Who has Michael Oher's money?

'The Blind Side' subject says his 'adoptive family' owes him, the family hires an expensive attack dog lawyer, and the author of the book says Hollywood has it.

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The “memeification of movies” has been all over the discourse after Barbenheimer this summer, but one of the first movie memes I can remember involved The Blind Side. Remember “Yer changin’ that boy’s life? / Nope. He’s changin’ mahn?”

I started FilmDrunk in 2007 and The Blind Side came out in 2009, so I remember that trailer well, anchored by that unforgettable Trailer Line (or more accurately, trailer exchange).

This scene was the perfect uvula tickler — so punchy. So gag-worthy. So bumper sticker ready. So “this definitely didn’t happen.” You could basically extrapolate from that three-second exchange that much of the BASED A TRUE STORY movie built around it was probably bullshit. Naturally, it went onto gross more than $300 million in worldwide box office and won Sandra Bullock an Oscar (the things I make fun of the most always succeed, I have a sort of reverse hexing power in that way).

The story was about Michael Oher, a raw football talent and former foster kid who got adopted by a rich Memphis family, the Tuohys — the patriarch an actual Taco Bell magnate — who gave Oher a stable home life, allowing him to develop the football talent that eventually made him an NFL first-round draft pick. There was a brassy mom (Bullock), a dopey dad (Tim McGraw!) in the sitcom mold, a cute little kid in the Hallmark movie mold, and all the actors got to do Southern accents and feign tackiness, which actors always love. The movie was patronizing and kind of racist (go watch the scene where Michael goes to visit his birth father and tell me it’s not) in that way that the Academy loves, but also an inspirational story of people doing good if you didn’t question the subtext of it at all.

Before it was a corny movie, The Blind Side was actually a great book by Michael Lewis, which was far more about the development of the left tackle position in American football than it was about the Tuohys adopting Michael Oher. Lewis was familiar with the story partly from having been childhood friends with Sean Tuohy, the Taco Bell magnate, with whom Lewis attended the Isidore Newman private school in New Orleans. The movie, not surprisingly, made the Tuohys’ “adoption” of “Big Mike” its central focus. But there’s a reason I’m opening this write-up with how dopey the movie was, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

This week, news broke that Oher, who played in the NFL from 2009-2016 and won a Super Bowl with the Ravens, was suing the Tuohys over money he says they owe him for the movie. A central issue of the suit is that Oher says the Tuohys had him sign conservatorship papers under the guise that they were actually adoption papers (the former allowing the Tuohys to negotiate business deals on Oher’s behalf, the latter not). Then, so the suit goes, they basically dined out on the idea they had adopted Oher, even as they were cutting him out of business deals.

From ESPN:

According to the legal filing, the movie paid the Tuohys and their two birth children each $225,000, plus 2.5% of the film's "defined net proceeds." The movie became a critically acclaimed blockbuster, reportedly grossing more than $300 million at the box office, and tens of millions of dollars more in home video sales. […] While the deal allowed the Tuohys to profit from the film, the petition alleges, a separate 2007 contract purportedly signed by Oher appears to "give away" to 20th Century Fox studios the life rights to his story "without any payment whatsoever." The filing says Oher has no recollection of signing that contract, and even if he did, no one explained its implications to him.

If you know anything about the sordid history of Hollywood Accounting (so common it has its own Wikipedia page; I have written at length about how it works myself), that bit about a deal for “net proceeds” probably jumps out at you. Earning nothing on a deal for net proceeds on a movie that grossed $300 million, sadly, is not unprecedented. The Tuohys have basically said as much:

In the past, the Tuohys have denied making much money from the movie, saying they received a flat fee for the story and did not reap any of the movie's profits. And what they did earn, they added, was shared with Oher.

"We divided it five ways," the Tuohys wrote in their 2010 book, "In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving.”

Of course, the suit alleged even shadier things from the Tuohys:

The deal lists all four Tuohy family members as having the same representative at Creative Artists Agency, the petition says. But Oher's agent, who would receive movie contract and payment notices, is listed as Debra Branan, a close family friend of the Tuohys and the same lawyer who filed the 2004 conservatorship petition, the petition alleges. Branan did not return a call to her law office on Monday.

That definitely makes the conservatorship arrangement sound a lot shadier than not getting net profits. And of course, it’s disappointing for anyone who believed The Blind Side to hear that this formerly loving, found family is now bickering over money.

So what do the Tuohys say? Along with the assorted quotes about them feeling “sad” and “hurt” by the lawsuit, they immediately fired back through their lawyer, Marty Singer, who fed TMZ a story headlined “Oher Attempted $15 Million Shakedown ... Before Blasting Us In Court Docs!!!”

That one alleges, in part…

Oher came to the Tuohys prior to filing his 14-page petition in Shelby County, Tenn. ... and threatened them, saying if they didn't pony up an eight-figure check, he'd "plant a negative story about them in the press."

If you follow celebrity gossip, the name “Marty Singer” is probably familiar to you. He’s the pitbull whose clients have included Bill Cosby, Bryan Singer, Sylvester Stallone, and Charlie Sheen, who has been a source for many other TMZ stories, such as “Sly Stallone Hires Top Legal Gun Fires Back at Rape Accuser,” “Lawyer Vows to Sue Accuser's Lawyer: You're a Fame Whore!,” and “John Travolta Sued By Alleged Gay Lover: I Never Agreed to Keep Secrets.”

"Unbeknownst to the public, Mr. Oher has actually attempted to run this play several times before – but it seems that numerous other lawyers stopped representing him once they saw the evidence and learned the truth. Sadly, Mr. Oher has finally found a willing enabler and filed this ludicrous lawsuit as a cynical attempt to drum up attention in the middle of his latest book tour."

More recently, the Tuohys (who, it may be worth mentioning, are so rich that they regularly fly around on private jets) announced that they were looking to end the conservatorship that Oher had challenged, claiming that they only did it in the first place to get around NCAA rules. Oher living with Tuohys and going to Ole Miss, where Sean Tuohy was officially a Ole Miss booster, presumably would’ve been against the rules unless he was officially part of the family, and, so their version goes, you can’t adopt an 18-year-old, so a conservatorship was the work-around.

Other people have also questioned the feel-good part of the Blind Side story, painting it more as a story of SEC football loophole dodging:

The Tuohys’ public stance, of wanting the best for Oher and whatnot, does seem to be somewhat at odds with them siccing Marty Singer on him to try to paint Oher as a shakedown artist (Sean Tuohy Jr., the cute little kid of the movie, did an interview with Barstool, of all people, intimating the same thing). This does also raise the question of whether demanding money from people who legitimately owe you money counts as a shakedown. But I digress.

This whole story left many of us waiting for Michael Lewis to weigh in, since I do consider myself a fan of his and of the book he wrote. Lewis ended up being interviewed in The Washington Post, during which he too blamed Hollywood Accounting.

“Everybody should be mad at the Hollywood studio system,” Lewis said. “Michael Oher should join the writers strike. It’s outrageous how Hollywood accounting works, but the money is not in the Tuohys’ pockets.”

According to Lewis, Twentieth Century Fox, as it was then known, paid $250,000 for the option to make “The Blind Side” a movie, which he split 50-50 with the Tuohy family. The Tuohys have said they split their share evenly, including with Oher. After taxes and agent fees, Lewis said, his half was around $70,000.

Another fun wrinkle here is that Fox ultimately pulled out, and the movie, based on the book Lewis wrote partly about his friend from private school, only ended up getting made thanks to another fabulously wealthy friend of the Tuohys:

Fox, however, never made the movie. (According to Lewis, the studio had thought Julia Roberts would be interested in the film, but she wasn’t.) Instead, Lewis said, Alcon, a small production company backed by Tuohy’s neighbor, FedEx CEO Fred Smith, stepped in. Instead of paying the actors large salaries, Lewis said, they were offered a share of the profits. Lewis said his deal provided him a share of the movie’s net profits, too. Warner Bros. distributed the movie.

Let this be a lesson to all of you out there trying to get a movie made. Maybe ask your neighbor, the CEO of FedEx?

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the interview though, is that, according to Lewis, the family actually did make money on those net proceeds.

Lewis said that ultimately after agent fees and taxes, he and the Tuohy family received around $350,000 each from the profits of the movie. Lewis said the Tuohys planned to share the royalties among the family members…

That actually sounds pretty good for a net profit deal. Also, why am I instantly suspicious of any assertion that begins with someone planning to share some money?

…including Oher, but Oher began declining his royalty checks, Lewis said. Lewis said he believed the Tuohy family had deposited Oher’s share in a trust fund for Oher’s son.

“What I feel really sad about is I watched the whole thing up close,” Lewis said. “They showered him with resources and love. That he’s suspicious of them is breathtaking. The state of mind one has to be in to do that — I feel sad for him.”

Taking Lewis at face value and assuming all of this is true (which I’m not sure I do — in addition to it being second-hand, it doesn’t seem strange or sad to be suspicious of Ole Miss boosters finding a way to send a generational football talent to Ole Miss), this raises an obvious question.

Namely, if this fight isn’t about the money — the Tuohys are clearly rich, and Michael Oher must’ve made pretty good money playing in the NFL for seven years — what is it about?

If I can be permitted a guess: It feels to me like the root of this is that Michael Oher got famous against his will for a movie that kind of made him look stupid.

From the original ESPN piece about the suit:

For years, Oher has chafed at how "The Blind Side" depicted him, saying it hurt his football career and clouded how people view him. He has said that based on the film, some NFL decision-makers assumed he was mentally slow or lacked leadership skills.

"People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie," Oher told ESPN in 2015. "They don't really see the skills and the kind of player I am."

"There has been so much created from The Blind Side that I am grateful for, which is why you might find it as a shock that the experience surrounding the story has also been a large source of some of my deepest hurt and pain over the past 14 years," Oher wrote in his book "When Your Back's Against the Wall," released last week.

"Beyond the details of the deal, the politics, and the money behind the book and movie, it was the principle of the choices some people made that cut me the deepest."

Like I said, there’s a reason I started this write-up with a discussion of The Blind Side being a dopey movie. Can you imagine being judged, not only by a corny movie about your life that makes the rich white people look like the heroes of your story, but by dumb NFL coaches’ assumptions about you based on their reading of said corny movie?

I consume so much sports docu-series content that I’ve become something of a connoisseur of god-awful football coach parables. For just a small sampling, here’s Lions coach Dan Campbell’s tortured metaphor about deep water from last year’s Hard Knocks:

Then there’s a number of teams, they are in the shallows. They come in a hurry, man, and they are all over your ass. They are all over your ass and they strike and move, they strike and move. They are dangerous, man! You just gotta get a hold of them, though. If you can just get a hold of them and you start dragging their ass out into the deep, dark abyss, you can drown them. And that’s what we gotta be, that’s who we have to be. That’s our domain. Because we will tread water as long as it takes to fucking bury you!

On this year’s Hard Knocks, Jets coach Robert Saleh had another doozy about eagles and crows:

"This is a life lesson for everybody. Three nights ago, I was in deep thought. Deep thought. I was thinking about you guys, I was thinking about all the excitement surrounding us, man. All of it. Did you know that the only bird in the world that will attack an eagle is a crow? It’s a crow. That’s the only bird that will have the balls to attack an eagle. It will perch on the eagle’s back and peck at its neck. So rather than fight back and tear a crow to pieces, like it can. An eagle spreads its wings and soars as high as it possibly can. It keeps going, and going, and going, as high as it can. The higher the eagle flies, the harder it is for the crow to breathe. Eventually, the crow suffocates, falls back down to earth and dies. That’s what happens."

I’m not an ornithologist, but I’m willing to bet a lot of money that this is not a scientifically accurate description of how eagles defeat crows.

Anyway, my point here is that, as a group, NFL coaches generally do not seem to be good story understanders. They probably got as much valuable information about Michael Oher from The Blind Side as a dog gets from the rolled up newspaper you use to smack it with. They will, however, make insane assumptions about players based on the smallest tidbits of dubious information. It’s part of their job. (Remember the “he’s got an ugly girlfriend. Ugly girlfriend means no confidence,” scene in Moneyball?).

And so, it’s not hard to imagine that the movie, which portrayed Oher’s as a half-mute mentally challenged boy (who “tested 98 percent in protective instincts”), felt like an albatross around his neck for half his career if not his life.

I’ve been banging the drum about bad biopics, phony “based on a true story” movies, and badly-adapted non-fiction for about as long as I’ve been writing about movies, and I think there’s a general misconception about what we mean when we call these movies “corny” or “cheesy” or whatever. I get the sense people think we mean derivative, or hackneyed, like it’s bad merely because we’ve seen it before.

That’s part of it, but the much greater sin, in my mind, is that these movies are incurious about their own characters. Characters are the root of any good story, and if you’re supposedly writing about real people, and you have them saying shit like “Nope, he’s changin’ mahn,” it’s a pretty good bet that you haven’t taken the time to actually get to know who these people really are. The writer has a preconceived notion of what a feel-good story looks like, and they just sort of drag and drop real people into this pre-fab narrative, quality and consequences be damned.

So when you’re seeing one of these movies and it seems hackneyed, the disappointment of it isn’t so much not seeing something new and fresh, it’s the sense that you’re seeing something that’s missing valuable information. What genuine insights did we miss in this rush to get a few greeting card-worthy turd niblets of word art wisdom?

The Michael Oher story is one in which bad writing had real consequences, with Oher having to live with this half-assed depiction of him hanging around his neck like an albatross for the last ten plus years, all so that Sandra Bullock could really chew some scenery (not that she isn’t delightful at it). Whether or not the Tuohys owe him anything financially, it seems clear that the filmmakers owe him something spiritually.

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Other Updates!

We have a NEW FROTCAST out, featuring Frotcast original member Brendan. We discuss Michael Bay inventing robot testicles, some of the Blind Side story I just detailed, and Bradley Cooper doing Jew Face in his new movie. You also get to hear Brendan react live to seeing that picture of Bradley Cooper playing the Elephant Man on Broadway for the first time. Apparently he needed prosthetics in order to play a Jew, but not to play the Elephant Man. Anyway, it’s a can’t miss.

Pod Yourself The Wire 312, the latest episode of our The Wire rewatch podcast, with Jack O’Brien from the Daily Zeitgeist, is now 100% free.