The Wages Of Service To The Dark Lord

New Line Cinema is being sued by a collection of extras who played orcs, hobbits and the like in the Lord of the Rings movies who claim that it is rooking them over their cut of merchandizing profits:

Plaintiff Stephen Ure played two orcs in the saga (Gorbag in The Return of the King and Grishnákh in The Two Towers) and had several lines. "Pretty much whenever an orc delivered dialogue it was me," said the Auckland-based actor whose LOTR characters have appeared on posters and been sold as figures, busts, and statuettes. "At last count, the money made on mine alone was over $13.5 million profit. Somehow they're turning that into a loss, which none of us can understand." He added, "In any country, it's very difficult to make a living as an actor. The industry is just a fledgling industry [in New Zealand]…. So when you get shafted like this, it hurts."

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One of the LOTR actors' attorneys, Henry Gradstein, of Gradstein & Luskin, agreed the Rings actors got a good, clear-cut deal. But he says New Line is employing what is commonly called "Hollywood accounting" to avoid paying the actors what they're due: The studio may have made $100 million on merchandise but is now deducting 50 percent of those profits as a "distribution fee." "What they're saying here is, 'We'll charge you a 50 percent distribution fee for the distribution of the merchandise….' There's nothing in the contract that says that. They just made it up. So right off the bat, they took half of the money off the table," Gradstein said.

You'd think that anyone who'd read the books would know that the words "good faith" are not in Sauron's vocabulary.