Tomorrow marks the release of Texas attorney Larry D. Thompson’s new novel, The Trial, a legal thriller which chronicles the plight of a small town attorney litigating against a fictional international pharmaceutical company. The book’s protagonist, Lucas Vaughn, is a former Houston-based trial lawyer who migrates to a small Texas town to escape the stress associated with his trial work. His plan appears to be working as his health improves and he is finally able to mend his troubled relationship with his teenage daughter, Samantha. Unfortunately, his new found peace is short-lived. After participating in a clinical trial for a drug manufactured by the fictional drug company Ceventa, Samantha contracts severe drug-induced hepatitis. With her life dwindling away, Vaughn takes the fight to the courtroom. During the litigation, he quickly learns that there are no limits to what Ceventa will do to protect its “revolutionary” new drug. You can see the novel’s “book trailer” (complete with dramatic music) here.

We here at Abnormal Use were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to interview Mr. Thompson about his new book and his inspiration for the tale.

[ON PORTRAYING HIMSELF IN THE NOVEL]

FARR: The Trial’s protagonist, Lucas Vaughn is a seasoned UT [University of Texas] law grad, Houston-based trial lawyer. Did you see a little bit of yourself in Lucas?

THOMPSON: Not really. There’s more of me in my first novel, So Help Me God. The protagonist in [So Help Me God] is Todd Duncan. He’s primarily a defense lawyer, so there’s more of me in him. [With Lucas Vaughn] I just wanted a character who had been around the courthouse some. I wanted to put him in a small town, so there’s really none of me. And of course, he was a plaintiff’s lawyer and I had been primarily defense. Although, like any defense lawyer, if a good plaintiff’s case comes along and it’s not against the client, then I’m happy to take the case.

[DEPICTING A LAWYER’S QUALITY OF LIFE]

FARR: Quality of life and the challenge of balancing a successful career with a good home life are serious issues in the legal community. What does the novel say about these issues – particularly in the context of Lucas and his relationship with his daughter, Samantha?

THOMPSON: Well, I think Lucas Vaughn thought he was being a good father. He was faced with having to raise a daughter by himself and I think he thought that “I provided a roof over her head and three meals a day and see her a few hours now and then,” then that’s what a father is supposed to do. He had the rude awakening when he moved her to San Marcos and discovered that his method of fathering really wasn’t all that good. He moved, and he changed his lifestyle. He didn’t change his method in fathering until Samantha flunked out of [Texas] A&M. It was his romantic interest, Sue Ellen, who finally said you need to change it [his parenting style], and he did. That gave him about a year’s worth of a good father/daughter relationship before she took the drug. My old deceased law partner said once that the “law is a jealous mistress.” And that is, in fact, true. No matter what you’re doing, you cannot let it consume you and you’ve got to find time for family. Actually, you’ve got to make time for family. If you don’t, then you end up with problems with your kids and problems with your spouse.

[DIFFICULTY OF REPRESENTING FAMILY]

FARR: In the novel, Lucas represents his daughter as she’s dying of liver failure against the clinical trial physician and Ceventa, the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the clinical drug. How difficult do you think it would be for a lawyer to actually represent a loved one under these circumstances?

THOMPSON: Hugely difficult. I mean, nearly impossible. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody that they represent a family member. I have some personal experience in that. My brother was a successful lawyer in the eighties. He died way too young. He wrote crime non-fiction. He got sued for libel for a book called Blood and Money in Texas. The first lawsuit was a nothing lawsuit when he lived in Los Angeles. I said, “I’ll handle that for you, and we’ll dispose of it pretty quickly.” Then came two other more serious lawsuits. Suddenly, I’m representing my own brother with three lawsuits, two of which were with very strong plaintiff attorneys. So I had a few sleepless nights as we went through those. We won all three of them primarily because my brother had gotten all his facts right. But to have to represent your daughter when she’s dying is something really that no lawyer in his right mind ought to do.

[ON REALISTIC DEPICTIONS OF THE LEGAL PROCESS]

THOMPSON: I want to make sure that any lawyer that reads this book will think, “Okay, the guy that wrote it really knows something about trials and evidence and what goes on in a lawsuit. It’s not ‘made up.'” From that standpoint, I generally succeed. My first novel had a trial at the end. This one has a trial at the end. The one I’m starting now will end up with a trial. I want lawyers to read it and think, “Okay, this guy really does know something about trying lawsuits.”

[ON MAKING LITIGATION INTERESTING]

FARR: The Trial is about far more than just those proceedings in front of the jury, the trial itself. In the book, you go through the rigors of written discovery, depositions, and pretrial motions. What were the challenges of, not only including a large part of the litigation process in a 300 page novel, but also of making it interesting to the reader?

THOMPSON: That is a challenge. I think the only way it can be done is that you have to – you can’t have talking heads for too long a period of time in any book. The reader is going to get bored when that happens. I think you have to mix in (along with the discovery and the depositions) . . . some scenes that involve a little more conflict, a little more drama, something totally apart from the discovery process itself. I think that’s the only way you can really keep a reader’s attention if you’re talking about discovery and hearings at the courthouse and that kind of thing.

[ISSUES WITH THE LENGTH OF COMPLEX LITIGATION]

FARR: One of the ways you were able to kind of condense the process, I guess, was to have the trial expedited due to the circumstances surrounding Samantha’s health. I believe that Ceventa had 90 days to prepare for trial. In practice, a case of this magnitude can be in litigation for a couple of years before it ever goes to trial, if at all. Do you think that courts should do more to expedite the process – especially in situations like Samantha’s?

THOMPSON: Absolutely. I think that – having been a trial lawyer for a long time, I think we [trial lawyers] waste far too much time in discovery. I really think that we could cut out about three quarters of it and it would not affect the outcome. I’ve actually got a plaintiff bad faith case against a disability carrier that I’m going to go to trial in September, and I’ve elected not to depose anybody from the insurance company. . . . I’ve just decided I’ve got their claim file. I know where I want to go with it. I’ve just decided that I’ve tried enough lawsuits that I’ll cross-examine them at the courthouse for the first time. . . . Of course, the big problem is that you go up against a big insurance company or a big pharmaceutical company or even a big products manufacturer, and they want to wear down the plaintiff’s lawyer and the plaintiff if they can drag it out long enough. I’ve seen it and know it happens. I’ve done it myself. It may not be the best way to achieve justice, but sometimes the money they’re willing to throw at it can just cause one delay after another.

[ON THE DEPICTION OF PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES]

FARR: In the novel, Ceventa, the pharmaceutical company, takes some pretty drastic measures – bribery, kidnapping, and murder – to not only have their drug approved by the FDA, but also to protect their interests during the course of the trial itself. Obviously, The Trial is a fiction novel, but were you concerned in any way as a defense attorney about the message that this may convey to readers about large corporations and corporate interests?

THOMPSON: Not really. The reason is because I did do a lot of research. Now, short of murder and kidnapping, well, maybe not even that because where I got interested in this subject was I had a doctor who was on the periphery of the VIOXX litigation and that got me interested in it. There’s a whistle blower named David Graham, who still works for the FDA. He’s a medical doctor and he was interviewed when he blew the whistle on VIOXX and all the problems that it was causing with the heart. He was interviewed by CNN and a question was specifically asked to him, “Because you have come forward and taken this position against Merck [manufacturer of VIOXX], are you in fear for your life?” He [Graham] just said, “Well, I try not to think about that. I am going to do what I think is right.” So far nothing has happened. . . . I’m stretching it a little bit when I tie in kidnapping and murder. As far as bribery , there’s evidence that the FDA has – some people on the FDA have taken bribes. It’s not too big a leap to say that a drug company might commit something like that. But, obviously, that’s fiction.

[ON REPRESENTING THE PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY]

FARR: If you were standing in Audrey Metcalf’s shoes representing Ceventa, would you have handled the case any differently? Are there any things that you may have done that Audrey did not do during the course of the litigation?

THOMPSON: Good question. I don’t think anybody has posed that question to me. . . . What could she have done differently that might have impacted on the trial itself? I think things got out of her hands. I think she was doing a good job as a defense lawyer. She was throwing up obstacles. She had actually kept the clinical trial results out of evidence with a very innovative theory that the results didn’t make any difference because Samantha was participating in the trial itself. I think that she was on the right track until the results of the clinical trial, including the falsified data, came to light through Ryan Sinclair. I think that once that was done the die was probably cast. But I think if that had not come to light, then I think she was on track to win the case. I don’t think she ever – she, herself, did not know that there was fraud involved in the trial itself. So I really think she did a good job. It was her client who was the one that really torpedoed the case.

[ON WRITING A NOVEL WHILE WORKING AS AN ATTORNEY]

THOMPSON: . . . [J]ust a matter of desire and self discipline. If once you decide you want to write, if you’re still a full time lawyer, then you have to get up a little earlier in the morning and write a couple of hours in the morning and then go to the office. That’s assuming you’re not in trial. If you’re in trial or getting ready for trial, then you’ve got to set the book aside and you’ve got to focus on your trial. . . . I couldn’t do it when I was in your stage in life [young associate] and I was too busy with . . . trial and family and . . . all the other stuff that was part of the world then. That took up all my time and I couldn’t have possibly written a book then. But, when my youngest [child] graduated from college and I said okay, I think I’ll give it a try.

[ON WRITING FROM THE PLAINTIFF’S PERSPECTIVE]

THOMPSON: I think David versus Goliath always has an appeal. So if you’re going to write a David versus big old Goliath story, you want to make David the protagonist. So – actually, I’ll give credit to John Grisham who’s the master of this genre in that he usually has, at least in some of his early novels, . . . some little guy against a big establishment company industry figure or something of that sort. And they succeeded. So I decided, well, if it’s good enough for Grisham, then I think I will. Nobody’s done one on the pharmaceutical companies really, so if I’m going to do one on the pharmaceutical companies, I don’t want to make the drug companies the good guys. I want them to be the bad guys.

[DEFENSE AS THE GOOD GUYS?]

FARR: Do you think it’s possible to tell a story, at least a story that people would actually want to read, where the corporate defendant is the good guy?

THOMPSON: Yes. Actually, I’ll direct you back to my first novel, So Help Me God. It’s not really about a corporate defendant, but I decided that for my first novel I took on a noncontroversial subject. I took on the abortion controversy. I decided I wanted to write a novel that would tell both sides of that without taking sides. I wrote it and I submitted it to a bunch of publishers and agents and, not surprisingly, got rejected by everybody – every single one of them. . . In that I actually presented both sides as evenly as I could. I had two really good, different personalities – lawyers on each side. I wanted to show that the – that lawyers can be professional adversaries, but still not take it personally as we so often see in what we do. . . and that there could be a trial where both sides could have really good lawyers. Both sides could have really good cases to present. Then I thought of a way so that I could end the story without taking a side as far as pro-life or pro-choice, which I did. But that doesn’t quite answer your question about the corporation. Can a corporation be a good guy and a protagonist? I would think probably the best way a corporation could do that is if you made the antagonist the federal government. Most people do not personally align themselves with big corporations. I’ve represented too many in my time, and you have, too. I know you haven’t been practicing very long. Juries usually don’t like big corporations. That’s one of our problems when we defend them.

BIOGRAPHY: Larry D. Thompson is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law and is a member of Houston’s Lorance & Thompson, PC. While he has tried numerous cases involving products liability, medical malpractice, insurance coverage, and health care throughout his career, in recent years, over seventy percent of his practice has been in the defense of physicians and health care providers.

Twenty years ago today, on March 15, 1991, the film Class Action was released to theatres. Directed by Michael Apted, written by Carolyn Shelby, Christopher Ames, and Samantha Shad, and produced by Robert W. Cort, Ted Field, Scott Kroopf (as well as Shelby and Ames), the film chronicles a products liability suit involving an allegedly defective station wagon, which when struck from the rear when the left turn signal is operating, bursts into flames. Essentially, the lawsuit is a fictional version of the famous Ford Pinto litigation. However, the real conflict in the film was familial in nature: Big Law corporate defense attorney Maggie Ward (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who represents the automotive company in the suit, is the estranged daughter of Jedediah Tucker Ward (Gene Hackman), the flamboyant plaintiffs’ attorney who brought the suit. Watching the film twenty years later, it’s notable that it made a real attempt to accurately depict the legal process. There are scenes featuring a motion to compel hearing, a discovery document dump, a contentious Plaintiff’s deposition, and ethical dilemmas aplenty for both sides of the bar. Interestingly, the film uses each legal sequence to further and elaborate upon the strained relationship between the father and daughter.

We here at Abnormal Use were fortunate enough to obtain an interview with producer Robert W. Cort and writer-producers Carolyn Shelby and Christopher Ames.

Excerpts of that interview follow below:

[ON REALISTIC DEPICTIONS OF THE LEGAL PROCESS]

SHELBY: It was really a tribute to, well first of all, Michael Apted, the director, [who] came from the documentary world. And he was very committed to doing as honest a depiction of the legal process as you can in a movie. There just has to be some, artistic license to be taken, but he got technical advice, and I was very happy when the movie came out. For years thereafter, various and sundry legal journals would do ratings of movies, and Class Action would always be rated very highly, and the overwhelming reaction was that it did as good a job as was possible to depict the legal process. I was very proud of that because we did work very hard, and we had the luck of a documentarian as our director and the luck of time and the luxury of time to do as good a job as humanly possible when you have to make a story have a true line and you’ve got to focus on characters.

[LOOKING BACK 20 YEARS AT THE FILM]

DEDMAN: Looking back twenty years, what are your thoughts on the film and how it was received as a courtroom or legal drama?

CORT: . . . [O]ne could never get this movie made today . . . Movies in which the ambiguities, the ambivalences, the grays of the world, in which character rules over plot, are almost impossible to get made. The business has changed so much, and I often say that one of the really fortunate things in my career is that I had my career at a time when I could do movies like Class Action, and I have such fond memories and [am] so proud of it. . . . Its really core idea is a relationship between a father and a daughter. It takes the kind of classic, Father of the Bride relationship between a father and a daughter and puts it into, a much darker, much more interesting context and plays out family dynamics as it affects the story.

. . . [W]e began to realize that the father/daughter dynamic was just really a fascinating thing, and then the surrogate son in the part played by Laurence Fishburne became a really interesting character [in conjunction with] the divided loyalties of the daughter. I look back and I’m struck by the ambition of the movie . . . .

SHELBY: . . . When we wrote Class Action with Robert, we went through five years of working [and] did 25 drafts. And that allowed us to go quite a while going in different directions and exploring different ways to do it. You can’t do that now. People make their decisions after one draft or so as to whether or not it’s going to get made.

. . .

CORT: [W]e were incredibly fortunate to be able to develop this in a way outside of the studio. We did develop it completely outside of the studio framework, and we sold it to Fox ,but we were not forced to go through a process. . . . Even in the eighties, even in the nineties, they kind of took the flesh off of anything. So, and I think if you want to look at that, most, many, many, many really wonderful movies were sort of developed outside the studio system.

[CASTING THE FILM; THE NEAR CASTING OF JULIA ROBERTS]

DEDMAN: How did Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio become involved with the project?

CORT: . . . Gene was always kind of in our mind. We wanted a very powerful character who played against the Henry Fonda of that character . . . We wanted someone who had been toughened and was tough because that’s who those people are; they’re not saints. They’re rough people even if their passions will have been shaded over into obsessiveness. And if you look at a lot of Hackman’s roles, going back to Popeye [Doyle] and The Conversation, you see a character in pursuit of what he believes is right [who] will go to any length and ignore everything else, including, in this particular case, his daughter.

. . . I had seen Mystic Pizza, and there was an enormous amount of heat about this young actress and it was, of course, Julia Roberts. We had given it to a few other major actresses and we’d been passed on . . . The character had a lot of gravitas and huge intelligence and a fair piece of alienation even though she was working very much within the system. . . . Michael Apted and I and Scott and Chris and Carolyn met with Julia, kind of saw what she was like, and she desperately wanted to do the movie. And we really believed in her. I was friendly with the people at Disney and knew that they had not released Pretty Woman yet, but that they were through the roof on the movie. They thought that she was going to be the biggest movie star around and she desperately wanted to do it, we wanted her, Joe Roth, who was the head of Fox, just didn’t believe in her, and he just kept fighting us and fighting us and he said “Well, all right maybe.” And we thought, “Oh my God, we’re going to get her.” And then he called me one day, and he said, “Forget Julia Roberts.” He said, “I have just seen the biggest movie star of her generation.” And he had just come from a screening of James Cameron’s The Abyss, in which Mary Elizabeth starred. Mary Elizabeth had been in, at that time, The Color of Money, in which she was great. She’s a terrific actress, absolutely a terrific actress. We couldn’t see the movie because Cameron wouldn’t show us. We never got to see it. Joe was sure it was going to be titanic. Obviously, it turned out not to be titanic. He said, “You’ve got to go to her, and if she doesn’t do it, all right you can use Julia Roberts.” So, we made the offer, she was represented by a man named Sam Cohn, who is a legendary agent in New York, and he gave it to her, and she delayed, and she hadn’t read it. I kept calling, and I said, “Sam, we need an answer ,”and he said, “Yeah, I’ll get you an answer.” I called Roth, and I said, “Look, we’re just getting jerked around, let us go with Julia.” He said, “All right, I’m calling Sam. If she doesn’t commit to it by noon on Friday, noon L.A. time, 3:00 in the afternoon in New York, go with Julia Roberts.” I absolutely kid you not, at 11:55, the phone rang in my office in L.A. and it was Sam Cohn saying “All right, Mary Elizabeth will do the movie.” So, by five minutes, we missed the part being played by Julia Roberts. And I think that it wasn’t just, in my opinion, the fact that Julia Roberts became this enormous star, and we would have been following Pretty Woman, [adding] incalculable value to that. But I think that Mary Elizabeth is a very dramatic actress, and she always went for the very dramatic and the very hard. And Julia, by nature of who she was and what she brought to it, always had that vulnerable, softer quality. And I think it would have been, opposite Hackman . . . it would have taken the movie, perhaps from a commercial standpoint, to another dimension. And the great story was that she got so mad that she went to see Joe Roth and said, “You didn’t believe in me,” and she and Joe Roth became unbelievably good friends. Basically, I didn’t talk to her again until she did Runaway Bride for us.

[DEPICTING THE CHALLENGES OF WOMEN LAWYERS]

DEDMAN: The Maggie character is an interesting one because she is both a young lawyer who wants to make partner, but also a woman in a profession that is dominated by men ,particularly at that time. How do you think the film addresses those issues, and do you think that’s changed in the last twenty years?

AMES: We talked a lot about this in the development of the script. . . . [W]e hung a lantern on that very issue with one particular piece of dialogue between her and her lover, who was also her boss, where she said “I want to make partner on my own, it’s different for a woman in a firm.” I’m not so sure that’s the case anymore. I hope it’s not the case. But certainly in those days, particularly because she was sexually involved with her boss, there was a tremendous stain that she was trying very, very hard to stay away from.

[DEPICTING THE LAW AND FAMILY STRIFE]

DEDMAN: You mentioned the film does portray not just the actions of lawyers in the courtroom but also how some of what happens in the courtroom bleeds into the family life. How many of Jed’s issues with respect to how he relates to Maggie are the result of him being a lawyer as opposed to him just being who he is as a person?

AMES: Well, I don’t think you can necessarily divorce one from the other. It strikes me with Jed that his was a gigantic ego and that informed everything he did, both in his own family and in court. Jed was the kind of character who believed that he could get away with anything just because of the sheer strength of his character. One of the things that we talked to Robert about from the very first day we started developing this script was that we were going to make him a “people’s lawyer” and her a “corporate lawyer.” We had to give each of them significantly large other dimensions to their lives which is why we made him morally compromised and why we made her somebody who second guessed her own decisions.

CORT: Look at Martin Luther King and his sexual peccadilloes. People of that ego, whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it for the right reasons or they tend to believe they are. There is so much testosterone in those people, so much drive, that they need sort of eat everything in their path. I think he was a hugely compelling character in that movie. I never knew anyone who ever said anything other than he felt real.

AMES: He was patterned on some real people. There was a little of Alan Dershowitz in him. There was a little of Tony Serra in him, too. As a matter of fact, the office that you see Jed in – his “office” was Tony Serra’s office – complete with the ashes of a former drug dealer/client [which] was sitting on the desk.

SHELBY: That was put to death by order of the court. And there was artwork all over from prisoners in prison who were using their served out time to paint art.

AMES: So we did have real models out there. Bill Kunstler was a model for him, also. He probably came closer to Kunstler than anybody else.

[REACTIONS OF LAWYERS TO THE FILM]

DEDMAN: What kind of reactions have you gotten from lawyers over the years about the legal elements of the film?

SHELBY: . . . [W]e used to go to theaters that were showing it, and we would come in, all the theaters got to know us, we would come in the last ten minutes of the movie . . . follow the people out and listen to the comments. And we always gravitated toward the lawyers who would be in great debate as they left about [whether the conduct depicted was] ethical. “Could they do this ?” and it went back and forth, and it was hysterical to listen to. But this was wonderful, because there was such huge debate, and these lawyers were having the time of their lives trying to analyze the movie and mainly coming out very positively.

AMES: Perhaps the highest compliments I ever got about the movie was my daughter called me breathless one day from George Washington University . . . to inform me that the plot of this movie was being taught in one of her classes that day and she about fell out of the chair.

[LEGAL ETHICS AND THE FILM]

DEDMAN: . . . [T]here is sort of a debate about some of the ethical decisions made by the lawyers in the film. What Maggie does at the end is probably something she feels is right but may be something that would get her in trouble with the disciplinary authorities.

AMES: I’ve heard arguments for twenty years on both sides of the issues. There are two issues that people always raise about it. Number one is that and number two is whether a father and daughter really could go up against each other in court, and we were scrupulous in our desire to make this an accurate movie.

SHELBY: We also found it was fun during the process of researching and writing it, particularly towards latter stages. At every stage, we wrote a draft that went to the studio, got a response from the legal department who would tell us do this, do that, this isn’t [accurate], and so we would adapt appropriately. So all the way through the process we were getting notes from attorneys, and ironically, we finally hired . . . a technical adviser two weeks before we were going into production. And he was not an entertainment attorney, he was a products liability attorney, and he said, “Well, [I] really loved the script, but it’s not a class action.” How could this be! We came to realize that “Oh, wow, these lawyers are very specialized in their knowledge level, and all these attorneys that we’ve been talking to have not been in the field that was appropriate.” So we then talked to three different class action attorneys who read it and promptly gave us some notes to truly make it accurately a class action. . . . [B]ut the technical advisor, who was a products liability attorney, kept saying, “No, they’re wrong, it’s not a class action.”

AMES: And I must say in the years since the release, no one has ever suggested it wasn’t a class action.

[DEPICTING THE PLAINTIFF’S DEPOSITION]

DEDMAN: There is a scene where Maggie is deposing the plaintiff who is played by Robert David Hall, and in it, she seems troubled that she has to ask him about past accidents and some pre-existing psychological issues that he has related to automobiles. Why is she troubled about that approach?

SHELBY: That that scene was rewritten to death. Every single day for five years, we rewrote that scene.

AMES: A fair amount of that deposition came to us from David Hall who was a friend of mine prior to the filming and when I got David scenes to do the part and David talked about the two-day deposition that he had had where the attorneys for, I think it was Volkswagen in that case, had grilled him over and over asking him the same questions over and over just slightly rephrased and how agonizing it had been for him. I thought always with Maggie was that there was a bit of her wanting to have her cake and eat it, too. That she wanted to be a powerful corporate lawyer, but she wanted to be a partner, but that she had perhaps too many moral qualms about what you had to do to people. There’s a scene just subsequent to that in a bar where she identifies herself as a professional killer. That’s how she saw herself behaving in there [at the deposition], and frankly, the scene that she played just before that with [the character of] Quinn, the main partner in the firm, who said, “I want him eliminated as a viable witness in this case,” she was not so much deposing him as she was destroying him.

SHELBY: . . . [W]e needed to see her be hard and be the good soldier and do what she needed to do. But we also, as the audience, we needed to have her do it in such a way that we wouldn’t hate her. We just would not hate her for the rest of the movie. And that is a balancing act that’s very difficult to write.

[FILMS ABOUT PRODUCTS LIABILITY]

DEDMAN: [T]here have been a number of films since Class Action was released that address this sort of products liability complex litigation class action context. What is it about those types of lawsuits that make them a good backdrop for films?

CORT: It’s always a greedy, irresponsible, immoral force against people who can’t really defend themselves and somebody standing up to them. That’s been at the heart of movies since Mr. Smith Goes to Washington back in the thirties. There’s been this kind of war in America so to speak between the enormous kind of secret respect we give to people who travel and become famous and rich and powerful and this hatred we have for people who trample our rights and the rights of the defenseless. So, I think thematically this has been a part of our society and hence been a part of movies ever since. You don’t see that much of it in major Hollywood movies any more because I think the sense in Hollywood is that the courtroom drama has been completely taken over by television and they just don’t want to do it. . . . But it’s not a staple of Hollywood film any more because Hollywood film is so dominantly about the created world and fantasy worlds that are aimed at sort of all ages audiences and most importantly are aimed overseas. And one of the problems with doing courtroom drama or doing a class action lawsuit like this is that it doesn’t travel well because the laws of other countries are different, the things that are crimes here and not necessarily crimes abroad . . . . So, I think the foreign or the international demands of the business mitigate against anything other than the guy who kills somebody is wronged kind of thing. So I think class action kinds of stuff is, or products liability are becoming more difficult to make work.

[THE PRESIDENTIAL CONNECTION]

DEDMAN: Two of the actors in your film went on the play Presidents of the United States. Donald Moffat in Clear and Present Danger and Gene Hackman in Absolute Power and Welcome to Mooseport and then Fred Thompson [who played a corporate representative in Class Action] actually ran for President. Is that a coincidence?

CORT: If I’m not mistaken, Donald Moffat also played LBJ in a movie.

DEDMAN: That was before Class Action. Is there a presidential coincidence there?

AMES: I’ll answer that question with a line from a review that I read shortly after the movie came out, where a reviewer was pontificating about the movie and actually liked it, but said “Can it be a coincidence that Maggie’s father’s first name is the same as the first name of the second in command in Citizen Kane?” And I read it and out loud I said, “Yes, it can be.”

[LAWYERS AND QUALITY OF LIFE]

DEDMAN: One thing that is always on the forefront of discussions in lawyer magazines and publications is the quality of life issue and how lawyers who are traditionally workaholics can achieve some type of balance between the work they need to do and their obligations to their family. What do you think that the movie says about those issues in light of the strained the relationship between Jed and Maggie?

AMES: If given his choice, Jed would always be working. Jed is a classic workaholic ,and Maggie has inherited that. I also think that the lack attention that Jed and probably Maggie to paid to their familial relationship growing up was something that was bound to bear fruit later on down the line and also put the mother in the position of being the arbiter between these two.

SHELBY: There’s no question that workaholism has worked a great deal on Maggie and Jed and really, I think, many achievers in our country, I don’t know any great thing to say about it except it’s just reality. And I think it’s worse now for attorneys than ever with the decline in opportunities for employment. I would not want to be an attorney. Of, course being a screenwriter wasn’t that far off.

[DEFENSE FIRM AS GOOD GUY IN A FILM?]

DEDMAN: You mentioned that part of the appeal for some of the movies that have been released over the years depicting these types of lawsuits is the David versus Goliath angle – the powerless taking on powerful interests. Do you ever think there will be a film, or is there a way to tell a story, where the large corporate interest isn’t necessarily the bad guy in the lawsuit?

SHELBY: Well, definitely. Good drama is the gray part where you can be ambivalent about who is the good guy and who is the bad.

CORT: I’m not sure where the story is when Goliath beats David. So I don’t know, I’m not, I don’t quite see that.

AMES: What we have here, Jim, is the perfect differentiation between a producer and a writer.

AMES: I think the writer is saying, “Now, wait a minute, this could be interesting. Let’s make this dog dance.”

DEDMAN: Well, is it just that the stakes are not as high if the big company . . .

CORT: You’re suing them and you falsified your claim to make them look bad, I guess. But I don’t really see that. . . . I don’t know what I’m watching there or what I’m supposed to feel. You know, there’s again, I think “The Good Wife” does a lot of ambivalent stuff.

SHELBY: There’s always a bigger firm that is more corrupt, you know?

AMES: There’s the movie: A firm that thinks of itself as being completely corrupt and then comes up against somebody who’s more corrupt.

CORT: Yeah, but then it’s like a pox on everybody . . . Who cares?

[SHELBY, AMES, AND DEF LEPPARD]

DEDMAN: I have to ask [Chris and Carolyn] about “Hysteria – The Def Leppard Story.” How did you get involved in that and how did you prepare to write that script?

. . .

AMES: [Our agent] said “I have this strange news for you.” She said “I’ve put you up for all kinds of projects which you would have been absolutely perfect for and you haven’t gotten them. As a group, I put you up for this and they jumped through hoops to get you.”

SHELBY: We had done a movie that was a TV movie that had not been made on, was it Marge Schott or was it – we had become kind of pigeon-holed in doing autobiographical stories or real stories about people and doing them in a way that, generally, most of the people were proved despicable but we did them giving them the benefit of doubt and depicting their background so that people could understand how the Marge Schotts of the world could happen and characters like that. And so they had read Marge Schott and they had read a project for Proctor & Gamble and they loved that we were able to take [on a] very complex context. We also did a thing on the Olympics bid in Utah and how it was achieved . . . . And they loved how we were able to take very big concepts and compress them into something with a story like that we could do in an economic amount of time. But we were so wrong on every other level . . . we were just too old and you wouldn’t think of us to write this and I had a classical music background. . . . I think one of the things that they did like about us was that we weren’t huge Def Leppard fans . . . . We were going to ask the hard questions and we were going to do our best to make it a compelling story without making it too syrupy.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, through her agent, declined a request for an interview. Samantha Shad, one of the writers, also declined our request for an interview.]

Over the last few months, we here at Abnormal Use have corresponded regularly with our friends at the Drug and Device Law blog, most notably Steve McConnell and Jim Beck, about both the law and popular culture. The subject of our conversations inevitably turned to music, a topic held dear by us all. Although our two blogs have previously quibbled on musical issues, we were elated to hear that Steve is a big fan of Bruce Springsteen and the late, great Arthur Lee. We have also learned that Jim Beck has a keen knowledge of The Rolling Stones. Over the course of these many discussions, we decided we would combine our two topics of interest – the law and music – and cobble together a list of songs, both popular and obscure, about the law and lawyers.

Steve and Jim took the first stab at a list, and they were kind enough to give us a sneak preview. Accordingly, armed with the knowledge of the songs they selected, we here decided that we would attempt to expand that list, rather than repeat what they listed. So, we won’t be including tunes like Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” or Jackson Browne’s “Lawyers in Love,” because Steve and Jim beat us to those and several others that come to mind. See here for their thorough and entertaining list that they posted this morning (at the very same moment our post went live), and couple that with our list below. You can then fill your own iTunes library until it’s full with tunes about attorneys, jurisprudence, and the hallowed halls of courthouses.

We’ll start with a list of songs which happen to mention the law or lawyers

AC/DC – “Rock ‘N’ Roll Singer” (“My Daddy was workin‘ 9 to 5 when my Momma was havin‘ me / By the time I was half alive I knew what I was gonna be / I left school and grew my hair / They didn’t understand / They wanted me to be respected as a doctor or a lawyer man/ But I had other plans”)

The Auteurs – “Underground Movies” (“She’s got a credo in underground movies / Her father is a lawyer / Who paid for the fitting and fixtures /And a house with bay windows.”)

B.B. King – “She’s My Baby” (“Hey, she’s my lawyer when I’m in trouble.”)

Beastie Boys – “Car Thief” (“Said good-bye to my girl, my lawyers, and accountants.”)

Belle and Sebastian – “Legal Man” (“Not withstanding provisions of clauses 1, 2, 3, and 4 / Extend contractual period, me and you for evermore.”)

Bob Dylan – “Cry A While” (“I might need a good lawyer, could be a funeral mad trial.”)

Bob Dylan – “Walls of Red Wing” (“Oh, some of us will wind up in St. Cloud prison / And some of us’ll end up to be lawyers and things / And some of us’ll stand to meet you on your crossroads / From inside the grounds of the walls of Red Wing.”)

Bon Jovi – “Blood on Blood” (“Now Bobby, an uptown lawyer Danny, a medicine man / And me, I’m just the singer in a long haired rock ‘n’ roll band / Through the years and miles between us it’s been a long and lonely ride / But if I got that call in the dead of the night, I’d be right by your side.”)

Bruce Springsteen – “Atlantic City” (“The D.A. can’t get no relief.”)

Bryan Adams – “Not Guilty” (“Do I have to prove my innocence? / Don’t need a lawyer with a fat degree / Cause if lovin‘ you is against the law / Then you better lock me up and throw away the key.”)

Camper Van Beethoven – “Good Guys and Bad Guys” (“Well there are good guys and there are bad guys / And there are crooks and criminals / There are doctors and there are lawyers / And there are folks like you and me.”)

Carly Simon – “Coming to Get You” (“Lovers and lawyers in Arkansas / Laid down the law.”)

Chuck Berry – “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” (“Arrested on charges of unemployment / He was sitting in the witness stand / The judge’s wife called up the district attorney / Said you free that brown eyed man / You want your job you better free that brown eyed man.”)

Chuck Brodsky – “Talk to My Lawyer” (“I was walking outside of City Hall – I slipped and I had a terrible fall / It was negligence on the part of I don’t care who / I fell so hard I was seeing stars / Dollar signs and men from Mars / And the man who helped me up said I ought to sue / He was a lawyer, he was all out of breath.”)

The Clash – “Guns on the Roof” (“Sue the lawyers and burn all the papers / Unlock the key of the legal papers / A jury of a billion faces / Shouted out condemned out of hand.”)

The Clash – “Midnight Log” (“Cooking up the books / A respected occupation / The anchor and foundation of multi-corporations / They don’t believe in crime / They don’t know that it exists / But to understand / What’s right and wrong / The lawyers work in shifts.”)

The Coral – “Liezah” (“So, lawyers doctors please beware of that girl with wavy hair / She will cut you down to size / Reveal the truth behind your disguise.”)

Creed – “My Own Prison” (“A court is in session / A verdict is in / No appeal on the docket today / Just my own sin.”)

Dance Hall Crashers – “Sue Us” (“I heard you had a mind to sue / Why I don’t know? / I guess your lawyers will tell us.”)

Dave Frishberg – “My Attorney Bernie” (“I’m impressed with my attorney Bernie / I’m impressed with his influential friends.”)

David Bowie – “I Have Not Been to Oxford” (“And the prison priests are decent / My attorney seems sincere / I fear my days are numbered / Lord, get me out of here.”)

Dead Kennedys – “When Ya Get Drafted” (“If you can’t afford a slick attorney we might make you a spy.”)

Dire Straits – “Telegraph Road” (“Then came the lawyers, then came the rules.”)

Don Henley – “The End of the Innocence” (“The lawyers clean up all details / since daddy had to lie.”)

Don Henley – “Garden of Allah” (“Today I made and appearance downtown / I am an expert witness, because I say I am / And I said, “Gentleman, and I use that word loosely, I will testify for you, I’m a gun for hire, I’m a saint, I’m a liar Because there are no facts, no truth, just data to be manipulated, I can get you any result you like / What’s it worth to you?”)

The Eagles – “Get Over It” (“Let’s kill all the lawyers, kill ’em tonight.”)

The Eurythmics – “Sisters Are Doin‘ It For Themselves” (“We got doctors, lawyers, and politicians, too.”)

Fishbone – “Ma and Pa” (“Well, there’s a lot of money / For all the attorneys.”)

Fountains of Wayne – “California Sex Lawyer” (“I’ve got a license to love.”)

Frank Zappa – “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” (“Gotta meet the Guerneys and a dozen gray attorneys.”)

Frank Zappa – “Heavenly Bank Account” (“He says the grace while the lawyers chew.”)

Geoff Berner – “My Dad’s A Lawyer” (“It’s a privilege to announce my dad’s a lawyer.”)

George Harrison – “Sue Me, Sue You Blues” (“Bring your lawyer, and I’ll bring mine / Get together, we could have a bad time.”)

George Harrison – “Wreck of the Hesperus” (“I’m not a power of attorney / But I can rock as good as Gibraltar.”)

Guns N’ Roses – “You Could Be Mine” (“Don’t forget to call my lawyers with ridiculous demands.”)

Jewel – “Who Will Save Your Soul” (” . . . [A]nother lawyer’s bill . . .”)

Kitty Wells – “Will your Lawyer Talk to God” (“Your lawyer called and said he had the papers all prepared / To sign my name was all I had to do / He saw the judge, now he seen me, there’s only one thing left / Will your lawyer talk to God for you?”)

Lou Reed – “Dirty Blvd.” (“Where’s the proof, man? Let me speak to my attorney.”)

Mojo Nixon – “Destroy All Lawyers” (There’s a plague on the planet, and they went to law school.”)

Neil Young – “Sixty to Zero” (“There’s a judge in the city / He goes to work every day / Spends his life in the courthouse / Keeps his perspective that way.”)

Neil Young – “Drivin‘ Thunder” (“I stopped into the courthouse / I had to pay some bills / Got talking with the judge / About the finer points of my driving skills.”)

Panic at the Disco – “Build God, Then We’ll Talk” (“The missus will stay with the cheating attorney.”)

Pink Floyd – “The Trial” (“The evidence before the court is incontrovertible / There’s no need for the jury to retire / In all my years of judging I have never heard before / Of someone more deserving the full penalty of law.”)

The Pogues – “Repeal of the Licensing Laws” (Instrumental)

R.E.M. – “Can’t Get There From Here” (“Lawyer Jeff he knows the lowdown.”)

The Roots – “Table of Contents (Parts 1 & 2)” (“Cutting through like attorneys at law that’s car chasin‘.”)

Todd Rundgren – “Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare Song” (“And bound on that journey you find your attorney.”)

Tom Paxton – “One Million Lawyers” (“In ten years we’re gonna have one million lawyers / How much can a poor nation stand?”)

A Tribe Called Quest – “Show Business” (“Get a good lawyer, so problems won’t pile.”)Tom Petty – “Accused of Love” (“Well, the attorney grins / The witness is drug in / With his face half hid in the shadow / Sworn to God and state, the truth arrives too late / and defense goes out the window”)

Warren Zevon – “Mr. Bad Example” (“Of course I went to law school and took a law degree / and counseled all my clients to plead insanity.”)

Weezer – “Jamie” (“Jamie, believe me, I won’t let you down / Cuz you are the best lawyer in town.”)

Willie Nelson – “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” (“Make ’em be doctors and lawyers and such.”)

As noted in the Drug and Device Law blog’s post, many law songs mention the criminal process. Here’s a brief list of some other such songs we identified:

10 CC – “Good Morning, Judge” (“Well, good morning Judge / How are you today ? / I’m in trouble please put me away.”)

Black Flag – “Police Story” (“I go to court for my crime / Stand in line, pay bail / I may serve time.”)

Bruce Springsteen – “Johnny 99” (“Well your honor I do believe I’d be better off dead / And if you can take a man’s life for the thoughts that’s in his head / Then won’t you sit back in that chair and think it over judge one more time / And let ’em shave off my hair and put me on that execution line.”)

Bruce Springsteen – “Highway Patrolmen” (“My name is Joe Roberts I work for the state / I’m a sergeant out of Perrineville barracks number 8.”)

Bruce Springsteen – “State Trooper” (“Mister state trooper, please don’t stop me . . . .”)

Bukka White – “District Attorney Blues” (“A District Attorney sho‘ is hard on a man / He taken me from my woman / Cause her to love some other man / District Attorney sho‘ is hard on a man / He will take a woman’s man and leave her cold in hand.”)

The Clash – “Know Your Rights” (“You have the right to remain silent / You are warned that anything you say can and will be taken down and used as evidence against you.”)

Elvis Costello – “I Stand Accused” (“Girl, I stand accused / People say I love you / Yeah, I stand accused / Oh, but what can I do? / You belong to some other guy / Hope I never have to testify / If loving you is a big crime / I’ve been guilty a long time.”)

Fiona Apple – “Criminal” (“What I need is a good defense ’cause I’m feeling like a criminal.”)

Furry Lewis – “Judge Boushay Blues” (“Good morning judge, what may be my fine?”)

Joe Perry Project – “Never Wanna Stop” (“Judge and the jury and the district attorney / Gonna try to put my ass in jail.”)

Johnny Cash – “Hung My Head” (“Here in the court house / The whole town was there / I see the judge / High up in the chair / Explain to the court room / What went through your mind / And we’ll ask the jury / What verdict they find.”)

The Kingston Trio – “Bad Man’s Blunder” (“The judge and the jury, they did agree. They all said murder in the first degree. The judge said, saying: I don’t know whether to hang you or not, but this here killin‘ of deputy sheriffs, just naturally got to stop!” (“You’ve got a point there, judge!”)

The Kingston Trio – “Tom Dooley” (“This time tomorrow / Reckon where I’ll be Down in some lonesome valley / Hangin‘ from a white oak tree.”)

LL Cool J – “Illegal Search” (“I got cash and real attorneys on the case.”)

Metallica – “And Justice for All” (“Halls of justice, painted green / Money talking, Power wolves beset your door / Hear them stalking.”)

Morrissey – “I’ve Changed My Plea To Guilty” (“I’ve changed my plea to guilty / Because freedom is wasted on me.”)

The Specials – “Stupid Marriage” (“Court in session. What do you mean ‘Oy, oy, oy‘? Must have court in session. Order. My name is Judge Roughneck, And I will not tolerate any disobedience in my courtroom. Rude boy, you have been brought in Front of me and charged with smashing this woman’s window. Before I sentence you, What have you got to say in your defense?”)

Was Not Was – “Dad, I’m in Jail” (“Say hi to mom / From jail!”)

We also located a few songs about family law (although we suspect there are many more):

Tammy Wynette – “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” (“Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes final today.”).

Steely Dan – “Haitian Divorce” (“This is your Haitian divorce.”).

Weird Al Yankovic – “Alimony” (“Lawyer’s callin‘ me on the telephony / Tryin‘ to squeeze some blood from a stony, stony.”)

There aren’t too many songs about products liability. However, we did manage to come up with a few songs that at least sound like they might be about that type of litigation:

Alice in Chains – “Angry Chair”

Beck – “Broken Drum”

Belle X1 – “The Ribs of A Broken Umbrella

Built to Spill – “Broken Chairs”

As for bands that just might have named themselves after products liability issues, what about Dangerous Toys?

Keeping in mind their beat, the folks at the Drug and Device Law blog also came up with a list of songs about drugs. Well, as they note, way too many rock songs are about drugs, but there are some at least that sound like they might be about the the prescription medication industry:

Candlebox – “Happy Pills”

Eels – “Novocaine for the Soul”

Entrance – “Valium Blues”

Fugazi – “Give Me The Cure”

Morphine – “Cure for Pain”

Neil Young – “The Needle and the Damage Done”

New York Dolls – “Pills”

Pink Floyd – “Comfortably Numb”

Ramones – “I Wanna Be Sedated”

U2 – “Miracle Drug”

The Velvet Underground – “I’m Waiting for the Man”

The Verve – “The Drugs Don’t Work”

Let’s not forget the Alanis Morissette’s album Jagged Little Pill, either, or the rock groups named Codeine and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. And, of course, if you’re looking for band names that sounds related to the pharmaceutical industry, what about The Cure?

Back in the halcyon days of the 1980s, we encountered one cassette tape of popular music actually produced by a major pharmaceutical company. We had to dig through our forlorn box of old cassettes, but we did manage to find it, and here’s an image of the cassette’s cover:

A joint production of Smith, Kline, and French (now a part of GlaxoSmithKline) and Capitol Records, the 1985 cassette celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the release of the prescription drug Dyazide. In so doing, the release included a number of songs from 1965. We’ve scoured the Internet for information on this release and found little, if anything. So, in the interests of posterity, we present you the track list of songs from 1965 included thereon:

SIDE ONE

1. Beach Boys – “California Girls”
2. Cher – “All I Really Want to Do”
3. The Seekers – “Another You”
4. Mel Carter – “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me”
5. Gary Lewis and the Playboys – “This Diamond Ring”

SIDE TWO

1. Jackie DeShannon – “What The World Needs Now”
2. The Beach Boys – “Help Me, Rhonda”
3. The Lettermen – “Theme from ‘A Summer Place'”
4. Freddie and the Dreamers – “I’m Telling You Now”
5. Al Martino – “Spanish Eyes”

While on the subject of lawyers and music, we would be quite remiss if we did not mention The Honorable Stephen S. Trott, a justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who was a member of the folk group The Highwaymen in the late 50s early 60s.

Further, we must note that although our friends at the Drug and Device Law blog did include “I Fought The Law” (originally by the Bobby Fuller Four, later covered by The Clash) on their list, they neglected to mention the subsequent covers by The Dead Kennedys, Green Day, Unknown Hinson, and Bell X1 (only some of which are worth a listen). We’ll forgive them that.

Finally, dear readers, if you’ve noticed that a song is missing from either our list or that of the Drug and Device Law blog, please feel free to leave us a comment with the omitted song(s). We’re sure we’ve missed many, many others. Also, if you happen to be a law blogger yourself, we encourage you to write your own post with your own list of songs we missed (or even a Top 10 list of your all time favorite songs that mention the law or lawyers).

JAMES: My wife and I were having dinner with some friends and the subject turned to Superman’s X-ray vision and whether privacy rights on Krypton might be very different. One of our friends suggested that this kind of thing might make for a good blog, which I was a bit skeptical of at first. I thought about it for a few days and wrote up the first few articles, then I posted about the blog on the personal projects section of MetaFilter, a kind of shared blog that Ryan and I are members of. I’ve been a member of MetaFilter since 2005, and it’s a fairly close community with a strong emphasis on member contributions. So I think what really prompted me to start the blog was a desire to contribute something interesting to that community, although I had no idea it would be so well received.

After the post to MetaFilter, Ryan immediately responded with an offer of collaboration, and so he was involved almost from the very beginning. We’ve both been pleasantly surprised by the positive reception the blog has received every step of the way.

JAMES AND RYAN: Relatively few comic books depict the legal process beyond villains being arrested by police after the superheroes do their thing. But what depictions there are hold up pretty well, especially considering most (if not all) comics are written by non-lawyers. The stories that have courtroom scenes usually don’t have any glaring technical errors, even if they don’t show a lot of detail. On the whole, most modern comic book courtroom scenes are on par with the depiction of court scenes in TV shows and movies.

That being said, comic book stories containing plot elements that are significantly legally problematic show up with some regularity, e.g. nobody ever seems to pay taxes or get audited. Some of that is excusable given the common genre trope of not showing boring details—no one ever seems to go to the bathroom either—and warrantless searches and arrests are so commonplace in comic books that it would be kind of surprising if they *didn’t* show up.

But we do occasionally see things that simply don’t work. For example, the criminal law definition of “insanity” isn’t represented in comic books very well. The Joker may be emotionally unbalanced, even to the point of meriting involuntary commitment, but he does not appear to be insane in a way that would excuse him from criminal liability. Similarly, maintaining a secret identity without government support is reasonably difficult even over the short term, and the problems get even worse for abnormally long-lived characters like Wolverine or R’as al Ghul. But again, the few times that comic books do explicitly deal with legal situations, they do fairly well.

JAMES: In one of the Manhunter comics, Manhunter’s alter ego, Kate Spencer, who is a criminal defense attorney, is at a grand jury hearing. The comic book mentions that the proceedings are sealed and that as a representative for the defense Kate is only there as a courtesy and can’t object to anything. I was very pleasantly surprised by the mention of those technical but important details. So that stands out in my mind.

RYAN: I find that the very early Iron Man comics (i.e. the mid-1960s), Tony Stark actually ran into significant difficulties switching between the Iron Man and Stark personae. It’s one of the few times that a superhero seems to have been bothered by the masquerade beyond mere fear of discovery; Stark started to have money problems. It’s one of the reasons he took off the mask, as it were: maintaining the double life was simply too difficult given the highly public life of Tony Stark.

JAMES: My favorite issues have been the ones closest to my day job, which is focused on intellectual property. Posts like “Batman and Patents” and the “Superpowered Merchandising” series are my favorites. I did really enjoy writing the recent post on legal ethics, though, since I don’t think the writer realized that the character was committing an ethical breach (improper in-person solicitation), and I don’t think many readers would realize it either. I enjoyed the opportunity to inform people about the ethical standards for attorneys, especially since this is an issue that they might encounter in their own lives.

RYAN: I’ve enjoyed the more historical topics, so outlawry, the non-human intelligence series, and the posts touching on immortality have been especially fun to write.

Everyone knows the tale of the New Mexico jury that awarded an octogenarian Plaintiff nearly $3 million after she spilled a cup of McDonald’s coffee into her lap at the drive through. In 1994, that verdict became the talk of the nation and the poster child for tort reform. Since that time, the case has become the legal community’s most infamous urban legend. However, most Americans probably wouldn’t recognize Plaintiff Stella Liebeck’s name; fewer realize that the large award of damages was ultimately reduced to approximately $800,000 by the trial court. The story of the hot coffee case – much like a childhood game of “telephone” – has been told and re-told so many times that the line between truth and myth has become indistinguishable.

As noted Tuesday in our interview with creator and showrunner Michael Sardo, “Fairly Legal” centers around Kate Reed (Sarah Shahi, pictured above), a mediator and former attorney whose idealism stands in stark contrast to the demands of her employment at a big law firm. We here at Abnormal Use obtained advance screeners of both the pilot, which debuts tonight at 10/9 Central on the USA Network, and the fourth episode, which will air in February. Written by Sardo, and directed by Bronwen Hughes, the pilot sees the puzzled fiancé of a plaintiff ask Reed, “What kind of mediator are you?” Litigators may have the same question, as the mediation process depicted is quite different than that to which practitioners have become accustomed. Be forewarned, there may be minor, minor spoilers in the review we offer below.

Weary of the legal profession, Kate explains that she has “more than a small amount of self-hatred.” This may be why she has given up her litigation practice and gone so far as to resign her membership from the California State Bar. But the law is in her blood, and she comes from a family of lawyers. Her late father was once a masterful attorney who built the large San Francisco law firm of Reed & Reed. Her brother (Ethan Embry), who has retired from the profession, used to work at the family firm. Her “evil step mother” Lauren Reed (Virginia Williams) – much, much younger than Kate’s father – is now the managing partner at the law firm, which is struggling in light of Kate’s father’s death. To boot, Kate’s own ex-husband, Justin Patrick (Michael Trucco) is an assistant district attorney. So, despite no longer having a law license, Kate elects to maintain a mediation practice and remain in the employ of Reed & Reed.

Kate has the sort of quirky existence seen on contemporary television programs: she lives on a boat, maintains an unusually close relationship with her ex-husband, programs her iPhone to display images from The Wizard of Oz based on the personality of the caller, and never seems to find herself on the wrong side of the issue presented in the episode. Shahi plays Reed with a charm of sorts, although there is an element of the holier-than-thou in her character, who often has to explain why the traditional result of the law is not always the product of justice.

In the first episode, Kate mediates two principal disputes. In the first, she is called upon to resolve a disagreement between a stern father and his adult son – both of whom are corporate representatives of a large clothier client which had negotiated a buy out now in peril due to the family dispute. Apparently, the son was charged with a DUI under mysterious circumstances which threaten the transaction. In the second, Kate is appointed by a judge to mediate a dispute between a pro se plaintiff, a recently engaged man, who is suing three pro se defendants who he claims ruined his meticulously planned proposal. Her approach to both cases is unorthodox, to say the least, and at times, she seems to stray into offering legal advice to non-clients (which, of course, she should not really do as the mediator, especially a non-attorney mediator).

Like many television lawyers, Kate is an idealist. She shows up at one client’s house late one night and encourages him to “do the right thing” – something which is contrary to his own wishes and best interests. Her managing partner advises her that a non-client criminal defendant is not worth attention – and Kate responds sarcastically that she should “never let an innocent kid’s life stand in the way of our legal fees.” She lectures her district attorney ex-husband about justice and truth being higher than the laws that are held up as sacred and immutable. The difficulty she faces – and what is bound to become a central theme of the show – is her philosophy and its conflict with the daily back and forth of the legal profession (which she comes to understand are just as important, but not more, than her own idealism).

One of the most interesting characters is Williams’ Lauren (pictured above), the managing partner who is forced to do a bit of wining and dining to rekindle client relationships in the wake of her husband’s death (which leads to its own set of ethical difficulties). She faces a clear set of challenges, not just in the perils of client retention but also the day to day struggles of the business of law. (Real life firms Morrison Forrester of San Francisco and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati of Palo Alto get shout outs as law firms moving in on Reed & Reed’s business following the death of Kate’s father.). To boot, Lauren also must cope with older male clients who think that she, as both a woman and a younger lawyer, might not be up to the task. As a foil to Kate, she could just be another symbol of a broken system, but there is potential in this character to showcase real and true dilemmas faced by attorneys across the country.

There are, of course, a number of inaccuracies and issues with the depiction of both the legal profession generally and the operation of a major law firm specifically:

One judge (Gerald McRaney) appoints her to mediate the dispute between the aforementioned unrepresented plaintiff and three unrepresented defendants. In so doing, he actually summons her to court (where all of the parties are waiting in the well of the court for the appointment to occur). The judge gives her two days to successfully mediate the dispute – a $10 million civil suit brought by a spouse suing an actor for blundering a proposal. Interestingly, she notes that two days would not be enough time to mediate a case involving multiple defendants and such a high initial demand.

Although we are told from the beginning that Kate is not a lawyer, she does not always inform those with whom she interacts and likely leaves the impression that she is not only a lawyer – but their lawyer as well. In the pilot, she visits an unrepresented criminal defendant and essentially offers legal advice in a fashion that borders on the unauthorized practice of law. Further, she makes no disclaimer to the defendant that she is not a lawyer generally and not his lawyer specifically, leaving him with the reasonable impression that he has created an attorney-client relationship with her.

Lauren, the managing partner, busily scurries about trying to save revenue. However, she never remarks on the fact that Kate, by resigning as an attorney but still holding herself out as a mediator, would almost certainly have to reduce her hourly rate. Surely a client would demand a lower rate for a former lawyer mediator than a licensed attorney mediator, especially from such a young former attorney as Kate.

As he indicated in his interview with our site, Sardo thinks of mediation as an opportunity for parties to a dispute to speak for themselves rather than through an attorney. If the pilot and fourth episode are an indication, this will lead to a reliance on stories involving unrepresented parties involved in a dispute with other unrepresented parties.

Although we dig the character, Lauren is a bit young to be a managing partner. According to her IMDB entry, Williams, the actress who portrays her, was born in 1978, making her the age of many associates. It may be difficult to buy into a managing partner of a major law firm being portrayed by an actress who was an aspiring teenage actress as recently as the mid-1990s (which was not too long ago). But, hey, it’s television, and what can you do?

What Sardo is trying to do with the show, though, is admirable. He’s not trotting out another formula legal drama that we’ve all seen before a million times. Rather, he’s attempting to depict the day to day business of alternative dispute resolution, which is something we here at Abnormal Use have not seen much of in popular culture. Sure, he’s got to take some liberties with the process, as no one wants to watch a program about a mediator shuffling from one conference room to another taking numbers back and forth and attempting to settle a case in that fashion.

Believe it or not, we here at Abnormal Use scored an interview with Hollywood writer and producer Michael Sardo (pictured above), whose new show “Fairly Legal,” debuts Thursday night on the USA Network at 10/9 Central. The show stars Sarah Shahi (pictured below) as Kate Reed, a lawyer turned mediator, whose spirited idealism pits her against the staid conventions of life at her late father’s San Francisco law firm. So weary of the legal profession is she that she actually resigned from the bar. However, she has decided to remain a mediator at the firm and work alongside Lauren Reed (Virginia Williams) who, in addition to being the firm’s by-the-book managing partner, is also Kate’s father’s young widow. Further complicating Kate’s life is her relationship with her ex-husband, Justin Patrick (Michael Trucco), an assistant district attorney who somehow finds himself embroiled in many of Kate’s many mediation antics.

Sardo was kind enough to grant us an interview earlier this month about the show and his philosophy on alternative dispute resolution in general.

DEDMAN: You’ve referred to “Fairly Legal” as “our little anti-law law show,” and I wanted to ask you first, how is it different from other legal shows?

SARDO: Well, it’s different in several ways. It doesn’t take place in the courts. One of the most important scenes in the pilot is Kate being thrown out of a court. She’s the thing that doesn’t belong. Kate Reed, the lead character, is a former lawyer who was frustrated with the law and who resigned from the bar and becomes a mediator. She tries to find a more direct way to solve conflict. Kate’s point of view is that the artifice of the law is this sort of standardization that’s needed to create laws that fit all levels of society [that] actually leaves out some of the most important parts, and she wanted to get to those most important parts. At the same time, in the pilot, she realizes that you often need lawyers and the law because if everyone was a mediator, that way lies anarchy. But as the balance has shifted to us being such a litigious, law-filled society, she is someone who moves towards the opening up of another way for some conflicts to be resolved.

DEDMAN: Now, if I were a client of the Reed & Reed law firm, why would I want Kate Reed to mediate my dispute?

SARDO: Because she would understand the cost, both physical and mental, of going to court, what you could possibly win, but also what it would cost you, and what you could possibly lose, and so she would first propose a more direct streamlined solution which involves hearing what you think, and what the injured party or the complaining party thinks, would be the solution. . . . [N]owhere does the show say we don’t need laws or lawyers. . . . [S]ay you go into a courtroom, [and] I have a disagreement with Jim Dedman, who’s my neighbor – so instead of talking to him, I go to court. . . . . I don’t talk to anyone. My lawyer talks for me. His lawyer talks for him. And then, a judge, who’s sort of dad or grandpa, tells us what’s going to happen. He doesn’t tell you what’s right or wrong but what the law says is right or wrong. So we kind of give up our rights and our adulthood and sublimate it to these laws, some of which may work, and some of which may not. It’s a system that functions well in some cases and really poorly in others. Kate is someone who takes a more direct approach and . . . puts [people] in a mediation where they get to talk for themselves and propose their own solution.

DEDMAN: You mentioned at the beginning that she is a former lawyer, and at some point in the events prior to the pilot, she surrenders her law license as an attorney to become a mediator. Why does she take that approach?

SARDO: A lot of lawyers who are also mediators . . . [they’re] still a lawyer. [They] can still then also hold what’s happened in a mediation confidential, and then be engaged as the person’s lawyer, and Kate wanted to make a clean break from being a lawyer. But she was still interested in the pursuit of justice and truth. . . . Kate is someone who would cut things off if she didn’t like the way they were going. This is the beginning of her becoming an adult in the sense of saying, “I don’t like some of that, but I do like some of it, and I’m going to stay, I’m going to work at my father’s law firm, but I’m not going to do it the way he does it, and the people around me do it. I’m going to make it my own.” For me, as a writer, what appealed to me about that character was the idea of you taking two people in conflict, you put them in a room, you close the door and you send in someone like Kate – to me that’s inherently interesting drama without any of the other artifice surrounding it I think you’ve got to peel away to get through the drama.

DEDMAN: Some of the promotional materials describe Kate as a “recovering attorney,” and in the pilot, she says that she has “more than a small amount of self-hatred,” and I wanted to ask you if those are connected in any way.

SARDO: [Laughs.] Well, like any of us you know, our work life and personal life are connected. Kate is really well aware of her flaws, and she is someone who can act impulsively, and often will do something that makes whatever she’s dealing with, whether it’s personal or professional, worse, because she acts in the moment, and that’s where the “no small amount of self hatred” comes from. “Recovering attorney” is a line I actually heard from more than one mediator who I talked to who said that’s how they referred to themselves as “recovering attorneys,” and I just thought it was great and was always looking for a way to work it in.

DEDMAN: You once gave an interview a while back in which you said that “the writer’s job is to have a point of view,” and I wanted to ask you, what is the point of view you’re expressing in telling stories about mediation, which is something that is not often depicted on television?

SARDO: My point of view is that anything that’s important to you, you should be as personally involved as possible, and you should let your point of view be known, and you should have part of the solution. Whether you caused the problem, or you’re affected by the problem. And that the less you turn it over to someone else, the better. And in my own experience, just in life, the further things get removed from having some kind of personal contact, [the worse they become.] . . . [Y]ou used to go and get your mortgage from your local banker, and he sized you up, and said, “Can this guy pay this for 30 years?” So what happens when they would bundle this part of 10,000 mortgages? There’s no accountability on either end to what happens in court. They sort of give themselves over to a system, and you hire someone with a knowledge of that system to work it to your advantage. . . . [T]he more that people can get involved themselves and take charge of [and] make their own statement about what they want and need and let that be known and try to work it out, [the better.] It’s still not a perfect system, but [it’s] a better system.

DEDMAN: Now, Kate is an idealist and appears unappreciative of the day-to-day operations of her law firm. Why does she still work for that firm?

SARDO: She gives a speech at the end of the pilot where she acknowledges for the first time out loud what is the advantage of the law and the law firm that you do need both things. To go back to your earlier question, what bothered Kate about the law was that every lawyer that I know has had cases that bothered them. But they had to accept that that’s how the law works. [They] knew that somewhere down the line someone was going to change that or that [there] was a wrongful conviction but the person will eventually get out. It’s that kind of ancillary damage that you have to accept to be a good lawyer, I think. It’s a thing that Kate couldn’t accept. But she knows that you need laws in a society. It’s the situational part of it that she couldn’t look away from – the way laws apply differently to different economic classes and different people have different degrees of lawyers. She couldn’t participate in that system any more, but she wanted to be part of the figuring out of truth and justice part of the system.

DEDMAN: One character that was particularly interesting to me as a lawyer was Lauren, who’s played by Virginia Williams, who is the managing partner of the firm and the foil to Kate. How do you think viewers, or lawyer viewers in particular, will respond to that character?

SARDO: . . . [W]hat I hope, and what Virginia and I have both worked really hard on, is to create a character who is – in the hands of a less gifted actress – would be easily parodied. She seems on the surface to be a trophy wife and kind of a bitch, and I think Virginia has found a way to play Lauren the way it was intended: to be neither of those. She actually had a true love with Kate’s dad, and that’s what bothers Kate, even on the surface. Yes, she’s thirty years younger, and she’s beautiful, but she’s quite a good lawyer, and she’s quite smart, and Lauren and Kate both want similar things. But they’re looking at the world through different facets on the prism. Lauren believes the world works best when the trains run on time, and she’s the person to run them. And she looks at the firm and says, “You know what, Kate, I’m watching out for the clients who are paying us, that’s why you have a job and your assistant has a desk and health benefits, and the lights are on. There is good in what I do, not just that it keeps the building running, but that I’m enforcing the law.” She believes in it, and she believes in the rightness of it, and doesn’t believe that it’s her job to change that. Kate questions everything, and between those two poles, I think they represent the two poles of how you can feel about the law, and I don’t think that it’s a healthy system that functions with just one or the other. I think you need both.

DEDMAN: One interesting thing is that both Kate and Lauren have roles that have traditionally been held by men in the past, both in the legal profession and in television depictions of the legal profession. Will the series explore the challenges that are unique to female mediators and female managing partners in the law?

SARDO: Yes, very much so. You see it in one scene in the pilot in what Lauren faces. . . . [Y]ou see how she has to deal with a very important client of the firm and make a decision as to which way she’s going to take that. Kate will deal with some of those issues, also, because, it’s funny, when you have a lead as attractive as Sarah Shahi, and you want to portray her as very serious about her work, but at the same time, you can’t be oblivious to the fact that she’s gorgeous. So, we made a conscious decision to have characters react to that and react to her as a beautiful woman because she is one. If she was a handsome man, people would react in a certain way, so she will have people react to how she looks. . . . Lauren particularly will have to confront those things in her position because of her visibility as managing partner and the fact that she often has to play hardball within the firm and with other people who are interested in the firm.

DEDMAN: One thing that Kate does in the pilot is show up at the front door of a client’s home and encourage him to do “the right thing.” What happens when her definition of “the right thing” conflicts with her firm’s duty to represent that client who might not want to do “the right thing”?

SARDO: That is the conflict that exists between Lauren and Kate, and I was very interested in that because I think that’s the conflict all of us face in all of our jobs. I think if you’re working at an auto repair place [then] you know that you’re being pushed to find everything that can be fixed because you want a higher bill. Every time I go into Starbucks they say, “Would you like something to eat with that?” [Laughs.] Everyone is trying to increase their billings, and they’ll say it to you whether you’re on a diet or 100 pounds overweight or not interested in a snack. So Kate and Lauren, I think that’s something that in all our professional lives we have to grapple with. . . . Kate had to acknowledge the reality that you have to be conscious of the client, and Lauren is not someone who’s without morals. She will also have to deal with the moral complications of making decisions that are better for the business but worse for overall justice in the world.

DEDMAN: Have you gotten any feedback from practicing mediators about the show?

SARDO: Not yet, but it’s starting to come. I’m going to be talking with some soon. I talked to mediators as I was developing the show about their motivations to become a mediator. A lot of them had been lawyers. And about what are the boundaries of what a mediator can do, and what interested me was how much they all repeated the same thing, which was it’s completely about the personality of the mediator. . . . We’ve tried very hard to stay with some degree of realism of what a mediator could do. Of course, the most colorful, interesting, fun mediator. I think people are starting to see the pilot so I will be hearing from our mediator friends.

DEDMAN: You’ve gotten some good supporting cast members and some guests. I noticed you have Gerald McRaney and Esai Morales and John Ashton and Chris Ellis in the two episodes that I saw. Is there anyone else that we can expect to see in the first couple of episodes?

SARDO: Richard Dean Anderson comes back a couple of times. Gerald McRaney will be on a few. and he’s wonderful. Wonderful to have. Ken Howard is in the pilot. We have – I’m trying to think of anyone else that you would really know. Paul Shultze from “Nurse Jackie” does a great turn for us. He plays Eddie the pharmacist on “Nurse Jackie.” I think those are the ones you would know, I’m sure I’m leaving someone else out and hoping they don’t read Abnormal Use.

DEDMAN: I do have to ask you about the “Battlestar Galactica” connection. Michael Trucco plays the assistant district attorney, Justin Patrick, and Esai Morales plays his boss, the district attorney. Trucco was on “Battlestar Galactica” and Morales was recently on [the “Battlestar Galactica” prequel] “Caprica.” Is that a coincidence in the DA’s office on the show there?

SARDO: [Laughs.] I like that you’re looking deeper than we had time to think when we were casting. We were just looking for the best actors we could find, and the good actors work a lot, and they just happen to be in close proximity to each other, but it was not by design. Some of “Battlestar Caprica” people may want to believe it is.

DEDMAN: . . . [M]y last question to you would be is generally, what do you believe is the chief advantage of mediation as opposed to litigation?

SARDO: Quicker. Cheaper. More satisfying. And more in control of your own destiny.

Incidentally, the quotation we reference in our fifth question to Sardo comes from a 1991 interview he gave to Media Week as a 31-year old writer and recent Emmy nominee. The relevant portion of that interview is as follows:

“One of the biggest problems of TV is that show creators write what they can sell and not what they want to watch. I just write what interests me,” says Michael Sardo, 31, who earned an Emmy nomination for his writing for the “The Tracy Ullman Show” before landing a development deal at Lorimar Television to create half-hour comedies for the networks.

“Most of my ideas don’t sell, because they are not recognizable television,” he says. “In my work, the characters have problems that actual people may have. People keep trying to write things that are already on. Why? You’ve already got one. The writer’s job to me is to have a point of view.”

The same obligation should extend to the networks. “There’s a tendency to homogenize – – to appeal to every kind of audience. Always go for the most intelligent way. Executives seem to talk about this fictional audience that’s moronic. Networks should try to come up with what they see are good shows and not what they think people want to watch.”

Sardo came to Hollywood in 1982 via a blue-collar Bronx childhood and Ivy League education to pay his writing dues. At one point, he even lived out of his car. A spec comedy sketch finally landed on NBC followed by two specials for MTV and the Disney Channel before Sardo wound up on the Tracy Ullman staff.

While he credits shows like Northern Exposure, L.A. Law, and Murphy Brown as exceptions, more often, he says, writers and networks try to go for the quick buck by succumbing to safe story structures, then get to used to the money or typecast as formula writers.

“That’s why you also see such unlikely pairings in sitcoms,” says Sardo. “‘She’s a Jew, he’s a Nazi.’ Come on, would they really be together?”

Karlin, Sue. “The New Producers,” Media Week, October 14, 1991.

We can hardly believe it ourselves. But we here at Abnormal Use scored an interview with the actor, Phil Morris, who most know as Jackie Chiles, the bombastic, flamboyant, and opportunistic trial lawyer from “Seinfeld.” So, today, Abnormal Use continues its series, “Abnormal Interviews,” which now includes actors, as well as law professors, practitioners, and other commentators in the field. Though the character only appeared in six episodes of the series (including the 1998 finale), Chiles resonated with viewers. Recently, Morris reprised the role for a series of videos posted on the Funny or Die website (two of which have been posted already with three more on the way in the coming weeks). Less than a week ago, Morris was kind enough to submit to a telephone interview with our own Kevin Couch. In the interview, Morris discusses not just his role as Chiles, but also his upcoming projects, his love of superhero comic books, and his past work and influences. Although you may be able to quote many lines of Jackie Chiles “Seinfeld” dialogue, you probably didn’t know that Morris has studied kung fu, collected 20,000 comic books in his life time, and expressed an interest in one day playing the Silver Surfer on screen. His new sitcom, “Love That Girl!,” premieres in January. Our favorite part: Though his signature character is associated with litigiousness, Morris himself is actually skeptical of the modern litigation culture, going so far as to call it “beyond the pale.”

The interview transcript is as follows:

ON THE RETURN OF JACKIE CHILES

KEVIN COUCH: [I]t’s been 12 years since the finale of “Seinfeld,” and you have revived the Jackie Chiles character recently. Can you tell me about that?

PHIL MORRIS: Well, you know, Jackie had a life of his own even during the run of “Seinfeld.” You know, I had done a couple of commercials for Honda and Diet Dr. Pepper. He was one of the few characters, actually maybe the only character, that Larry [David] and Jerry [Seinfeld] would allow to do his own thing outside of the “Seinfeld” universe. So, you know, I mean, I just never really tired of him. I don’t think the public did, and we never got a chance to do a show that was – we had in development, and it was always just kind of percolating beneath my skin, and when the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” shows came out last season with the “Seinfeld” reunion kind of run, or arc, everybody was asking me about Jackie. I mean, you know, it was like Jackie had come back, and Jackie wasn’t even in it. So, I sat down with a friend of mine who’s a pretty high powered agent here in town, and he was asking me about Jackie. You know, we loved this reunion stuff, and we finally had something to talk about at the water cooler again, and you know, the only thing missing is Jackie. Where’s Jackie? I was like, “You know, man, Jackie, that ship has sailed, and blah, blah, blah.” He goes, “Oh, no, it has not sailed. We want that guy back.” And he gave me the idea to kind of put it on the web and, you know, test the waters, see if people were interested. You know, Kevin, I work a lot. I do a lot of shows. I do a lot of stuff. I’m on “Smallville” on the occasion. I’m doing a new show called “Love That Girl!” for TV One. So, it’s not like I was sitting around waiting on stuff to do.

COUCH: Right.

MORRIS: It’s like, this came to me, and as an actor, rarely do you get a character that you feel so committed to and it speaks to you so fully as a Jackie Chiles. So I was like, “Why not?” Let me give it a shot. You know, so, I wrote a couple of these interstitial commercial kind of things. You know, Jackie’s back, and he’s wanting new clients kind of deal. And, a buddy of mine and I who are writing it, he told Funny or Die that we were doing this. And we hadn’t even started. And they came right at us. They were like, “We’ll produce it, we’ll distribute them, we love this guy, he’s perfect for us!” So I wrote these five with Whit’s help, Whit Hertford’s help, and went to Castle Rock and cleared their legal. It took about two months. And the result is kind of, you know, what you see. They’re parceling out one episode or one segment every few weeks and judging the public’s interest. And so far, the public is very interested.

…

COUCH: [W]ould you be interested in pursuing the Jackie Chiles character further? I mean, it sounds like you’ve got some good feedback from Funny or Die, and from the public on Funny or Die, would that be something you’re interested in pursuing in the future?

MORRIS: Of course, of course. Like I said, it’s rare for an actor to have characters that you so firmly connect to. Now, I don’t really relate to Jackie personally, but as an actor, I get it completely. So, I find that it’s refreshing for me to try to fit into that skin all the time, and like I said, I have barely scratched the surface of Jackie Chiles, so it’d be great to be able to pursue this path, you know, the computer screen and maybe into a television series, or I don’t even know what’s next for him, but I really don’t think there’s a limit.

COUCH: [H]ow much of you is in Jackie? Is he a completely foreign character, or is there some part of you that can identify with who Jackie is?

MORRIS: Well, I’m sure you have people in your family or people that you know that you can imitate or you can represent because they’re such great characters, but they’re not – it’s not really you, but you know them so well, you know, and I think Jackie is a combination of many men that I have grown up with and seen, from my father to my great uncle, Uncle Phil, my namesake, that just remind me of this kind of force of nature that is Jackie Chiles. You know, of course, Johnnie Cochran is in there as well. He was the template. For my purposes as an actor, Jackie is a hustler, he’s a pimp, he’s a preacher, and he’s an attorney. So, do I relate to all those things? I relate to them. Are they Phil Morris? No, not all of them.

COUCH: Did you have a chance to meet Johnnie Cochran?

MORRIS: I did, actually. Interestingly enough, we went to the same barber shop for years and years and years here in Los Angeles. So, I would see him as a kid come in and pontificate on everything from the Raiders moving to L.A. to any of the number of egregious acts of civil unrest. So I think I was doing some subconscious study on him for a long, long time.

COUCH: [B]ut you never had a chance to discuss the Chiles character with him?

MORRIS: Yeah, I did. And he loved it. I mean, I think he thought it was very flattering – at first.

COUCH: At first. Understood. Of course, one of the story lines from “Seinfeld” was, I guess, Kramer’s burns from the hot coffee. Do you have any feeling about that? What about people filing these lawsuits for burning themselves on hot coffee?

MORRIS: Well, we’re so litigious in this society, too much. It’s way beyond the pale. So that’s where I kinda jump off from Jackie. I certainly wouldn’t put stock in a lot of that stuff. I think, it’s just, we’ve gotten away with way too much here in the United States in terms of the legal ramifications of everything. I think, again like I said, beyond the pale. Jackie is an opportunist. So anything like that is manna for him. But personally, I think we’re really hurting ourselves and shooting ourselves in the foot. Not only are we giving our legal system a bad name, but we’re abusing it! We’re misusing those bits of legal power that we have – we’re fortunate enough to have in this country. It kind of drives me crazy.

…

COUCH: Have you ever had any lawyers come up to you and talk about Jackie Chiles?

MORRIS: All the time.

COUCH: What’s common in what they talk to you about?

MORRIS: Most of them – all of them, to me, are very positive. In fact, there is a Jackie Chiles Law Society at the University of Utah. I bet you didn’t know that!

COUCH: I did not go to the University of Utah, or I assure you, I would have been a member.

MORRIS: Is that crazy? So, anyway, their club, their society is about the public’s perception of law as the media represents it. And it’s very interesting, a very interesting phenomenon. But, yeah, most of the lawyers that come up to me are very supportive. They get the joke! You know what I’m saying? And I think people need to know that. As crazy as we think lawyers are and as crazy as the lawyers might actually be – on a whole, especially when it comes to Jackie – they get it! They’re like – man, this man is a lightning rod for all that’s good and all that’s bad.

COUCH: Anybody talk to you about not getting the joke?

MORRIS: No. Not one lawyer has gone – you know, “What the heck are you doing, I can’t understand why people even like this character!” Not one. Not one has come up to me with any sort of negative spin on this [character].

…

COUCH: It’s not the first time you’ve played a lawyer. I’ve got to ask you about Tyrone Jackson. I don’t know if anybody else will know who Tyrone Jackson is. But you played a character on “The Young and the Restless,” right?

MORRIS: You’re good, Kevin, you are good!

COUCH: Well, you know, I have the Internet to thank for that. . . . Is [there] anything from Tyrone that’s in the Jackie Chiles character?

MORRIS: Only his determination. That’s it. Tyrone actually was a very good natured, “Johnny Be Goode” kind of character, and Jackie certainly isn’t that. But what they have in common is their dogged determination to make sure the truth – as far as they see it – will out. That’s pretty much the only connection there.

COMIC BOOK SUPERHEROES

COUCH: Like you mentioned earlier, you’ve done a lot of different work – voice work and animated features, Doc Saturday, Jonah Hex, work in the “Justice League.” . . . I guess you’re a fan of this genre of entertainment?

MORRIS: Yep, oh, yeah.

COUCH: What motivated that? . . . From what I can tell your sister [actress Iona Morris] has done some voice work and animation, as well.

MORRIS: She actually turned me on to voice over work early on. I was so busy with the on camera stuff. Voice over is not easy. It’s a very clique-ish insider type of circle that you get into. But, hey, I’m a comic book fan, man. I’m sitting here right now in my bedroom, and I’m looking at the 20,000 comic books I have in my library. 20,000!

COUCH: Wow. That is impressive.

MORRIS: I’ve collected since I was a child. So, all of that helps me as an actor. It helps my imagination. It helps my fantasy life. All that stuff. So, it’s a natural to kind of transition into voice-overs. I’m just a child. Man, I haven’t grown up.

COUCH: Are you a fan of anything in particular in the comic book genre?

MORRIS: Now, I’m a big fan of the writers. Before, I used to be a Marvel guy. When you’re a kid you kinda take allegiances with either Marvel or DC – those are the two big dogs. But there’s a lot of independent books out there, and a lot of writers and artists that – now that I’m in that world – that I’ve known and been fortunate enough to become friends with. I really like the writing. Obviously, it’s not kid stuff anymore. They’re dealing with some interesting themes in the comic book world.

COUCH: Well, you mentioned earlier you played a super hero on “Smallville.” Do you have a favorite superhero? If you could play one, who would it be?

MORRIS: It would be the Silver Surfer, actually, from the Fantastic Four comics. He was a very existential, philosophical being who kind of belonged to no world and no universe, and sometimes, I feel like that. [Laughs.]

COUCH: Well, I’m sure it wasn’t hard to play a super hero right after playing a lawyer, right?

MORRIS: [Laughs.] You know, perfect study. I’ll have to be honest with you.

COUCH: You would agree that lawyers are pretty much like super heroes?

MORRIS: No doubt, no doubt. You’ll get no argument from me, Kevin.

ROLE AS PRODUCER

COUCH: You ever think about doing anything other than being an actor? Like, being something like a lawyer?

MORRIS: I was very interested in automotive design for a long, long time. When it got a bit too math intensive, I bounced out of that. You know, I think I sort of expanded my ability to create and express within this particular career choice. You know, Jackie, I wrote and produced, and obviously, am Jackie. Since then, I’ve produced something else that we want to turn into a feature film. So, I went from producing nothing in 30 years of acting to the last couple of months producing two very diverse and very extravagant products. I would really like to pursue that more – to produce and to write and use all of my skills as opposed to just the acting part of my tool kit.

COUCH: Is there anything you’re working on now as far as production or writing?

MORRIS: There’s a movie that we’re trying to put together called Surf Men, which is a historical piece about the turn of the century, actually 1880’s, Reconstruction lifesaving service back in the East Coast which is a precursor of the Coast Guard and the African American lifesaving crew that was a part of that service. It’s an incredible story, so my buddy Dennis Haysbert from “The Unit” and “24” and the Allstate commercials – he and I are producers on this project. And we’re very excited to get it out there and have people see what we’re really all about beyond our acting skills.

KUNG FU HOBBY

COUCH: Now, you’re a kung fu guy.

MORRIS: I am.

COUCH: How’d you get into that?

MORRIS: Well, my dad [Greg Morris] did the original “Mission Impossible” . . . years ago, back in the sixties. At first, they started to take karate lessons because they were doing some exotic hand-to-hand combat then – it really wasn’t seen. So, when my dad started, I started. In ’66, I was seven. So, I’ve been involved with the martial arts since I was seven years old. This particular master that I study with now, Hawkins Cheung, I’ve been with for a little over 20 years. I started with him here in Los Angeles, and he was Bruce Lee’s best friend back in Hong Kong. So, there was no better teacher I could find than him. And I was a huge Bruce Lee fan, so it just fell right in my lap. I’ve been with him for over 20 years.

COUCH: So if I were to anger you in some way during this interview, would you be more likely to file a lawsuit Jackie Chiles style or just put me in some kind of kung fu grip?

MORRIS: I think I’d just file a lawsuit. Jackie would come after me if I put hands on you. He would say, “You should know better.” And I should. I need to walk away. I’d rather come after you with humor. [Laughs.]

COUCH: Now, you talked about your dad, Greg Morris. You grew up in a household where he was an actor. Did you ever think to yourself, “He’s got a much cooler job than being a lawyer?”

MORRIS: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

HIS INFLUENCES

COUCH: . . . [W]ho else helped shape your career – who have you wanted to be as far as an actor and now maybe this production and writing?

MORRIS: A big influence – not as much personally, although I do know him personally, professionally, in terms of his legacy is Sidney Poitier. I remember when my father came up, he was one of the first African Americans to present an image on television that was palpable, acceptable, mainstream, strong, intelligent. It was a huge deal in the country, period, but especially in my community. And certainly one of the great idols and icons in my community, Sidney Poitier. And I had the fortune to meet him as a child and to see him come to our house, hear him speak, he was a good friend of my father’s. And every time I run into Sidney, he has great words of wisdom and is always checking on my well-being and my understanding of this business beyond just being an actor. So, he’s been a huge influence. The way he carries himself, his intelligence, his bearing. So two of the greatest – Sidney in film and my father in television – were two of the greatest influences a young African American actor could have. Those two. Bill Cosby, ironically enough. Another very good friend of my father’s who is such a solid individual. He’s a professor. He’s very much a family man. A staple of entertainment, black, white, indifferent, for years and years and years. In fact, decades. So he’s been a very close friend. Not so much personally [that] I call him up on the phone and say, “Hey, Bill, what do you think about this?” Just that when you grow up the way I grew up, the influences are everywhere. You’re fortunate, and you’re smart, if you take a page out of the people’s books who’ve been there before you. I’m hoping to find that and further that in my own creative career.

HIS NEW SITCOM, “LOVE THAT GIRL!”

COUCH: . . . You have got a new sitcom coming. Tell me about that.

MORRIS: Yeah. Martin Lawrence is one of our producers, and Bentley Kyle Evans, who produced the “Martin” show and “The Jamie Foxx Show,” created a show called “Love That Girl!” starring Tatyana Ali from the “Fresh Prince.” It’s basically – Tatyana plays this young divorcee’ who moves back to Los Angeles and deals with her father. I play her dad. And deals with her brother, played by Alphonso McAuley and her crazy neighbors. It’s really a traditional four camera sitcom that is just funny and has great value and is not just good for my community but good for television overall, and TV One is a brand new network that has been out maybe five or six years and is being run by some of the most forward thinking African American executives I’ve ever worked with. We air in January. We have a 26 show initial order. So, I think the public will like that, as well.

FAVORITE ROLES

COUCH: Do you have a favorite project that you’ve done? You’ve done a multitude, you know, “Star Trek” and all the other stuff that you’ve done. Can you point to a favorite? Is that hard to do?

MORRIS: It’s kind of hard to do because I’ve done so much and so different. I loved “The Young and The Restless.” I really did. We started talking about that a little bit. That was a great initial offering for, again, a young actor.

COUCH: I tried to look that up on YouTube. I did not find any Tyrone Jackson videos. I don’t know if there’s some legal reason for that. But if we can dig one of those up, we’ll put that up.

MORRIS: I don’t know where that would exist either. “The Young and The Restless” has been on forever. They’re a daily show, so the archives have got to be very convoluted, but “The Young and The Restless” was great. Certainly, “Seinfeld” was phenomenal. I did a television movie for Disney called “Tracks of Glory” about Marshall “Major” Taylor who was a world champion cyclist. That’s a project that not a lot of people saw, but again, very close to my heart and helped me a lot as a creative person. I did the new “Love Boat.” This was a weird one to pick up and talk about. The new “Love Boat” I did with Robert Urich and Joan Severance, and it was one of the most incredible times I’ve ever had. First of all, Robert Urich was a fabulous guy. He had had – he was post-operative cancer, he’s since passed away from cancer. But to know him was just a joy, and he just was a brilliant guy, and I got a chance to work with him. I worked with Peter Graves on the new “Mission Impossible,” which was phenomenal. Here, he was my Uncle Peter, I grew up with him and his kids, now we’re working together! It was just – I’ve had a great life, a great creative life, Kevin.

FURTHER READING ON PHIL AND GREG MORRIS

• “Mission: Impossible’s Greg Morris / He keeps his cool despite grueling competition both on and off the screen,” Ebony, December 1967.
• “Mission: Possible: Greg Morris Family / Beats old show business ‘jinx,” Ebony, May 1981.
• “Mission: Possible / Phil Morris takes over dad’s role in suspense TV series,” Ebony, June 1989.
• “New Faces on TV and in Films,” Ebony, March 1985.
• “Phil Morris Stars in ‘Tracks of Glory,‘” Jet, July 20, 1992.
• “Second Generation: Children Tell Why They Follow in Their Parents’ Footsteps,” Jet, Jun 19, 1989.
• “TV’s Greg Morris Talks About His Family and Future,” Jet, January 12, 1978.
• Waldron Clarence. “‘Young and The Restless’ Celebrates 35 Years of Drama, Success,” Jet, April 7, 2008.

In the spirit of Halloween, we present to you the comic book cover above, Adventure Comics #294, published way back in 1962 (which you might have surmised from the references to JFK, Marilyn Monroe, and Jerry Lewis, all of whom are apparently familiar to Bizarro). With a title like “The Halloween Pranks of the Bizarro Supermen,” though, how can you go wrong?

Rather than link a series of frightfully normal legal news stories, today, we here at Abnormal Use thought we would explore something a bit more apprehension inducing and suited to the holiday at hand. So, to celebrate the occasion, we asked two of our contributors (and our non-blogger associate Nick Farr) to share their thoughts on the movies they fear most. (Specifically excluded are movies about associates attempting to meet billable quotas. We won’t count The Paper Chase, either, although we wonder if anyone still watches that movie, anyway).

Nick Farr: Before I saw The Exorcist as a young teenager, I thought I was pretty tough. The Shining was boring. “It” made me laugh. Halloween just left me with a childhood crush on Jamie Lee Curtis. There was something about The Exorcist, however, that affected me in a way that Betsy Palmer (a/k/a Mrs. Pamela Voorhees) yielding a machete simply could not. Maybe if Michael Myers would have spun his head around backwards, Halloween would have been more to me than a breakthrough performance for another Hollywood starlet. Maybe if Pennywise the Clown would have crab-walked down a flight of stairs, I would not have thought of “It” as an adult-sized Bozo. Even today, when I reminisce about Regan walking into that party and innocently proclaiming, “You’re going to die up there,” chills run down my spine, and those feelings I felt seventeen years ago are resurrected. Tonight, I better sleep with the holy water.

Jim Dedman: The scariest movie I’ve seen would be, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, although that is not the best story I have about a fear-filled work of cinema. In July of 1999, I was a first quarter law student at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. That month, I faced one of my first – and most dreaded – finals: Civil Procedure. (That frightful test, written and administered by the now retired Professor Trail, was scary enough.). After enduring that test, I took the rest of the day off, drove to Austin, and saw The Blair Witch Project, then out in theatres for only a few days, at the now defunct Dobie Theatre. Shot in a point of view fashion, the film profiled the misadventures of a group of students who venture out into the Maryland woods to explore the Blair Witch myth. The now defunct Dobie was a small, indie venue, and the particular theatre we were in had less than hundred seats. Imagine seeing that movie in such a place before all the hype and newspaper coverage ruined the original guerrilla style marketing of the film. At that time, there were still people who somehow believe the “found footage” was real. Of course, at the end of the day, I can’t say which was more horrifying, the film or the final.

Kevin Couch: I thought long and hard about the movie that terrifies me the most, and I settled on 1985’s Follow that Bird, a film adaptation of the beloved children series, “Sesame Street.” In the film, Big Bird runs away from home, a much madness ensues. Although you may scoff initially, I ask you, what is not terrifying about human-puppet interaction, especially when Miss Finch, a social worker puppet with the nefarious sounding Feathered Friends Society, is given the power to alter the human-puppet relationships foundational to all that is “Sesame Street”? In addition, given the films Big Brother feel that the social worker knows better than the (albeit nontraditional) family, I’m surprised that the film wasn’t re-released for its twenty-fifth anniversary this summer and run at Tea Party rallies. After all, the real horror of the film (again, aside from the human-puppet interaction) comes after the credits. Who really believes that the sinister Miss Finch is content to let Big Bird stay at Sesame Street? No one. She will come like a thief in the night and remove Big Bird from his nest on the basis that it is in his best interest, and Gordon and Maria will be left only with sorrowful years of fighting the system in the family courts. If a nine-foot yellow bird puppet is not safe from government intrusion, how safe do you think you are? And you thought Nosferatu was scary?

And that dear readers, is all we here at Abnormal Use have to say about scary movies. Of course, the rumor is that this very afternoon, the South Carolina Bar will release the names of those who passed this past summer’s bar exam. What could be scarier than the wait for that?