A frivolous lawsuit? Not according to Big Labor!

While researching my inability to get IMDb.com to open, I learned about a fascinating million-dollar-lawsuit that initially made me laugh out loud because it is so obviously frivolous.

In 2011 IMDb was sued by an unknown actress for more than US$1 million due to IMDb revealing her age (40). The actress claims that revealing her age could cause her to lose acting opportunities.^[10] A federal judge in Seattle dismissed the lawsuit, saying the actress had no grounds to proceed with an anonymous complaint. She re-filed and so revealed that the complainant is a Huong Hoang of Texas, who uses the stage name Junie Hoang.^[11]

Revealing someone’s age is age discrimination? Give me an effing break!

For whatever reason, the geniuses at Wiki fail to point out that this obviously frivolous lawsuit now has major backing from two of the most powerful unions in the film industry:

When a judge threatened to throw her case out unless she used her real name, Hoang finally stepped into the spotlight. According to IMDbPro, she was born in Saigon in 1971, though her resumé lists her age range as between 26 and 33. Along with a lot of minor TV work and modeling in the last two decades, she’s been in some silly-sounding movies such as the recent Gingerdead Man III: Saturday Night Cleaver. What can’t be laughed off so easily is how much her charge has resonated with actors’ groups.

Two heavyweight unions, the 200,000-member Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the 80,000-member American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) came to the then-unnamed actress’s defence in October, denouncing IMDb’s policy: “An actor’s actual age is irrelevant to casting. What matters is the age range that an actor can portray. For the entire history of professional acting, this has been true, but that reality has been upended by the development of IMDb as an industry standard used in casting offices across America.”

Last Friday, SAG issued another statement praising Hoang for her courage in “standing up to fight the unfair and abusive practice of publishing actors’ private information online without their consent.” The organization says thousands of actors have been hurt by IMDb’s unauthorized publication of their ages, particularly women. According to the union, women over 40 make up 24.3 per cent of the U.S. population, but actresses over 40 get just 12.5 per cent of movie and television roles, while men are proportionally represented. Using legal remedies against age discrimination has become increasingly popular in the United States. Two years ago, a class action by writers over 40 ended in a $70-million settlement paid out by 17 networks and production studios, putting an end to a practice of hiring young writers for television to capture young viewers.

I see two issues here. One is whether or not studios should have the right to engage in age discrimination, and the other involves basic First Amendment freedom. There is a free speech right to state the age of any person, and whether that might cause some people to discriminate on the basis of age is irrelevant. At the rate we’re going, pretty soon we won’t be allowed to say anything about anyone.

As to the right to discriminate on the basis of age in the film industry, I am reminded of Joan Crawford’s laughable attempt to portray a young woman when she was in her sixties. (It didn’t work out too well.) Isn’t a studio within its rights in casting only people who look like the characters they’re supposed to be portraying? If the character called for is young, slim and pretty, (or young, athletic and masculine in the case of a man), why would it be discriminatory if the producers want an actor who looks that way? Casting older or middle-aged actors as college fraternity or sorority kids just won’t cut it unless the goal is to make a comedy. Unless the unions’ goal here is to ruin the film industry, I’m not getting it.

But even if ruining another industry is their goal, I wish they would leave the First Amendment alone.

UPDATE: An interesting question has been raised about the wisdom of “casting a 5’7?, 148 lb. dwarf named Tom Cruise to play the fictional 6’5?, 250 lb Jack Reacher.”

Hmm…

Well, we are talking about how things look on the screen, right?

What that means is that if we convert the above to pounds per inch, Tom Cruise’s 67 inches (at 148 lbs.) yields a ratio of 2.2.

And Jack Reacher’s 77 inches (at 250 lbs) yields a ratio of 3.3.

The point seems well taken. Barring other factors, Tom Cruise is either too short or too light to play the part. The camera shows people as they are, right?

But what about the gravity factor? If we consider the gravitational pull on the human body (and body mass factors, including bone density), do mathematical extrapolations yield exactly the same body proportions?

(Hey don’t look at me! I’m the wrong person to ask…. I can’t make sense of the Global Warming math models.)