For our next installment in our week-long My Cousin Vinny tribute, we here at Abnormal Use are once again proud to present to our interview with the film’s co-producer and screenwriter, Dale Launer, who was kind enough to agree to an interview with our own Nick Farr late last year.  No stranger to Hollywood, Launer is the the son of actor John Launer (Hitchcock’s Marnie, and TV’s “Dragnet” and “Perry Mason“).  Along with Vinny, Launer has written and produced several hit movies, including Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Love Potion No. 9. As you can see from the interview that follows, Launer offered plenty of insight (and more) behind one of our favorite films, including the genesis of the Vinny character, inspirations for the screenplay, his thoughts on the production of the film, and news to us, the proposed My Cousin Vinny sequel that was never to be.

NICK FARR: Looking back twenty years, what are your thoughts on My Cousin Vinny and how it has been received as a courtroom or a legal drama?

DALE LAUNER: You know, it’s interesting how the story was conceived.  It was actually one of the first stories I ever had.  It was conceived back in the early seventies.  I had a vague idea of what the story was.  . . . In the very early seventies, I met a guy who had taken the bar and was waiting the bar exam results.  So I asked him, “What happens if you don’t pass?”  He says, “Well, I can take it again.”  I said, “Well, what happens if you don’t pass then?”  “You take it again.”  “Well, how many times can you take it?”  He said, “You can take it as many times as you want.”  “What’s the most someone has taken it?”  You can see this is a little like a third degree, like a cross examination.  So I said, “How many times can you take it, fail and then eventually – no what’s the most times somebody has taken and failed and finally passed?”  He said, “Thirteen times.”  I was surprised at how many law students seem to know that number, you know. That, by the way, since has been superseded in California, it was doubled.  It took some guy twenty-six attempts to pass.  And I believe there is now a limit, interestingly enough.  But I always thought that guy who took thirteen times to pass the bar, or girl, is probably out there practicing law in some capacity.  Now, how would you feel if suddenly you learned that guy is your lawyer?  And then I stepped it up and made it a little funnier.  What if you have been accused of a crime and clearly, you have what appears to be the worst lawyer in the country?  And then even funnier yet, then I set it up, what if you’re driving through the deep south [and] you’re arrested in a small town for a murder you did not commit?  And that was back then when I would say generally if you’re from the north or a big city, you had a certain prejudice against the south, and that was largely because it was portrayed in movies like Easy Rider.  So, I took that straight out of Easy Rider.  I mean, that was basically where that idea came from. And that idea was back in 1972.  And so it was an idea I sort of sat on, and when I actually had a career and a couple of movies made, I remember pitching it.  . . . I still wasn’t sure exactly what the story was, I just knew the kids were going to be innocent.  And then I actually flew down to New Orleans, picked up a car, drove up to Mississippi, I went through Jackson, I stopped in, I think, Yazoo or Wazoo, I think I made up the names of one of them, I can’t remember.  And then went over to Alabama and drove through there, and I stopped in a little town called Butler and knocked on the door of a local lawyer, I think the district attorney, and sat down and chatted with him.  So a lot of ideas came from that trip.  . . . [P]eople seemed to be excited about the fact that somebody from the movie business would be down there actually doing research.  . . . [T]hey let me know that they hoped I wouldn’t portray the south unfairly.  A lot of times in movies it made them look like a bunch of rednecks.  And so that is actually part and parcel of the movie.  So when he goes in to meet the judge, because see the judge is a little like, a little tough on him, a little extra tough to let you know.  We’re very sophisticated up here.  Don’t get any ideas.  As a matter of fact, I’ll show you how sophisticated we are.  I intend to hold you to the letter of the law.

So, that was great.  That all works for the story.  Then what happened and while I was writing it, I had a friend of mine, he was a lawyer who was a litigator and he’s an old friend from high school and we had a number of brunches.  And I would ask him a lot of questions about exactly what the procedure is.  Then I asked, “Where do you learn this stuff?”  He says, “Well, you learn it from either going in the court and finding out and watching or you learn it from the firm that hires you.”  I was taken aback.  They don’t teach you this in law school?  He laughed and said, “No.”  “Are you kidding me?  That’s fantastic, okay.”  So that’s what the movie’s about.  And I thought what’s great about it is, especially from the audience point of view, is how many courtroom movies we see and how many times we don’t understand what they’re saying, I get to explain it.  So the movie explains things to the layman.  Now, . . . [the movie is] mentioned in a lot of law exams.  It’s mentioned in an evidence exam in Harvard.  And anytime I run into a law professor, often they’ll mention Vinny.  . . . [O]ne guy said that you’re going to learn everything in this class that you didn’t learn in My Cousin Vinny, which is great.  So, it has taken on a certain life.  You know, what’s odd is I thought the movie would be embraced by the car guys because that movie gets in some real automotive details.  It wasn’t picked up by any of the car magazines.  But the legal community absolutely seemed to have picked up and embraced the movie, so it’s very exciting to me.  For me, one of the most exciting things in my career was when the American Bar Association’s monthly journal came out a couple of years ago with an issue that said the twenty-five greatest legal movies – then they had twenty-five runner ups.  And Vinny came in number three which was like getting the Oscar.  In some ways, better.

NF: And Vinny, Vincent Gambini, was also ranked number twelve on the list of greatest fictional lawyers as well.

DL: Number twelve?  I thought it was higher than that.

NF: I was surprised that they could come up with eleven people who would outrank him.

DL: Well, he used to be number one.  I think they allowed the public to get in there because it was number one for a while.  There was number one, Atticus Finch was, I think.  Another one, the other number one – Oh, no, no, no, the article was “The Greatest Fictional Lawyer Who Wasn’t Atticus Finch.”  And Vinny – he was number one for a while there so –

NF: Now they have Frank Galvin from The Verdict.

DL: Well, they’ve been stuffing the ballot.

NF: Did you foresee these types of accolades when you were writing the script?

DL: No.  I perceived different accolades.  I’m writing my Oscar speech and things.  On a certain day, write one scene, and “Oh, this is great.”  But no, not for what the movie has become.  And with a certain amount of distance, the movie seems to have gone and snowballed a little bit in terms of attention and respect.

NF: Just a minute ago, you spoke about the lawyer in California that had failed the bar exam thirteen times before passing. Vinny failed the bar exam five times before finally getting it right on his sixth attempt.  What does does the film say about the difficulty of the bar exam?

DL: Actually, I’m going to have to tell you.  This is a little interesting inside information on the movie.  And I’m going to say things that may be a little critical of the director and you are welcome to print this.  What happened was, I did not want to make Vinny a dumb guy.  . . . Vinny was supposed to be originally a bag man for the mob.  He was supposed to be a big tough guy who seemed a little dopey, but he’s not dopey.  He seems to have an intrinsic intelligence.  Occasionally in my life, I’ve met people like this who acted a little dopey, but they were smart people.  They seemed to go out of their way to act a little dopey, but they’re actually fairly bright people.  Off the record, I think our last president was like this, George W.  I think he liked to act a little dopey, but he wasn’t that dopey.  Does that make sense?

NF: Yes, sir.  I totally understand.

DL: I don’t think that’s so bad.  I think it’s sort of a backhanded compliment.  It also goes in the vein of Will Rogers.  I think Will Rogers acted dopey per se, but he acted like just kind of a “Gee, shucks” common folk who had a very sharp way of looking at things.  So, rather than make Vinny dumb, what I did is [make] Vinny dyslexic.  So, . . [w]hat I had in the script is, the kid said, “Why did it take you five times to pass the bar or six years to get through law school and six times to pass the bar?”  And Vinny says, “Well, I’m a little dyslexic.”  It’s just one line.  I didn’t want to focus [on it] too much in the movie, but that actually says a lot about his character.  People with dyslexia tend to have a little chip on their shoulder that they think in some ways people perceive them as being either backwards or retarded.  When in fact, that little chip on their shoulder means they’re a little sometimes overly independent.  And it should reflect something in their personality, which it does with Vinny.  He’s a little dyslexic.  Next scene, or a scene or two later, he meets with the judge.  The judge gives him this big thick book on Alabama criminal court procedure.  “Read this over the weekend.”  It’s really kind of funny if you think about it.  Dyslexic guy?  Reading a book like that over the weekend?  Yeah.  Not going to happen.  So, then, later, we see him looking at the book.  Then we see what he sees, and we cut to a very close shot of a word, and the word’s jumbled up.  Then the word would dissolve, do you know what dissolve is?

NF: Yes, sir.

DL: Okay, then the word would dissolve to the word less jumbled up, and then, finally, it would dissolve to the word not jumbled at all.  Then we would pan over to the next word, and that one is jumbled up.  He sees it’s going to take him a year to get through this book.  It’s going to take him a while.  Then there was one additional moment where this was mentioned where his girlfriend says, “Is there anything I can do to help?”  He says, “No.”  She says, “Do you want me to read to you?”  She said this kind of delicately.  He says, “No, I don’t want you to read to me.  I’m not a fucking child.”  That’s it.  That’s all that’s mentioned in the movie.  I’m sorry, in the script.  That got cut out of the movie because the director said he did not know how to portray dyslexia.  So I said, “Why don’t you know how to do it?  Why don’t you just do it the way I wrote it?”  He says, “You know, like where the other words are darkened out, and you see that one thing, it’s too deliberate.  I don’t like that.”  “Well, you don’t have to darken them out.  Just go close shot on the one word.”  “I don’t know.  I don’t like that. I don’t like dissolve.”  So guess what?  Since he doesn’t like dissolve, since he could not figure out a way to do that, which is what a director should be able to do if you had a little talent, that gets cut out of the movie.  So when they asked Vinny, “Why did it take you so long?” – I’ll be honest with you, I don’t even remember what he says – it doesn’t make any sense to me.  So Vinny’s not dyslexic in the movie.  However, in the electronic news kit – which is the press kit that goes out that’s made by the studio that goes to all the magazines and the newspapers and all the news shows and the entertainment shows and there’s clips from the movie, there’s also interviews from the director and the actors.  I don’t know if there’s an interview with me in there, I don’t remember.  And the head of publicity, or someone who works for publicity for Twentieth Century Fox interviews the director.  This is not like somebody who’s trying to trip you up.  This is not “60 Minutes.”  So this is someone on your side, and the trick question was, “So, what’s this movie about?”  The director stumbles a little bit and says – he’s English – “Well, it’s um, um, it’s about a dyslexic man.”  That’s the first line out of his mouth.  And he’s the one that cut that out of the movie.  You wouldn’t know that.  There’s a long involved answer so one thing that I’m not happy about in the movie is Vinny comes off not so bright.  You don’t know why it took him so long to get through the bar.  And then suddenly he starts acting smart.  What you have to do is make assumptions that he is actually a smart guy, and the law is just complicated and boring.  And for some reason, he didn’t pay attention.  . . . I don’t know if there is any other conclusion than that.  There’s also one other line in there – one other thing that the director changed which doesn’t make as much sense.  When Vinny’s cousin, played by Ralph Macchio, is . . . describing how Vinny has a kind of innate intelligence, he describes a wedding that Vinny was at for a mutual relative and that they hired some sort of famous magician there as some entertainment.  And that Vinny could figure out all the tricks.  Now to me that takes a certain kind of intelligence. So that way of observing something that looks a certain way, but the reality of it is something else.  So, I would think that would be a kind of intelligence a good litigator would have.  Then Vinny is explaining something to the kids and he’s explaining this with a deck of cards.  And he says that the prosecutor has to build a case, and he takes pieces of evidence which looks solid from one angle, and he assembles it and it looks like it’s a solid case.  In a sense, a three dimensional thing, and there’s a little bit of a metaphor for that.  Then he knocks it over and says, “When in fact it’s really a house of cards.”  That all makes sense to me.  But the director rewrote that a little bit and turned it into a magic trick which doesn’t make sense at all.  . . . It doesn’t make any sense to me.  It sounds like Vinny is trying to make the case that’s completely opposite of what I just said.  It looks like he’s suggesting that either the case is magic or the deck is stacked, it doesn’t make any sense to me.  I’m rambling here.

NF: How were you able to create realistic courtroom scenes and still make them funny?

DL: Doing research and trying to find some good juicy courtroom ideas.  Especially, there’s a book out there which I think it’s called – I don’t know what it’s called – but it’s like “Comedy in the Law.”  That’s not the term, but sort of, I don’t know, it’s a book of humor and there’s some great little moments in there.  They’re all real so they’re basically public domain so I could take them and use them.  One of them I lifted up and put directly into the movie.   [That one] is where someone was doing a voir dire of a potential juror and they . . . ask them their opinion on capital punishment, and they said something like, “I think it should be left up to the victim’s families.”  Then they then described exactly what the murderer did, and then that the juror actually said, “Fry them.” So I put that right in the movie.  There was another thing which I would liked to have worked in. Some police, I think it was police, were questioning somebody.  There was a fax machine in there – no, no, a copy machine.  A Xerox machine.  They put some wires in the back of it and then attached the wires to an aluminum salad colander.  They put the colander on the guy’s head.  They told him, in fact, this is a lie detector.  They asked him a question.  He would answer it.  They would press copy.  Apparently, they had a [piece of paper] underneath there that said “He’s lying.”  They showed it to him, and it said, “He’s lying.”  It actually unnerved the guy so much that he broke down and told them the truth.  This apparently was thrown out of the court.  But it was just hilarious.  I always wished I could have worked that in. I studied some court cases including one which is a very interesting, one which I had remembered in a movie as a kid.  I didn’t know what it was, and I went online, I think I went online, but I found it somewhere. But it actually was a court case that was tried and won by Abraham Lincoln.  . . . [I]t was a murder case.  He was defending somebody, and somebody said, “Are you sure it was him?”  He says, “Yes.” “How can you be so sure because, it was nighttime?”  He says, “Because I saw him in the moonlight.  There was a full moon.”  Well, what happens, he picks up a Farmer’s Almanac, [and] points out [that] on that date there was no moon.  Certainly, no moon at that time.  Bang.  Wins the case.  Which I thought that’s great, that’s great lawyering.  That’s a great reversal.  That’s a great turn in a case.  How can I take that conceptually and then turn that around and make it funny?  And a lot of the humor just would come out of a certain character.  There was one guy who was not too bright, played by the actor Raynor Scheine, which was great.  He was living in a trailer, and he was looking through a dirty window, through leaves, and through all that stuff.  So that’s generally what you do in a regular court case.  I’m not sure how to answer that question.  I didn’t make it funny.

NF: How did Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei become involved in the project?

DL: When I was writing the movie, I liked that sort of Italian American lower class or working class, whatever you want to say, that patter that you would hear in certain movies.  It’s also sort of a Mediterranean thing, the way they talk back and forth and seem like they’re arguing when in fact it’s just a discussion.  A real good example of that is Raging Bull.  The guy says, “What are you doing?” ” What am I doing?”  “What’s it look like I’m doing?”  “I don’t know, if I knew what you’re doing, I wouldn’t ask what you’re doing.”  So it goes on and on like that, and it’s fun to write, it’s easy to write, and it just sounds funny to me.  So I kind of took that out of that movie.  That kind of sensibility.  A lot of that was a certain amount of improv in there.  In those movies.  Not my movie.  Adapt that to the character.  So the characters – somewhere along the way – I didn’t know where Vinny was from when I first conceived of the idea.  Then somewhere in the mid-eighties I wanted Vinny to be like Sam Kinison.  Remember the stand-up comic?

NF: Yes, I do.

DL: He was the screamer.  I saw Kinison a number of times in concert at the comedy clubs.  You just prayed, you prayed there would be a heckler there because this guy had a way of just eviscerating a heckler.  I started to think that the hecklers were planted because he was so funny with them, and he would just rip into somebody so well.  . . . [A]lso, in college, I was on debate team, and I remember going to a couple of debates before I debated and seeing some really good debaters.  A really good college debater wouldn’t just win an argument, they would devastate you.  Not just devastate you, ideally, they would humiliate you.  It just worked better that way.  And it was much more interesting to the debate judges.  I wanted to put that in the movie.  I wanted that kind of character.  So it was going to be Sam Kinison, at least his personality.  And at one point in the story, . . .  the original idea was probably to have him do that with every witness, and then I changed that.  I wanted it to be a little different with every witness.  So there was one woman who came in with very thick glasses.  She was very sweet, and he was very sweet with her.  Very candid with her.  I can’t remember the name of the character, but the one Raynor Scheine played, the one who was looking through the dirty window, through the trees and the leaves.  And this guy was a little dim.  But he didn’t really humiliate him.  He did, but in a very subtle way, you know what I mean?  You really had to take some guy who being a little belligerent, and then the payoff is better.  So there was that one character who was talking about the grits.  And that was the one where I got to use that idea and that was probably the only time I ever used that idea.  And he would humiliate the guy with the grits.  Because the guy with the grits had a little bit of an attitude. So the whole idea that it takes X amount of time to cook grits, and it took you such and such amount of time that this happened, or something like that.  The line there that was one of my favorite in the movie was, “Do the laws of physics cease to exist on your stove?”  Which is great.  That’s really ripping somebody in court.

NF: What I was getting towards was Joe Pesci or Marisa Tomei. Did you have them in mind?

DL: How did Joe and Marisa get involved?  . . . [T]his is kind of an interesting story.  If I can name the names, yeah, sure, why not?  Being the writer and producer of the movie, I met with the president of the studio, Roger Birnbaum and the chairman, which was Joe Roth.  We were going to talk about casting.  And Roger said, “Who do you think would be good for this?”  So I said my first choice for Vinny would be Robert De Niro.  Then Roger had a kind of pained, almost embarrassed look for me.  Then he said, “Robert De Niro?”  Then he shook his head slightly pained.  “For one, he’s just not funny.”  I said, “Robert De Niro?  You know, he started as a comic actor.”  He said, “Really? I don’t know, he’s just not funny.  And his movies don’t make money.”  I said, “Well, Midnight Run did make money, and he was in it, and it was a comedy, and he was funny.  I like how he plays it straight and knows where the jokes are.”  So he said, “No, no, no.”  Now, cut to now.  I don’t know if any drama or thriller that De Niro’s ever done that has really made much money.  But the comedies all make money, and everybody thinks De Niro’s funny now.  Isn’t that interesting?

NF: That is interesting because you think of De Niro now and you’re thinking Meet the Parents and Analyze This.

DL: And notice he plays it straight, and it’s still funny.  It’s great.  And that’s what I wanted for Vinny.  That’s the tone I like.  That’s the tone I write for.  So the bane of my existence is when the director tries to come in and changes it.  You could play it straight, and it would be, if anything, to me, even funnier.  Otherwise you, by trying to be funny, by trying too hard, you tend to step on the joke.  Especially if the joke is somewhat situational.  So most of the humor in that movie can be played very straight, and it generally works that way.  . . . Joe was not the first attached.  He was certainly discussed.  And I say he’s not my first choice because Vinny was supposed to have been, like I say, a bad man for the mob.  A big guy.  A tough guy who’s supposed to come in and be imposing in the room.  De Niro is not that big but he comes off big.  Especially if you make all the other actors short.  . . . The first name that comes up from them is Danny DeVito.  I’m thinking, Danny DeVito?  Bad man for the mob?  I mean, Danny’s less than five feet tall.  That doesn’t make any sense to me.  He doesn’t come off as any threat.  There’s no irony that this tough guy could come in and be kind of smart.  So all that was very frustrating.  I said no to that.  They went after Danny anyway.  They basically completely ignored me.  Danny reads the script.  He’s now interested.  I’m not told how Danny is interested.  Do you want to direct?  Do you want to star in it?  Or both?  And he’s like, “I don’t know.”  Danny wasn’t sure what he wanted.  I had a meeting with Danny.  It was a creative meeting.  I sat down with Danny.  Here’s how it goes.  Danny says, “You know, the script, it just doesn’t, it just doesn’t go.  It doesn’t go.”  “So you want more go?”  And he laughed.  That’s kind of an absurd statement.  I mean, what am I supposed to do with that?  It’s one of those things that when you’re a screenwriter and somebody comes up to you, you’re in a meeting, and they have a problem with the script, it’s very important they be precise and convince you there’s actually something wrong and they convince you something’s wrong by telling you what’s wrong.  Then you can fix it.  If you’re a writer, and someone says, “The script just doesn’t go,” you can’t do anything with that.  All you can do is leave the meeting feeling bad about the script.  Or, hopefully, finding somebody somewhere who says, “The script’s got a lot of go to it.”  I had no idea what he meant.  As a result, the meetings were slightly strained in that way because he didn’t really know what to say.  So somewhere along the way he dropped out.  Then the script was offered to Jim Belushi.  Jim Belushi was to star in a movie called A League of Their Own, which is about a female baseball team.  And he was the coach.  I know Tea Leoni who was not a star then but was a friend of mine’s girlfriend, she was to be in it.  And then that movie fell apart and . . . they [had] made a pay or play deal to Belushi. Do you know what that means – pay or play?  A pay or play deal means we’re going to offer you this movie.  Here’s the offer, here’s, let’s say $2,000,000 or $5,000,000 or $10,000,000, it’s a pay or play deal.  We’re going to offer you this.  If the movie falls apart, we still pay you the money.  Great deal.  Especially if it falls apart.  You can get rich and never do anything. . . . . So they had to pay or play Belushi, and what they were hoping was that instead of paying you off nothing to not make this movie, we’ll offer you this instead.  Will you do My Cousin Vinny?  He passed on My Cousin Vinny.  So, I actually think he would have been good in it.  And then, after that, it then went to Joe Pesci.  Now, what had happened in the meantime, Joe was in a movie called Goodfellas, and in Goodfellas, he played a scary guy.  Before that, Joe didn’t come off threatening to me.  But in that movie, he comes off threatening – a little bit of a psychopath.  And then he won the Oscar.  And he actually was nominated for the Oscar while he was shooting Vinny.  So I said, “You’re a shoo-in.  You’re going to win.”  He says, “Well, I don’t know.”  I said, “I’ll bet you.  I’ll bet you money.  I’ll give you odds.”  He goes, “I’ll take that bet.  I don’t want to lose that bet.”

…

Marisa was on a list I had given the casting director. . . . I usually say there’s a list of ten actresses, I think there was more like six or seven.  And I put them in order of desirability.  I said, “Any of them will work, including the last one, which is Marisa Tomei.”  And I had seen Marisa in a play in New York.  She was part of an ensemble, a repertoire group called Naked Angels. I saw her in a play called “Aven’u Boys,” which was written by her boyfriend at the time.  The only reason she wasn’t at the top of the list is the top two or three actresses actually inspired the character in the movie.  So I think top of the list was Carol Davis.  Carol Davis was a girl I actually went out with a couple of times.  She was a hip hop singer.  She was an actress with real credits.  She was fluent in French and Italian, spoke a little Thai, mother was French, father was CIA.  She was a big brassy personality.  She showed up.  She was  a Penthouse Pet.  I think she showed up in Playboy, so she was sexy and foxy and brassy and funny and smart.  She was an interesting character.  When I was in Butler, Alabama doing research for the movie, I remember calling her up and describing the small town, which is like so many small towns in the south.  I remember she said, “I’ll bet the Chinese food is terrible.”  So, I wrote that down, that’s a good line.  I put it right into the movie.  I don’t know if she knows that line is hers.  If my friends say something that’s funny, I’ll write it down, and it goes into a script.  It’s mine.  They’re not writers, so.  . . . [S]he was on the list.  There was an actress named Lisa Gaye, I used to know.  I haven’t spoken to her in forever.  I remember she was a New York actress.  She showed up in the Troma movies – these Toxic Avenger low budget horror comedies.  I don’t remember what she played in them.  She played some wild character, I think, like some sort of a dominatrix-y kind of character.  But I remember going out with her to play pool in New York.  She shows up, and she’s got her own pool cue.  She’s sitting there screwing up.  That’s a great little thing.  I don’t know any woman who have their own pool cue.  There was another character named Nancy Boykiss who has since passed away.  Nancy was pursuing an acting career.  Nancy lived with this singer-songwriter named Staples Burkhart – not his real name by the way.  Staples and Nancy had this weird combative relationship.  You’d go to their house, and they would have these unbelievably vicious knock-down arguments, but they’d be performing.  It’s like they’re performing in front of people.  It’s like “The Honeymooners” or something.  . . . [O]ne of them would come up with something so unbelievably below the belt horrible.  The other would respond, and go, “Ho-ho, that was good.”  So the idea of them arguing was interesting to me as a component of the story and also a reason why Vinny might be considered to be smart.  He’s got a girlfriend, he’s been with her for ten years, and they argue all the time.  It’s all about argumentation.  It’s all about trying to like what’d you just say.  And then we establish that in the movie with a scene that was not played quite right, which both Marisa and Joe admit.  It was a little of my fault in there because I wrote something as a metaphor, but the director took it not as a metaphor which, as I say, is almost a form of seduction for them.  It was a form in the sense that one of them says something smart and the other is kind of like impressed with it.  Impressed with their intelligence.  Impressed with their comeback, their snappy comeback and it’s kind of cool. . . . .

NF: Are you referring to the leaky faucet scene?

DL: The leaky faucet scene.  Which is a very good example of, I guess, of cross examination.  Anyway, so in the movie, it plays a little different.  He actually plays it, and as they’re saying it, the other one is actually getting turned on, and they end up kissing at the end, which was just a little bizarre.  I should have worded it a little different, so the director understood.  But in that scene was a little like the arguments that Nancy and Staples would have, except it was about something rather specific, rather than being vicious and personal.  Again, it wasn’t exactly like the arguments they would have, but that’s where I got the idea from.

NF: What do you think lawyers could learn from Vinny?

DL: . . . [J]uries are common folk, and if you present a case to them in a way that makes perfect sense, that, of course, is what you want.  You want to do that because you want to get them on your side.  . . . I have always found that if you make an argument succinct, but with humor, you point out . . . the absurdity of the other guy’s case. If you can make them laugh, you’ve taken it to another level.  If you can make them laugh, you’ve got an emotional charge to your case or against their case.  I don’t know how often that happens, but clearly, and sometimes in a case, I can see if someone made a point and then the court laughs and the jury laughs, wow, they’re on your side.

NF: The testimony of the state’s expert witness, George Wilbur, played by James Rebhorn, is vital to the state’s case.  In fact, had Vinny not been able to look at these photographs and put all the pieces together, those boys could have been locked up for murder.  Ultimately, Lisa came was a good rebuttal witness.  So what does the film say about the use of expert witnesses?

DL: They can be manipulated.  Absolutely.  In my research, that happens all the time.  I know people who have been expert witnesses, and they know that they are sort of slanting things in a certain way, that you can absolutely jumble up statistics in a way to build a case and make it your case.  To give you a good example, and now that the guy’s dead, I don’t think he’s going to come back and sue now.  I wrote a movie called Blind Date. The movie was taken away and given to – I was told and it was later denied – to a female writer to soften it up.  It was too edgy.  That draft was then given to Blake Edwards who rewrote it.  I read it, and I thought it was horrible.  I actually argued two things which were somewhat opposed to each other.  One, I argued to have my name taken off the screenplay and put an anonymous name or a pseudo-anonymous name which I had registered with the Writer’s Guild which was Nigel Grosswinker.  Turns out the studio has the right of whether or not a pseudo-anonymous credit can be granted if you make a certain amount of money, and I had that amount of money.  In other words, if you make a lot of money, they want to kind of exploit your name by attaching it to the movie.  If they don’t pay you much, if it’s underneath a certain precedence, then you, the writer, can elect to use the pseudo-anonymous credit without permission of the studio.  I wanted to argue to have my name taken off.  On the other hand, I was arguing for sole screenplay credit.  If I were to share credit with any of the rewriters, I then have to share my production bonus.  I didn’t have a huge production bonus – I know this is very Hollywood, it was only $100,000 – but I didn’t want to split that.  So I had to argue the case that despite the fact the script had been rewritten massively, I deserve complete and total screenplay credit.  Now, part of that is rather strategic and creative interpretation of what they call the “Writer’s Credit Determination Manual.”  It was actually about five or six pages, if that.  It would tell you what you had to do to deserve a shared credit on a movie if you rewrite a script.  The most important thing is the structure.  Second most important thing are the characters.  So if you’ve added new characters or taken characters out or changed characters substantially, you then will deserve credit.  You can change all the dialogue, and you will not get any credit at all because that’s more of a dialog punch-up guide.  So they put the emphasis and they slanted it towards the original writer, as well they should, but they also slant it toward structure.  And I have to tell you, I’d say 99 percent of the people working in Hollywood, including a huge majority of the writers, have no idea what structure means.  To give you a little example, structure is a setup and a payoff.  It’s a joke setup and then the punch line.  That’s structure.  That’s a very simplistic version of it, but that’s essentially how it happens in a movie.  When you start writing scripts, it all starts making more sense, and then it becomes a more complicated structure, yes, but it’s still the same thing.  There’s something that comes first, and then the structure evolves, and then eventually, it turns into something else.  But all that has to work together and flow together and support each other.  When it’s weak, it doesn’t support, it doesn’t work.  So I ended up making it as a metaphor of the structure of a house.  So I said Blind Date is about a guy who’s set up with this girl, he gets her drunk, she ruins his life.  I said that’s the premise of the movie.  That is the structure of the movie.  Blake Edwards came in.  He did not change much, and he certainly didn’t change that structure.  Therefore, I deserve total screenplay credit.  Now, I was a little more elaborate than that, and then, I got the full credit for it.  I’m not sure why I’m getting into this whole story.  There’s a reason for it.  Where did this start?

NF: We were talking about expert witnesses.

DL: Expert witnesses, there you go.  What I had done is I had taken the Credits Determination Manual and had juggled it in a way where it seemed to say exactly what the Credits Determination Manual said.  Certainly in the spirit of it when, in fact, if you were to ask me now, “Do I deserve full screenplay credit for that movie?”  Good God, no.  The last third of it had nothing to do with my script.  But they’re all my characters and it was still my “structure”.  So I went in – since no one knows how to define structure – I went in with my own definition of what structure is.  This is what structure is.  It’s like the foundation of a house.  Here’s the footprint.  Here’s the foundation of this screenplay.  Here’s the footprint.  It is unchanged.  You have to grow up.  You have to build up from that.  And what you’re building is on the foundation that I gave and this foundation provides the structure of the story.  I could go back and rip that apart but when, in fact, it was a very good argument.  No one else gets to read my argument.  The only ones that read it are the judges.  So no one actually gets to listen to your case and take it apart.  So that’s what’s kind of interesting, so I actually won full screenplay credit.  Blake Edwards was livid.  He wanted to sue the Guild.  But because the guy refused to ever talk to me or return my calls, . . . knowing he was livid was especially satisfying.  You know what I find is interesting right now, I’m working on an essay on economics, which is something I’m fascinated by.  I did write one essay which is, I described what the recession is, what caused the recession, which most people don’t seem to understand but economists are comfortable with it.  But the pundits go off, and they have these crazy ideas.  And I said the left and the right, the Democrats and Republicans, really have solutions which amount up to nothing less than dumb and dumber.  It’s amazing that both can take statistics, point to them, and come up with all this support of why it works.  And what I did is not unlike what Vinny did.  And one advantage I have as a screenwriter is you have to take an idea and then you have to game it out – three or four or ten or twenty or fifty steps ahead.  A lot of these people come up with these ideas for a solution to the recession and they’re not two or three steps ahead.  They can easily be condemned.  They’re easily disproven.  One of which – I don’t know where you lie on the political spectrum, but I had a girlfriend who is a libertarian.  She’s head of the – I know this sounds oxymoronic – Malibu Tea Party.  She was absolutely livid and passionate about Obama raising the federal income tax 2 percent.  . . . [S]he’s too upset over that 2 percent.  If it was ten or twenty or thirty percent, I would be upset.  Then she talks about the corporate tax.  And that the corporate tax – the lower corporate tax and you would increase more jobs.  I’m sorry – this is off on a tangent which I doubt is going into this thing –

NF: That’s okay, keep talking.

DL: This is just an example of taking statistics and twisting them around.  I have some friends in the political community, and I go to this cocktail party, which I’m now hosting once a month and we – a lot of writers, some screenwriters, a lot of journalists and a lot of pundits and a lot of political bloggers, and we have got anybody from a political strategist that will show up and campaign people, people who have run campaigns, presidential campaigns, Ann Coulter to Arianna Huffington could show up to these things.  I do remember at a dinner party with a bunch of fairly prominent conservatives and they all sort of toed the line – cut corporate tax and that will create jobs.  And I said, “Hold on a second.  That doesn’t make sense.”  They’re all: – “No, no, no, blah, blah, blah, blah.”  They really didn’t game it out.  It just makes sense to them.  There’s extra money.  They’ll use that money and go hire more people.  I said, “Why don’t you talk to someone who actually runs a business?”  You hire as few people as you can because you want to protect your bottom line.  That doesn’t make any sense at all.  And guess what, if you hired more people, and you made more money, you would hire them anyway because, guess what, labor is deductible.  They don’t argue that.  They never really thought it out that far.  And I actually came up with a plan for my libertarian ex-girlfriend where I said, “I can come up with a way where you can increase corporate taxes to 100 percent and still create jobs.”  And she was like, “How could you do that? They’d take all your money.”  I said, “No, no, again.  None of you guys actually run businesses.  Why don’t you run a business, have a corporation?  Trust me, you don’t really have to pay taxes.  Two-thirds of all corporations pay no tax.”  You can do, for instance, I asked, “Do you know what a loan-out corporation is?”  No, she didn’t know that.  I have a loan-out corporation.  I’ve never paid a dime of corporate tax.  Wouldn’t make sense, because at the end of the year I then bonus myself all of my money.  So they never see a profit.  A corporation can do that, too.  You’re using statistics, but they’re not always accurate.  I’m sorry, the statistics are accurate, it’s the conclusions people draw from them.  So it’s a little like looking at the evidence of a case and putting together and making your case.  It’s fascinating to me – especially like in a criminal case or any case – there is sometimes one side is telling 100 percent truth, usually not always the case.  But it’s usually one side that’s telling the truth in general and the other side is just making up any kind of bullshit they can you cannot prove wrong.

NF: Getting back to Vinny, Judge Chamberlain Haller, played by Fred Gwynne, was a very dynamic character, which is atypical of how judges are traditionally portrayed on film. How did you write for a judge?

DL: A lot of it had to do with again talking to my friend Doug, who is a litigator, is now an assistant attorney general, deputy or assistant, deputy attorney general in California.  In asking him questions about what would happen here, he says, “Well, it depends on the judge.  A judge can do this, and a judge can do that.  So knowing what a judge can do could allows me to kind of manipulate the case to go in a certain direction.”  Now, there is one scene in there which infuriated me.  It was the scene the director put in there, and to his shame, as far as I’m concerned, I think he was either a solicitor or a barrister at one time.  So it was something where Vinny has an objection, he speaks in a way in a wording that Vinny would not use – “the veracity of this witness,” blah, blah, blah or something like that.  But the judge said that’s a lucid well thought out argument – denied.  Or overruled.  And I’m thinking like, “Whoa.”  I would not put that in there because for something very, very important to me, I did not want to make the judge into an asshole.  It was very important to me that this movie had no clear delineated antagonist, and if you look at it, it doesn’t.  Except perhaps that one scene.  The judge seems as though he’s the bad guy.  The judge shouldn’t have been the bad guy.  In that scene, he’s the bad guy, and that throws the movie off for me just a little bit.  There was no reason for that.  It’s not necessary for the judge to be a jerk.  The reality of it is information is stacked up in a way where it looks to the prosecutor that these guys did it.  And that happens.  There are cases where the prosecutor somewhere along the way realizes, “Wait a second, this is wrong.”  And that to me – I liked that part of the movie.  I liked the fact that Vinny is battling something.  If there’s an antagonist in the movie, it’s the truth.  And Vinny doesn’t know exactly what it is.  And it doesn’t reveal itself until towards the end of the movie.  . . . [W]hat I really like about the character . . .  is that Vinny is clearly from the north, clearly from New York, and he has a little chip on his shoulder about how the south is portrayed.  So that came out through the research.

NF: So what is Vinny doing now?

DL: Well, in the sequel which I wrote – you know who Gerry Spence is? . . . Gerry Spence is a litigator, very smooth talking, kind of handsome guy who wears these leather fringed jackets, and he shows up on CNN.  He would show up on Larry King a lot.  . . . And he was a very good lawyer.  I’m good friends with Elon Dershowitz, who is the son of Alan Dershowitz.  Alan likes Gerry Spence a lot.  He likes the kind of portrayal of this country lawyer.  And he shows up on CNN wearing a leather fringed jacket.  He’s kind of a character.  So what I did is that Vinny is clearly pretty good and pretty sharp.  That he’s actually a good lawyer.  But that he’s a bit of an urban lawyer.  So I wanted to make him kind of the urban version of Gerry Spence.  So, he’s a guy, he goes into a courtroom, he still talks like this.  But he’s still sharp, and this and that.  It’s a character, and it’s also very entertaining.  I figured that could be viable in the courtroom.  In the sequel, Vinny, in the screenplay, because there’s an actual play version, but in the screenplay . . . Vinny is representing a John Gotti-like character who apparently has . . . like thirty-one charges against him.  Basically, in the title sequence, Vinny’s there, he’s checking off each one of – not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty – until we go to thirty one counts.  He’s gotten Gotti off.  So in the sense, Vinny’s a little like Bruce Cutler.  But Bruce Cutler is very urban, very New York.  He’s got a real New York accent.  So Vinny is a little more Long Islandish, a little more Queens than New Jersey.  So I kind of like that as a character.  Then we see Vinny go over to CNN and get an interview.  I think we might even have him on with Gerry Spence.  Then he goes off to a victory party, and then he’s in the car with her, and he decides, “Let’s get married.”  [He] doesn’t portray it in a very romantic way, which pisses her off, and . . . he doesn’t understand why she’s pissed off. He said, “Maybe we ought to just go ahead and do it.”  “Do what?”  “Get married.”  “That’s it?”  “Yeah.”  “Yeah.”  “That’s it, huh?”  “Yeah, just go off and get married?”  “Yeah.”  So he can see she’s pissed off, and he doesn’t get it.  He’s got an issue with romance anyhow.  Then she gets pissed off.  She gets angry at him.  She says, “Well, maybe I’ll think about it.”  “What do you mean think about it?”  He’s been with her for like twenty years or something. “Come on, what’s to think about?”  “I’ll think about it.”  “Well, what are you going to do?  Say no?”  “Yeah, I could say no.”  Anyway, they live together.  She’s pissed off at him.  And this becomes part of the plot and part of the structure without revealing too much – I’ll tell you exactly what happens in the play because here’s how the play starts out.  The play actually starts out in the Old Bailey, which is the court in London.  She is the defendant.  She has a solicitor.  Her solicitor informs the judge that her barrister at Queen’s counsel which tend to be older died that morning.  She is without counsel.  They . . . inform her that according to English law, if you are not represented by somebody, you’re allowed to choose any barrister in the room, and they have to defend you.  Before he can finish that sentence, all the other barristers had left because they don’t want to work – it’s what they do.  She looks back at the barrister’s bench and there’s this one guy, and it’s Vinny.  And Vinny’s wearing a barrister’s robe and wig.  And she chooses him.  Of course, he comes up.  He has no idea what he’s doing so we can sort of do the whole procedure thing because procedure in England is different than procedure in America.  You can’t approach the bench.  You don’t refer to him as Your Honor.  You refer to him as My Lord.  You have to be a member of an Inn of Court otherwise you’re not a real attorney, none of which Vinny is.   . . . It’s kind of funny because he makes every mistake you can imagine.  If you say something incorrectly, when Vinny says, “Your Honor,” the judge looks off and says, “Excuse me, I can’t hear you.” Which is a polite British way of saying, “I didn’t hear that, why don’t you correct yourself?”  So Vinny just speaks louder.  And he says, “Excuse me, don’t yell at me.”  “You said you couldn’t hear me.  Can I approach the bench?”  “No, you can’t do that. You don’t do that here.”  He freezes in his tracks.  At one point, he objects.  You don’t do that in an inquiry in England.  You can’t do that.  The judge explains you cannot do that.  “You don’t object here.  That’s an American aberration.”  . . . [I]n this version, the judge is unbelievably frustrated and annoyed with Vinny.  But you’re sympathetic with it.  . . . When I was flying over to England, I was reading the in-flight magazine, which was describing a certain judge in England who corrects everybody’s grammar, and in the middle of the case, might discuss the etymology of a word. Where that word came from, the Latin this for that.  And this all goes into the transcript, which I thought was great. So I figured for a guy that talks like this and uses sometimes double negatives and triple negatives to be in a courtroom with a guy who’s correcting your grammar,  it’s funny.  So, sure enough, in the case, there’s actually a character named Julie Warner.  She says, “I’m not Julie Warner.”  “Well, then you have an a/k/a.”  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I’ve got nothing to do with no Julie Warner” – which is a triple negative.  It’s driving the judge crazy.  He says, “That’s a triple negative.  That then lands you in the affirmative.”  She’s looks at him like, “What the fuck you talking about?”  She says, “You’re going to correct my grammar?  You’re counting grammar here?”

NF: So, what’s the status of the sequel?  Is it going to be made?

DL: Probably not.

NF: Probably not?

DL: Yeah, what happened is when I was writing it, Marisa was nominated for an Oscar, which she won.  And she dropped out of the sequel.  And then the studio wouldn’t replace her, they wanted to rewrite her character.  They can’t rewrite her character.  It’s easier to replace her.  . . .  I said, “Why don’t you just replace her?”  “Oh, you can’t do that.”  “You can’t replace an actor? ” “Yeah.”  “No.  “It’s the character that’s supports it.”  “No.”  “It’s done all the time.”  “Where’s it done?”  “In plays.  They have different actors playing characters all the time.”  “Well, this is a movie.”  “This is what they do in the movies.”  “Where do they do this?”  “How about the biggest franchise ever made?”  “What’s that?”  “James Bond.”  “Can you think of another case?”  “Tarzan.”  “Oh, well, that’s Tarzan.”  You win, you lose.  You cannot win.  What’s the point of even arguing?  There is no point.  You can’t argue.  I think it’s Mark Twain said, “You never argue with an idiot.  They’ll bring you down to their level and they’ll beat you with years of experience.”  And that’s kind of what it’s like to deal with the studio heads.  So, they wouldn’t replace her.  So then they had another writer come in and write another draft because I wouldn’t do it.  And they gave that . . .  page one rewrite . . . to Joe Pesci who stopped talking to the studio.  They let me read it.  I said, “This is terrible.  It’s not funny.  Not one funny moment in here.”  The studio executive said, “Oh, I think it’s great.”  “You think it’s great?”  “Yeah.”  “Great?”  “Yeah.”  “Great as good, very good, excellent, and then great?”  “Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s great.”  I needed to define what great is.  I don’t think it’s even good.  Not funny.  They gave it to Joe.  As I say, Joe stopped talking to the studio.  He thought it was so bad.  So, then there was a time when Marisa came around, she wanted to do it.  She and Joe were willing, but it did not happen – the studio said no because it’s taking too much time.  Do you think people have forgotten the movie?  Yeah.  I don’t know.  Again, it’s one of those things where you make your arguments.  I said, “Go ask your guys in video because this movie still shows on TV and it still sells DVDs.  It’s a very popular movie.”  You can’t convince them of anything.  I finally went to them and said the most convincing argument of all.  I said, “Okay, tell you what.  I’ve got financing for the movie and prints and advertising.  You don’t have to put any money out at all.  Not a dime.  All you do is collect money.  The thing is, you have to give the investors the lion’s share, which is not uncommon for the general distribution, for the theatrical distribution.”  . . . I just threw this at them because I wouldn’t normally do this.  You get the DVD.  That’s why going to a studio saying you have nothing to do, I’m going to give you $20,000,000.  You’re going to get $20,000,000. But here’s how studios work.  Wait a second, we get $20,000,000 and not do anything?  What do you get?  I said, “I get $20,000,000 if you get the $20,000,000.”  “We don’t pay the $20,000,000?”  “No, I get the $20,000,000 from someone else.”  “Really?  Well, we want your $20,000,000.”  It’s not enough they make money.  They have to fuck you.  That’s it.  If they don’t fuck you, sorry, excuse my language, but you absolutely print it, they don’t feel like they’ve done a good job.  So, that’s part of the problem too.

NF: I know you said that she dropped out.  Do you know why she dropped out?

DL: I don’t know exactly why.  She was nominated, and what happened, she was being offered lots of different parts.  I think the idea of doing a sequel would be – maybe she was afraid she’d get locked into that character.  That might have been it.  But it was, I think from a career strategic point of view, I think it’s a mistake for her, because what actors fail to understand, is the audiences really don’t know they’re acting.  They just don’t think, “Wow, you’re a brilliant actor, you should be great in this, oh, you’ll be great in this.”  They don’t know you’re great in it until they see you.  They also loved her in My Cousin Vinny.  You’ve got to give your audience something like that now and then.  There are certain actors [who] are very smart with their careers.  Jack Nicholson, who’s been a star throughout all his career. There are a lot of actors who have not.  There are certain actors who have been the number one actor in the world, bang, and they go away.  Either they stop making those movies or they don’t make a smart movie that sells them.  Sean Penn, although he’s made some smart movies, he hasn’t made a truly satisfying commercial movie.  As a result, he’s not a big star.  He’s a star, but he’s not a big star.  He can get a movie of a certain budget made but not a big budget.  Certainly not one that’s going to rely on him.  What Nicholson is good at, he’ll do something that’ll be a big idea for the audience, a big people pleaser and then he’ll do something that’s more of an art film.  So he’ll stagger them out.  And he shows up as the Joker in Batman, as the Devil in the The Witches of Eastwick.  Smart actors like that.  That’s a smart career move.  But you take someone like Mickey Rooney, who was the biggest star in the world.  Not anymore.  He could barely get hired.  Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world at one time.  Not anymore.  There are certain actors that do that and then screw up their careers.

You can learn more about Launer”s films and career by visiting his official website here.

(To see a full index of our My Cousin Vinny twentieth anniversary coverage, please see here.).

Continuing with our week-long tribute to My Cousin Vinny, we here at Abnormal Use are very proud to present our interview with the film’s director, Jonathan Lynn, who was kind enough to agree to an interview with our own Nick Farr late last year.  In addition to Vinny, Lynn has directed some of our favorite films, including Clue, the legal comedy Trial and Error, and The Whole Nine Yards.  Further, he created and wrote every episode of the hit BBC political comedy series “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister.”  Last year, he published Comedy Rules!, a book in which he shares his own personal rules of comedy from his long and varied career. A fun fact: Lynn brought with him some legal experience to Vinny; he earned an M.A. in Law from Cambridge.  As you can read in the interview that follows, Lynn offered interesting insight into how the film transitioned from the page to the screen, some highlights from the sets, and his thoughts on the film’s popularity.

NICK FARR: In 2009, the ABA Journal ranked My Cousin Vinny third in its list of the top legal movies.  Why do you think the film continues to resonate with viewers 20 years later?

JONATHAN LYNN: That’s a good question.  One never knows the answer.  I think films that resonate over a very long period of time have some universal truth in them in the way the characters are portrayed.  I think that the characters of Vinny and Lisa are – were unique.  . . . [Y]ou see so many films where the main characters are more or less interchangeable from one film to another, and these characters have not been seen on the screen before and probably not since.  I think it’s partly great performances, and I think partly that the script tells an enthralling story.  A crime movie is always good if it’s done properly and works well because there’s a lot of tension and a lot of drama involved.  For me personally, what the film was about is how wrong capital punishment is and how people can so easily be executed when they’re not guilty if they’re not adequately represented or if there’s a lack of relevant evidence available.  And we’ve just seen that this week with Troy Davis.  I am profoundly opposed to capital punishment, and I think the film makes that statement.  Although it makes it entertaining and in a way that isn’t preaching to people.

NF: Why do you think the film resonates with lawyers specifically?

JL: I think it’s a bunch of reasons.  First of all, there aren’t any bad guys in the film.  Most films seem to have a corrupt judge or a corrupt prosecutor or there’s somebody who’s a bad guy.  There are no bad guys in Vinny.  . . . [W]e think that a film has to have, in film jargon, a protagonist and an antagonist – the antagonist being the bad guy.  It’s a fact that it would be possible for someone to be convicted of a capital crime when they’re not guilty.  But the judge is not corrupt.  He’s very correct and a little straight-laced, but he’s not a bad guy.  He’s fair.  The prosecutor is more than fair.  Nobody’s doing anything wrong.  I think that’s the way it is in most trials, and I think lawyers are probably happy to see a movie in which the system actually works and in which all the participants behave correctly.  So, I think that’s one aspect of it.  In other words, I think it sort of validates the legal system.  . . . [A]nother reason would be that I think we got it right legally, and I think most trial films don’t.  I was very particular about that being a recovering lawyer myself.  I thought it was very important, and I . . . made a lot of changes [to the] script to make sure that it was completely accurate.  I think the writer, Dale Launer, had also done quite a lot of research.

NF: What types of changes did you make to the script?

JL: I can’t remember, it’s 20 years ago.  There were a lot of little procedural changes.

NF: I understand that you received a MA in Law from Cambridge University.  How did your degree affect your direction of the film?

JL: I would say only in the way which I’ve just said.  It affected it because I wanted to make sure we told the – we got all the legal points correct.  I think that was really important.

NF: How difficult is it to depict the legal process in a film and make it correct [but] where it’s still entertaining and humorous?

JL: What’s difficult is to get studios and producers to agree.  They have a cavalier attitude towards the truth.  I made another legal film later called Trial and Error.  There are some legal errors in that film, and I could not persuade New Line Cinema and . . . my partner producer – I was one of the producers – I could not persuade them to allow me to make necessary changes which I thought would improve the accuracy of the film and would lead to other comic possibilities.

NF: What makes a courthouse an attractive setting for a film?

JL: It’s built-in drama.  That’s why a third of the programs on television are drama series on television are legal series.  It’s built-in drama.  Somebody has to win, somebody has to lose, there are high stakes.  Sometimes, as in the case of Vinny, life or death stakes.  There is nothing more dramatic.  Obviously, you have to cut out all the dull bits.  Alfred Hitchcock said that “drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”  And obviously that’s true.  . . . [O]ne of the tricky things about the film, making Vinny, was to make sure it all absolutely seemed to be following the trial detail of the whole course.  We hardly ever saw anybody being sworn in as a witness or all the legal paraphernalia that goes with identifying witnesses and identifying evidence, all that kind of thing.  None of that’s actually in the film, and yet it remains completely truthful.  . . . [W]e knew that the audience could assume all that and would know all the things that went on in a courtroom that we didn’t show in the film.

NF: The courthouse scenes were filmed in a courthouse located in Monticello, Georgia, is that correct?

JL: No.  The courthouse is a set.  It was based on the courthouse in Monticello, Georgia, which is where I went to do some research. . . . I watched a murder trial there.  I learned a lot of interesting things on that particular trip.  First of all, it was an African American defendant and a largely white jury.  And the largely white jury found him not guilty, which I thought was an interesting development from how things might have been in the past.  I watched, for instance, the counsel for the prosecution – the prosecutor and the public defender were both quite severe with each other in the courtroom and the judge was meticulous.  But when the jury was out and lunchtime came around, the judge, the prosecutor, and the defender all sat down at one of the tables and had sandwiches and beer together.  I thought that is, of course, an aspect of the whole process that you hardly ever see.  And of course, there wasn’t a place for that in Vinny, although the relationship between the prosecutor and Vinny is actually quite cordial.  Anyway, I watched a murder trial there, and it was very interesting.  I picked up some nice phrases there that got into the script.  When we came to shoot, I said to the production designer this is how I would like it to look.  Well, we couldn’t shoot in there partly because it was a working courthouse.  . . . [W]e couldn’t shoot the courtroom in there.  Because we had a month of shooting, and when you’ve got nearly half a film taking place in one set, you’ve got to keep finding interesting new angles.  I mean, photographic angles.  So, the camera moved behind the judge and behind the witnesses.  Well, that can’t happen in a real courthouse.  There’s a wall behind the judge.  So, we had walls that flew in and out.  We needed to be able to reproduce weather, sometimes sunshine outside the courthouse, sometimes rain.  There are all kinds of reasons why you need to build a set.  Mainly to do with the room to maneuver all the cameras and to get enough different angles. The other rooms in the courthouse are, in fact, shot on location there.  The judge’s office is the real office.  The prosecutor’s office.  Those are all actually authentic location scenes.

NF: Throughout the course of the trial, Vinny refutes the testimony of each of the state’s eyewitnesses.  What does the film say about the reliability of eyewitness testimony?

JL: It says it’s not very reliable, which is what absolutely all independent research shows.  It also shows that people place a great deal too much reliance on eyewitness testimony.

NF: After Vinny casts doubt on the testimony of each of the eyewitnesses, the testimony of the state’s expert witness, played by James Rebhorn, became critical to its case.  However, his testimony was also later refuted.  So what does the film say about the use of expert testimony?

JL: Well, it says firstly that experts can be wrong, which will not come as a shock to any lawyer.  And secondly, it says – it doesn’t say, but it could have said, that experts will say whatever you want them to say if you pay them.  Now, that’s not strictly speaking true, because a lot of expert witnesses are ethical people.  But you can always find somebody to pay to come along who will argue what you want them to argue.  Or nearly always.  And I think what it says is that you have to proceed very carefully, that trials . . . are delicate business and it is very easy for the wrong person to be convicted.  . . . [W]hat should be inferred is that prosecutors should stop announcing to the world that . . . they’ve found the villain, they’ve found the criminal before a trial has taken place.  I came from England where that’s forbidden.  They say a man has been arrested or a woman has been arrested and is helping the police with their inquiries, and then they say “So and So” has been charged.  Not a word after that until the trial is reported.  Because anything said between charging the person and the trial would be construed by the British court as contempt of court.

NF: So there’s not a Court TV or a Nancy Grace commenting on every stage of the trial?

JL: No, because nobody would know.  . . . Yes, there is commenting on the stage of the trial once the trial is happening.  But there aren’t two trials.  There isn’t another trial taking place on the courtroom steps.  There isn’t a media trial in advance of the real trial.

NF: Throughout the film, there is a culture clash between the north and the south, and there are some stereotypes portrayed on both sides.  What was it like to portray this dynamic from a British point of view?

JL: I would say they’re not stereotypes, first of all.  You could argue that they’re archetypes, which is quite different.  I would say that they’re not stereotypes because in most American movies southerners are portrayed as rednecks or as stupid or as ill-educated or some other critical way.  This judge went to Yale.  He’s highly educated, and he’s highly intelligent.  The prosecutor is Jim Trotter, III, which suggests there was a first and a second, and that he’s from a wealthy and successful family.  I think the culture clash, because I’m British, I think it’s a class clash.  I think Vinny and Lisa are blue collar, or as we would say, working class.  He was a garage mechanic, and he’s become a lawyer by attending adult education.  She’s a hairdresser from a family of mechanics.  I mean, these are clearly working class people.  They’re up against, in the south, upper class people.  They’re up against people with old money and lots of class and courteous, well behaved – more or less the opposite of the southern stereotype, as seen in the films.  For me, it’s a clash between two different classes.

NF: What about this clash between two classes makes for a good backdrop for a film?

JL: Well, all conflict makes for a good backdrop for a film.  And that’s a very good source of conflict.  Frank Capra’s films were almost all about class differences.  Usually between the romantic characters, a man and a woman.  There’s a long tradition for this in American and British films.  But I think that essentially the important point is to see it from everybody’s point of view.  I think we understand Vinny and Lisa, and we also understand the judge and the prosecutor and the sheriff.  I think one of the reasons why the film resonates, to get back to your first question, is because the audience can have a warm and friendly feeling towards all of these people.

NF: Can you recall any funny moments from the set?

JL: No.  There were lots of things that were in the script that were funny when they were played.  I suppose the one time that I was utterly convulsed was when Austin Pendleton, playing the public defender, stood up to make his opening speech to the jury and couldn’t get a word out.  Austin is a very old friend of mine, and I knew he would be really funny in that part.  But I really didn’t quite imagine just how funny.  And I had to literally hide behind the camera.  I normally sit by the camera.  But I had to hide because I was laughing so hard.  I had to somehow stop myself from making a sound, and I couldn’t let Austin be put off by seeing me.  So, to me that was undoubtedly – that’s the funniest moment I’ve had on any film I’ve ever made.

NF: What was it like to work with Joe Pesci?

JL: He’s a brilliant actor.  He’s an absolutely brilliant actor.  It was an interesting issue that had to be solved because his whole persona at that time was of a bad guy, a dangerous guy.  He’d just made Goodfellas.  In fact, while we were shooting Vinny, he won the Oscar for that.  But the perception of Joe was of a mean guy and Vinny had to be – he’s belligerent and argumentative, but you had to love him.  I think Joe worked very hard on that and made it a great success.

NF: Can you tell our readers anything about your new book, Comedy Rules!?

JL: Yes.  I wrote a play that was – and still is – called, “Yes, Prime Minister.”  And directed it.  The publisher of the play said to me, “Could you write a book about the rules of comedy?”  And I said, “No, there aren’t any.  That’s an impossible task.”  A couple of months later, I was teaching at the AFI, the American Film Institute, and I was talking about comedy and realized all the things that I was saying were, in fact, rules of comedy.  So I got back in touch with the publisher and said, “I can’t do a book on the rules of comedy, but I could do a book on my rules of comedy.”  And she said, “Great.”  So, I did.  She said, “It’s got to have a lot of you in it.”  So, it’s basically sort of part memoir and part rules of comedy.  Basically, what it is, I give all my rules of comedy, and it’s a memoir in that I explain how I discovered them or was taught them.  And people seem to find it funny, and it had unanimously good reviews.  So, I’m very happy about it.

NF: My editor would be very angry with me if I did not ask this last question.  Is it true that there was a fourth ending film for the movie Clue that was not included in the film?

JL: Yes.  It is true.

NF: What became of that ending?

JL: I have no idea.  I cut it out because it really wasn’t very good.  I looked at it, and I thought, “No, no, no, we’ve got to get rid of that.”

You can learn more about Lynn’s films and career by visiting his official website here.

(To see a full index of our My Cousin Vinny twentieth anniversary coverage, please see here.).

As I look back at my childhood, I recall a number of formative events which shaped me into the adult I later became.  Of those experiences, my first viewing of My Cousin Vinny ranks at the top of the list. Doubt me? It’s the honest truth.

My first Vinny experience came later than most.  When the film was released in theaters twenty years ago this week, I was in the fifth grade and far too young to gain entry into an R-rated movie.   To be honest, I did not even realize at the time I was being punished by oppressive movie restrictions.  I was more interested in classics like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Wayne’s World.  As you might imagine from this embarrassing confession, Vinny was not exactly on my radar in the early 1990s.  As a result, I didn’t watch the film until my parents rented it on VHS some time later.  Of course, I had to stay up late after my parents had retired to bed to watch it due to its R-rating.

The movie was, of course, hilarious, even though some of its humor was slightly over the head of a ten year old viewer.  Above all else, Vinny’s opening statement to the jury stayed with me long after that first screening.  In that scene, district attorney Jim Trotter (played by the late Lane Smith) gives a rousing opening statement forecasting the state’s damning evidence.  Vinny, weary and exhausted from a night without slumber, slept through Trotter’s presentation.  Undaunted, Vinny responds with the greatest opening statement in the history of film – “Everything that guy just said is bullsh*t.  Thank you.”  The jury was instructed to disregard the entire statement with the exception of the “thank you.”  Nevertheless, he made his point.  That young version of me hoped to do the same some day.

Fast forward to the fall of 1993.  A friend of mine was running unopposed to be our 7th grade homeroom’s student council representative.  A firm believer in democracy, I thought it would be un-American to permit an uncontested election for such a prestigious position.  Unable to convince any of my other classmates to run, I decided to toss my name into the hat.  I never really desired to become a member of the student council, but I did want to give my class another option, even if it was an untenable one.  On the other hand, my friend clearly wanted the job and campaigned as if he were seeking a presidential nomination (minus the negative television ads and robocalls).

After a week of campaigning, we each gave a speech to our class prior to the election.  My friend arrived fully prepared with note cards and a platform.  I, on the other hand, had forgotten that it was even election day.  My friend spoke first.  He delivered a lengthy speech and set forward a clear agenda of (unachievable) educational reform.  After concluding, he returned to his seat to thunderous applause.  It was then my turn. I walked to the front of classroom, all the while trying to formulate clever impromptu remarks.  At that time, I realized this was my chance to be Vinny.  I knew saying, “Everything he just said is bullsh*t” would earn me an afternoon of tedium in detention.  So, I decided to adapt Vinny’s speech for a 7th grade audience.  My speech, like Vinny’s, consisted of just one sentence: “Everything he just said, I can do better.”  Not quite as punchy, but it still got the point across, right?

While my teacher disapproved of my candor, she respected the First Amendment and allowed the election to go forward.  Not that I cared.  It wasn’t like I was going to win with that speech anyway.  To my surprise, however, my class felt differently.  I won in a landslide.

To date, I have not recreated Vinny’s infamous opening statement in a court of law.  However, it taught me a valuable lesson.  Let’s cut through all of the bull and tell the people what they need to hear.  You’d be surprised how well people respond to the truth.  That is the crux of Vinny.  There is nothing wrong with cutting to the chase.  This philosophy has served me well so far.  After all, it did earn me a yearlong stint as a 7th grade student council representative.

Thanks for that, Vinny.

(To see a full index of our My Cousin Vinny twentieth anniversary coverage, please see here.).

Last year, a federal class action lawsuit was filed against Caesars Entertainment Corporation alleging that the casino corporation failed to safeguard its employees from secondhand smoke. The named plaintiff in the case, Denise Bevrotte, alleged that her son died of cancer from inhaling secondhand smoke at work. Bevrotte’s son was employed as a dealer at Caesars’ Harrah’s New Orleans Hotel and Casino for over 15 years. Bevrotte brought the suit on behalf of all non-smoking employees of Harrah’s New Orleans Casino. The case filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana is captioned Bevrotte v. Caesars Entertainment Corp. d/b/a Harrah’s New Orleans Hotel and Casino, No. 2:11-cv-00543-SSV (E.D.La. 2011). The class claims were dismissed in October for failure to allege a common issue. Last week, Bevrotte’s remaining wrongful death claim was dismissed for failure to allege facts sufficient to demonstrate that she was her son’s statutory beneficiary. While these dismissals were a clear win for Caesars, they offer little fodder for legal bloggers on the validity of secondhand smoke claims. Undeterred, we now offer our thoughts.

As frequent casino visitors, we here at Abnormal Use empathize with the concern over secondhand smoke. When we discard our money, we could do without that pleasant aroma of Virginia Slims. On the other hand, we understand why casinos allow smoking. Casinos are big business. If people want to smoke while pouring their money into slot machines, casinos are glad to accommodate. For those who don’t enjoy smoke, casinos offer many other vices.

Even though we ourselves disdain smoke, we would never sue a casino because of it. First, we have never knowingly been injured as a result of casino smoke. Sure, any secondhand smoke has undoubtedly blackened our lungs beyond repair, but so too has the smoke from every other bar and restaurant into which we have ventured over the course of our wearisome lives. How do we single out the casino?

We recognize that Bevrotte’s son served as a Harrah’s employee for over 15 years. As a result, his smoke exposure at the casino is far more significant than that on our casual weekend vacation. Even if Harrah’s is a more identifiable tortfeasor for Bevrotte, we share one thing in common. We each made a choice. While our reasons for entering the casino may have been different, nobody forced us to go. By entering the casino, we know we will be exposed to secondhand smoke, yet we continue to go. While we continue to learn about the impact of smoke inhalation, the dangers of secondhand smoke are not a new discovery. We assume the risk and shouldn’t sue others for our own perilous decisions.

Today is February 29, the saddest and loneliest day of  the Gregorian calendar. February 29 lives a solitary life. Sure, this dreadful and curious day tries to make friends. Developing a social life, however, is quite a challenge when one only shows up to the party once every four years. Even though the 29th of this month has 28 comrade days in February, this short month is an oddity in its own right. February itself is simply a weird month. As we here at Abnormal Use can attest from our high school days, it’s difficult to find acceptance among your peers when you only associate with other outcasts. Thus, the 29th lives the hard-knock life, to be certain.

On the bright side, lawyers have bickered over the significance of the date, and there has been a surprising amount of jurisprudence generated over leap day. Defense counsel in criminal and civil cases alike have argued that the extra leap year day is not included within the statute of limitations’ calculation of time. Courts all across the country, including New York, Virginia, and Oregon to name a few, have responded to this argument and included the 29th within the meaning of the term “year.” When all else fails, that misfit of misfits, February 29, should take solace under the protective wings of the judiciary.

If February 29 is good enough for our court system, it should be acceptable to us, too, right? So, today, don’t anger yourself each time you mistakenly write “March 1” on your letters. (And by, what are you still doing writing letters by hand? It may be February, but it’s February 2012! This isn’t “Downton Abbey”!)   Instead, take a step back and marvel at the synchronization of our calendar with the astronomical year. Who knows? Maybe February 29 will turn out to be a friend after all.

We recently came across an article on Yahoo! Finance entitled “America’s 10 Most Sleep-Deprived Professions.”  Intrigued, we thought we would investigate to see if our noble profession made the list.  Sure enough.  Number 2.  The fact that attorneys made the list did not come as a surprise.  The morning crowd at the coffee maker is evidence enough that our profession is immune from blissful slumber.  But what does this study say about our profession?

Let’s take a look:

As you can see, there is not a great deal of variance among the professions on the list.  To say that lawyers are more sleep-deprived than police officers because they find one less minute of sleep seems ridiculous.  These sleep figures are based on the self-reported sleep times of 27,157 adults.  In reality, this study may reveal that we think we have less sleep than others – not that we actually get less sleep.

Now take a look at this:

In comparing the “sleep-deprived” with the “well-rested” occupations, it is difficult to decipher many defining characteristics.  On either side of the spectrum, you will find a dichotomy of professions in terms of compensation, hours of work, education-level, and job location.  Perhaps the sleep differential can be attributed to personality types or other behavioral attributes.  That type of analysis, however, would require an advanced psychological degree and is well beyond our expertise (although we do have a copy of the DSM-IV around here somewhere at Abnormal Use headquarters).

So what does all this mean?  Probably very little.  We doubt the 20-minute sleep differential between lawyers and forest loggers is actually statistically significant.  In any event, this study acts as a stark reminder to us all.  We enter this profession knowing that it requires a lot of hours and hard work to be good at it.  We are willing to do it because we love our jobs and we want to do everything we can to best serve our clients.  (Or, in the very least, we have to pay back all these student loans, right?) At the same time, we also have to balance being the best spouses and parents  we can be along with other outside commitments.  There are only so many hours in a day, and sometimes, sleep is the easiest to cut.

The moral of this story is twofold.  First, continue to work hard.  Not only do our clients expect and deserve it, we owe it to ourselves.  After all, nothing is worth doing unless you go all in.  Second, it is imperative that we find a work/life balance.  Life will be much happier when you can enjoy all aspects of it.  Make time for work.  Make time for family.  Make time for a little sleep. And now, I’m off to take a quick nap.

We here at Abnormal Use love checking out product warning labels. Such labels, while serving a necessary purpose, can sometimes seem like a bit of overkill. Must we really warn that sleeping pills may cause drowsiness? Or, better yet, that a beach ball should not be used as a life saving device? The truth is that companies have a reason for these labels – to protect themselves from potential litigation even from the most over-zealous consumers.

We mention this as way of backdrop for an interesting situation that arose last week at The Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas. According to Yahoo! News, a man recently suffered a heart attack while eating the Grill’s “triple bypass” burger. Fortunately, the man survived the attack, and by all accounts, should make a full recovery. While there is no indication of any potential lawsuits rising out of these events, we here at Abnormal Use had to question whether there could be.

While restaurants have been sued for causing obesity, we are not aware of any restaurants being sued for causing heart attacks. Obviously, the isolated consumption of a burger is not enough on its own to cause an attack. Eating similar foods, however, over a period of time can reek havoc on one’s arteries. Knowing as much, what should the Heart Attack Grill do to protect itself from future lawsuits?

To the restaurant’s credit, it has taken measures to provide adequate warning. If its name was not enough, a sign on its door warns that its food may be hazardous to your health. The Grill’s servers are known as “nurses” and its owner, “Doctor.” With menu items like the “triple bypass” burger and “flatliner” fries, customers should have fair warning the meal would not win the approval of “The Biggest Loser.”

It should be noted that while the restaurant jokingly warns its consumers, it also entices them with its slogan, “Taste worth dying for.” To make matters worse, anyone over 350 pounds eats at the restaurant for free. Unlike the lure of a forbidden fruit, however, a consumer must assume the risk before partaking in a butterfat milkshake. (Yes, it is on the menu).

While this may seem absurd, don’t be surprised to see a restaurant promoting unhealthy food show up on the litigation radar in the future. Fortunately for the Heart Attack Grill, no one can say they didn’t provide fair warning.

Recently, we learned of a proposed class action filed in the Middle District of Florida against video game maker, Bethesda Softworks, LLC. In the lawsuit, captioned Walewski v. ZeniMax Media, Inc., No. 11CV01178, 2011 WL 2790627 (M.D. Fla. July 18, 2011), Bethesda and its parent corporation ZeniMax are accused of deceptive conduct in “designing, manufacturing, marketing, distributing and selling a defectively designed video game” to consumers. As video game aficionados, we here at Abnormal Use were intrigued. According to the complaint, Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has an inherent design defect that occurs suddenly and without warning. The animation defect, referred to in the complaint as an “abomb,” causes spell effects, doorways and traps to freeze, thus “crippling” the player’s gameplay. Because the abomb drops in “as little as 200 hours of gameplay,” players must rush to finish the game and cannot enjoy the “enormous world” and “unlimited possibilities” advertised on the game’s packaging.

At first glance, the complaint reads more like an editorial from The Onion mocking gamers than a pleading in federal court. We would hate to be the attorney charged with explaining to a federal judge how the abomb affects spell casting and hinders a gamer’s ability to become a Level 35 dark elf. However, we here at Abnormal Use can sympathize with the plaintiff’s abhorrence of video game freezing.

We can still remember our younger days when video game defects could easily be cured by blowing into the cartridge and banging the Nintendo console a few times. As technology has improved, these old-fashioned remedies are no longer available. One of the major improvements in this field is the cheat codes – check out new world hacks, here.  But is a federal court the proper venue to redress these problems?

If the basis of these claims were another product, a computer for example, rather than a video game, this lawsuit likely would receive less scrutiny. If our computers froze after 200 hours of use, denying us access to the Internet, we may be more likely to consider the product defective. But a video game? Maybe it’s the stigma talking, but we doubt this one will hold up in a court of law.

This defect allegedly occurs after at least 200 hours of gameplay. In the named plaintiff’s case, the defect arose after 450 hours. What is the shelf life on a video game? The plaintiff may not consider 450 hours ample time to explore Oblivion, but we consider it the equivalent of a pickup truck rolling over 200,000 miles. Four hundred fifty hours is over an hour of gameplay per day for a year. Maybe the abomb is Bethesda’s cue that your social life may be lacking.

According to reports, a Florida magistrate has recently recommended the case be dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. However, it will be interesting to see if this is just the beginning of the video game defect lawsuit. We too have experienced our own fair share of “abombs.” We just choose to if them the old-fashioned way – by turning the game off.

P.S. According to the complaint, every copy of Oblivion is affected with the abomb. We can personally attest that we purchased Oblivion when it was released in 2008 and we still maintain the ability to cast spells and open doors (not that we do this type of thing on a regular basis).

According to the Chicago Tribune, a New York man has sued Frito Lays in a proposed class action claiming that the “all natural ingredient” labels on the company’s Sun Chips and Tostitos products are deceptive. According to the complaint, the chips contain ingredients derived from genetically modified corn and oils. Further, the plaintiff alleged he paid an additional 10 cent “premium” for the chips over their Doritos counterpart. The plaintiff seeks damages in excess of $5 million.

The case is captioned Shake et al. v. Frito Lay North America, Inc., No. 12-408 (E.D.N.Y. Jan. 30, 2012).

These allegations raise a couple of pertinent issues. First, can the plaintiff really claim that he paid a premium for “all natural” chips?  For many, a ten cent premium may seem trivial.   We here at Abnormal Use appreciate the desire to purchase organic or all-natural foods. In doing so, we expect to pay a premium.  However, we would expect these premiums to far, far exceed the 10 cents alleged by the plaintiff.  Ever try purchasing organic milk for 10 cents more than its non-organic counterpart?  When faced with the decision of purchasing two bags of chips, one “all natural” and one not, we doubt a 10 cent differential in price is a deciding factor in the process. In fact, we might not even notice the difference in cost.

Second, to our knowledge, the Food and Drug Administration has no definition for “natural” as it applies to food labels.  Of course, it may be difficult for the FDA to define such a term.  What is “all natural” anyway? Certainly, the phrase can be left to varying interpretations.  Should “all-natural” be restricted to plants grown without the use of pesticides?  Or should the definition go further?  Apparently, the plaintiff’s beef with Frito-Lay is that the company uses organisms genetically modified in a lab by swapping genetic material across species.  It is unclear whether the allegations stem from the “genetic modification” itself or that the modification itself which occurred in a lab.  Genetic swapping occurs naturally all the time.  We can not even begin to count the number of products we enjoy on a daily basis that were created as a result of “natural” genetic swapping.  Are these products considered “all natural”?  Where do we draw the line?

The desire to eat foods the way they were intended is a noble feat.  However, we shouldn’t be so quick to dispose of the advances of modern science.

Let’s not be so quick to pass judgment on new plant species created by the marvels of modern science. Who knows, maybe we are on the brink of the new “natural”?

Over the last year, we have written ad nauseum about hot coffee-related litigation.  Time and time again, consumers of the brewed beverage have sued fast food chains after suffering burns from what Plaintiff’s lawyers insist is an “unreasonably dangerous product.”  Apparently, one consumer has turned coffee into something other than a litigation golden ticket – a weapon.

According to Cincinnati.com, 50-year old Lamar Bond was dining at a McDonald’s restaurant in Cincinnatti, Ohio.  Following an argument, Bond threw a cup of hot coffee and a biscuit at a female McDonald’s employee, striking her in the face.  Thereafter, Bond fled.  Police records did not disclose whether the employee suffered any injuries.

We don’t know the source of the argument, but we will be keeping tabs on this case. In light of all of the hot coffee litigation over the past two decades, we wonder what positions will be taken by the parties in any criminal proceeding arising from this assault and/or any workers compensation hearings prompted by this on the job injury.

But something strange is going on in Ohio. Two weeks ago, according to CBS News, Cincinatti police responded to a separate incident at an IHOP in which a woman was hit in the head with a coffee pot.  At this time, we here at Abnormal Use do not know whether these should be considered incidents isolated to the Cincinnatti area or the beginning of a nationwide movement.  Maybe we should have seen this coming. If courts keep throwing out hot coffee suits, something needs to be done right? Alas, let the people rise up against coffee served hot!