Hard times for 'The Professor and the Madman': Mel Gibson film based on book by local author stuck in court Hollywood feud sparks lawsuit over film adaptation of Winchester bestseller, a "labor of love" for Mel Gibson

Posted Friday, August 4, 2017 7:24 pm

GREAT BARRINGTON - A hard tale of Hollywood wrangling is an unwelcome plot twist for a local author whose best-selling book is being adapted into a movie starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn.

A fight between Gibson's Icon Productions and Voltage Pictures, a movie finance, production and distribution company, has already delayed completion of the long-awaited film based on Simon Winchester's "The Professor and the Madman." The story traces the friendship and obsessions of two men who began the Oxford English Dictionary.

The film was set for release later this year, according to Winchester.

Nearly 20 years after Gibson acquired movie rights, the $25 million project is stalled in its home stretch after Voltage and Icon ran into disputes over money and a location.

Now Icon has filed a lawsuit against Voltage, alleging a breach of agreements both financial and artistic - all of which stopped production of what court documents say is a "labor of love" for Gibson and director Farhad Safinia.

The lawsuit filed on July 31, says Voltage and owner French producer Nicolas Chartier breached its financial promises, didn't secure a completion bond, prevented Safinia from making a director's cut, and didn't give Gibson his right to choose the final cut, "eviscerating Mr. Gibson's approval rights."

It also alleges Voltage "secretly prepared a cut" that is incomplete, and screened part of it privately with potential distributors at the Cannes Film Festival.

And Chartier, the lawsuit says, refused to allow director Safinia to shoot "critical scenes from the agreed upon screenplay" in Oxford, England, the real setting for the true story about the creation of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Gibson's attorneys say the deal between both companies was that the film be shot in Oxford for "up to five days."

The film, so far, was shot in Dublin, Ireland. But Winchester told The Eagle that for artistic integrity, certain scenes needed their true places in Oxford - Christ Church at University of Oxford, Oxford University Press and the Bodleian Library

In an interview with The Eagle in Great Barrington Wednesday, Winchester said the legal battle isn't catastrophic to the film's eventual release, now likely pushed to 2018. And it won't affect him financially since he had already sold the rights. But in filmmaking, delays are expensive.

Three days of shooting the Oxford scenes in January was to cost $1.8 million, he said. Two delays that pushed the plans to June raised that price tag to $2.7 million.

And then there were coordination snags that snowballed. "By [June] all the actors had disappeared around the world and Gibson will have to grow his beard again," Winchester said.

Calls to Chartier and Icon's offices were not returned.

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Winchester's book tells the true, ripping yarn of the collaboration between professor James Murray and the "madman," William Chester Minor, during Minor's years at Broadmoor Hospital in England, a psychiatric asylum. It was from the hospital that Minor sent Murray 10,000 entries for the dictionary.

Minor had been a U.S. Army Surgeon at the Battle of the Wilderness during the American Civil War. The battle saw heavy bloodletting on both sides, and events there had likely contributed to the mental illness that later lead to his killing a man in England.

Gibson acquired the rights from French director Luc Bresson in 1998, the year the book was published.

And Winchester said that with about $22 million to $23 million already spent making the film, Gibson is not likely to give up without a battle worthy of one of his film characters.

"Gibson is playing hardball," Winchester said. "He's Mad Max here. He and his longtime producer [partner] Bruce Davey - they mean business, and they feel Voltage is inhibiting the making of what could be an absolutely wonderful film."

"Their hope is that this [lawsuit] will shock Voltage into doing something," he added.

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Court documents indicate that unless it's all made right by Voltage, the matter will head to jury trial.

Winchester and his wife, Setsuko Sato, went to Ireland last year to watch filming and spend time with the cast. Winchester previously told The Eagle he was impressed with the set and "moved" by the experience.

Later he saw a 50-minute rough cut at Icon's offices. "From what I've seen, it's beautifully done," he said, praising the actors and Safinia's talent.

Winchester, who was born in London, is currently finishing up another book. Sometimes he stays in New York, but mostly he and Sato live on a farm in Sandisfield.

Winchester's long-time journalism career included reporting for the The Guardian, on the Watergate scandal. His reporting on Bloody Sunday led to him being considered a pariah for years, he said, for maintaining that British soldiers had fired needlessly into an unarmed crowd. He was eventually vindicated, he said, after former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had opened a public inquiry that confirmed Winchester's account.

Winchester wrote 10 published books before "The Professor and the Madman." It was his first commercial success, allowing him to turn to writing full-time.

"I was churning them out and not many people were buying them," he said of the first 10.

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"After 54 years you're an overnight success," he said his mother told him after sales took off on his 11th.

Winchester's "long story cut short" version of how he came up with the idea to pursue the story is that it happened in the bathtub with a captivating book. It was a footnote that did it: "Deranged American lunatic murderer contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary."

He called a British lexicographer he knew who had been to Broadmoor and seen Minor's file, which was "11 linear feet of paper," he said. She told Winchester if he could get access to that file, he was set.

And perhaps there was more than one reason that footnote captured his interest. Winchester said he had been treated in a New Jersey asylum in his early twenties.

"I went a bit loopy," he said of a sort of fugue state that sent him to the Cumberland County Hospital for the Insane, where the mid-nineteenth century architecture was similar to Broadmoor.

Winchester said electroconvulsive therapy there cured him. But when he first arrived and saw the sign with the word "insane," he was daunted. "You see that and you think, `My god, my life has completely fallen to bits.'"

After that initial spark made by the footnote, he saw the dovetailing of his experience with his immersion in this story.

"All other sorts of resonances sprang to life," he said.

Winchester noted that while Victorian asylums get a bad rap today, they were once places of safety and compassion, where drugs were not administered.

Winchester said had Minor been given drugs for what was a schizophrenia diagnosis, "it would have robbed him of his work on the dictionary, which was itself therapeutic."

So Winchester hopes the feud will be surmounted so an extraordinary tale can come to the big screen. And he said he doesn't think Voltage will ultimately "torpedo" the project.

"It will happen, otherwise [Gibson] throws away $25 million, and the reputations of good actors are behind this."

Reach staff writer Heather Bellow at 413-329-6871