Olivia de Havilland’s Landmark Court Case
by Andre Soares
Sonny Tufts?? Olivia de Havilland totally loses it upon learning that Warner Bros. will loan her out to RKO for the dismal World War II comedy Government Girl, co-starring second-rate Paramount leading man Sonny Tufts. Or perhaps this is a scene from Robert Siodmak’s dark thriller The Dark Mirror.
Matthew Belloni in The Hollywood Reporter:
"If newly emancipated agent Ed Limato brings his exclusive Oscar party from ICM to WMA, he should reserve an invite for an unlikely guest of honor: 91-year-old actress Olivia de Havilland. Sixty-four years ago Thursday, de Havilland and her lawyers at the Gang Tyre firm filed the lawsuit that led to the ’seven-year rule’ for personal services contracts, helping bring down the old studio system and bestowing unprecedented power on talent and, ironically, agencies like the one Limato successfully sued to escape.
"California’s seven-year rule, also known as Labor Code Section 2855, is such an accepted tenet of entertainment law that it’s hard to imagine the business before it existed. De Havilland, who received her first Academy Award nomination for 1939’s Gone With the Wind and went on to win best actress twice, sued Warner Bros. when the studio repeatedly extended her contract after ’suspending’ her for rejecting the roles it suggested. It was an uphill battle (Bette Davis lost a similar case in the 1930s), but the California Court of Appeal ruled in 1944 that de Havilland was not bound to perform services beyond seven years from the start of her contract. The case became state law, significantly shifting negotiation power from studios to talent and allowing agents like Lew Wasserman to usher in the era of top-dollar star salaries and the commissions and packaging fees that can make agenting such a lucrative business."
As per Belloni’s article, Limato’s case wasn’t exactly like de Havilland’s, as the agent had willingly renogatiated with the talent agency ICM — though the outcome of the arbitration turned out to be the same. Limato, who has represented the likes of Denzel Washington, Mel Gibson, and Steve Martin, was allowed to do business elsewhere.
Back in the 1920s, studio contracts usually lasted five years. That’s about how long studio bosses expected to last the careers of their stars. In the 1930s and 1940s, two more years were added to such contracts.
During that period, studios could suspend — without pay — recalcitrant actors, and then add the suspension time to the end of the initial contract. Studios also gave themselves the power to renegotiate contracts every six months or every year. The performer couldn’t drop the studio, but the studio could either drop the performer or give him/her a salary raise — that hardly ever matched the contract player’s growing box-office popularity — and/or better roles in bigger movies. Studios were also free to loan out stars to other studios for a high fee of which only a small portion, usually what was stipulated in the star’s contract, would go to the loaned-out player.
Olivia de Havilland had been at Warners since 1935. Her commitment to the studio should have ended sometime in 1941 or 1942, but Warners wanted de Havilland to remain at the studio because of previous suspension time — and because de Havilland had by then become a solid box-office draw. (In addition to Bette Davis, James Cagney had also fought the studio in the late 1930s; also in the ’30s, Myrna Loy had fought MGM.)
Adding insult to injury, in 1943 Warner Bros. loaned her out to independent producer David O. Selznick (who, incidentally, had de Havilland’s sister and nemesis Joan Fontaine under contract). Selznick then passed her on to RKO, who wanted de Havilland to star in screenwriter-turned-director Dudley Nichols’s (inane) wartime comedy Government Girl. At that juncture, de Havilland decided she was ready for a split with Warners.
As a result of the lawsuit, de Havilland’s career suffered a two-year break in the mid 1940s. There were no de Havilland vehicles in 1944 (Government Girl opened in some markets that year) and 1945, and when the 1943 production Devotion, about the Bronte sisters, finally saw the darkness of a film theater in 1946, Warner Bros. made sure that remaining contract player Ida Lupino received top billing.
That same year, de Havilland starred in two box-office successes: At Universal, she played twins — one good, one psycho –in Robert Siodmak’s film noir The Dark Mirror, and at Paramount she was an unwed mother who gives up her son for adoption in Mitchell Leisen’s shameless tearjerker To Each His Own. For the latter, de Havilland won her first Academy Award. Three years later, she won again for a much better performance in an infinitely better film, William Wyler’s The Heiress (above, with scuzzy suitor Montgomery Clift).
Considering that at Warners de Havilland usually played innocuous heroines in mild comedies (Hard to Get, The Male Animal, Princess O’Rourke) and in adventure epics focused on leading man Errol Flynn, it’s hardly surprising that her two Academy Award nominations during her tenure at the studio were a result of her work elsewhere. Gone with the Wind was a Selznick-MGM co-production (she was nominated in the best supporting actress category), while Mitchell Leisen’s Hold Back the Dawn was made at Paramount in 1941.
"From the age of 18 when I began my career as Hermia (’though she be but little, she is fierce’) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream," de Havilland told Robert Osborne, "I always wanted to play difficult roles in films with significant themes. With the exception of that first Shakespearean film, no equivalent opportunities were given me at Warner Bros." (De Havilland added that "absolutely no one in the industry thought I would win the case.")
Additionally, de Havilland received an Oscar nomination for the 1948 drama The Snake Pit, directed by Anatole Litvak. For her role as a woman committed to a mental institution, she won the New York Film Critics Circle’s best actress award. The following year, she would win again — for The Heiress.
Olivia de Havilland lives in Paris, and is currently writing her autobiography.
Olivia de Havilland quotes: Robert Osborne 2005 interview at The Hollywood Reporter
Women on Film: Morphing Montage
Ann Sheridan Biographer Ray Hagen Discusses the 1940s Warner Bros. Star
Miriam Hopkins Biography in the Works
Errol Flynn Signature Collection
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