenwriters of taped movies and TV programs shown in their respective countries.  This tax is intended solely to compensate U.S. authors.  But there are logistic problems.  How are these “blank media” royalties calculated?  Who distributes them?  And even more basic:  How do these governments identify the authors?  After going through various arrangements, the Writers Guild of America, along with the Directors Guild of America, eventually negotiated a settlement with the studios in 2001.  They would share credit as co-authors for up to 25 percent of the foreign levies.  The studios would get the rest. 

Things haven’t worked out as planned, however – at least for a number of writers who believe the WGA is sitting on the money or worse, funneling it to the studios.  That’s what precipitated the 2005 lawsuit.  The class-action suit, which names the Directors Guild of America as a co-defendant, scored an advance this past April when U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Morrow ruled that the agreements under which the guilds distribute foreign levies “limited the plaintiffs to receive their full share.”  She ordered the case tried in state court.  Officials of both guilds have dismissed the charges as groundless.

William Richert, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based lead plaintiff, says underpayment of royalties has been a fact of life for thousands of writers, whether WGA-affiliated or not.  Richert, whose film credits include A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, Winter Kills, and The Man in the Iron Mask, recently received a $467 check for movies shown abroad during 2002-05.  He thinks the real figure due to him is much higher.  “The Writers Guild has been collecting money for years and not accounting for it,” he remarked.  “I never gave any person or union the right to collect money for me, and to withhold money from me without my knowledge.”  Richert isn’t the only writer who may have gotten the shaft.  Jon Brown, a partner in Ensemble Entertainment, a firm representing the estates of several writers, puts it this way:  “They [the WGA] have an account with a bunch of money in it that belongs to their members – and not them – and they’ve made no attempt to distribute it.”  One of his clients, the estate of the late Paul Gallico (Pride of the Yankees, The Poseidon Adventure), received a foreign levy check for a mere $120.  And Brown had to do months of legwork just to obtain that.  “If they wanted to find me, they could have found me very easily,” he said.                      

Complicating the issue is a wrongful-termination suit filed last year in Los Angeles County Superior Court by Teri Mial, a former WGA estates trusts manager who alleges that she’d been fired for cooperating with a U.S. Labor Department investigation of the union’s handling of foreign levies.  A former manager for ex-child actor Gary Coleman, Mial stated in a deposition that she previously had voiced “heavy, serious concerns” to her bosses about repeated delays and problems in sending foreign levies to writers and beneficiaries.

Guild officials respond that they would like nothing better than to send out the checks, but that they can’t find the recipients.  “Do we wish we didn’t have $20 million on hand?  Sure.  We wish it were a lot easier to distribute,” said Tony Segall, WGA general counsel.  “We’ve done nothing but work at getting this money out.”  The guild’s chief financial officer, Don Gor, argues that because so many of the claims for back earnings have been filed over the Internet, it is difficult to process all the claims.  “Most of the buildup occurred around 2000 where we got more money in – and our system was not capable of processing all of it,” he admitted.  As for Teri Mial’s wrongful-termination suit, Segall denies the WGA took arbitrary action against her.  He admits that she is owed $17,000, but that this is not the result of deliberate withholding.  “We discovered in the last month financial discrepancies in the foreign levies department, and that they go back to December 2006,” he said.  “We were unable to account for the funds.”

So what exactly is “missing?”  Is it the money or is it the writers who are supposed to be receiving it?  Ask the writers, their union, the studios or the “foreign-collection societies” who are supposed to be in charge of distributing the checks – you’ll get a different answer from each.  Since 1991, the writers’ guild has received $47 million in foreign levies, paying out about $27 million.  That leaves a gap of $20 million, the disputed sum.  Guild officials say they have hired temporary employees to reduce the backlog, acquiring information from the foreign-based societies. 

If theft is going on, the real story may be something independent of the suit.  For years, the Writers Guild has diverted 92.5 percent of writer fees toward studios, producers and itself.  Since 1990, critics charge, the union has taken tens of millions of dollars off the top without the writers’ consent or even their knowledge.  “The theft has been extraordinary,” states WGA renegade Eric Hughes, who wrote the scripts for Against All Odds and White Nights.  The Department of Labor, though reluctant to talk about it on the record, reportedly has been gathering evidence and testimony about this practice for more than a year.  However the copyright suit turns out, that may turn out to be a sub-plot.  (Los Angeles Times, 5/2/07; LA Weekly, 5/2/07; other sources).