WME Hit With Fraud Suit By ‘La La Land’ Composer Over Concert Packaging Deal; Agency Says Claims “Without Merit”

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: A stinging lawsuit filed today by the composer of La La Land may leave WME wishing they’d been slipped the wrong envelope.However, unlike the Academy Awards’ Best Picture debacle of 2017, the breach of contract, negligence and fraud complaint from Oscar and Grammy winner Justin Hurwitz against the agency and now divested production arm Endeavor Content over a touring “live-to-film concert” of the Damien Chazelle directed movie seems much more than a mere sleight of handIllustrated with an invective filled (surprise, surprise) cameo by Ari Emanuel, the suit filed this morning in LA Superior Court by attorneys Bryan Freedman and Tamar Yeghiayan claims “WME had cynically concocted an illegal scheme, whereby its fixed profit from La La Land in Concert was completely out of line with industry standards for talent agencies.” Resurrecting the demons of packaging that WME and other Tinseltown studios hoped to be forgiven for in their court-fought capitulations to the WGA last year, the civil complaint alleges that Hurwitz was scammed by his own reps so WME could “secure the license for the tour of La La Land in Concert – only to self-deal by competing directly against Hurwitz for the profits from the tour.”“Only in the wake of the Writers Guild’s pressure of revealing said talent agencies’ conflicts of interest, did WME rush to transfer its license for La La Land in Concert to Endeavor Content, its newly created subsidiary, to try to hide its clear breaches of its fiduciary duties,” the action says at one point. “Hurwitz never consented to the secret transfer to Endeavor Content, which at all relevant times was wholly owned by the same parent company.”“Hurwitz found himself in the absurd position of being denied the