Legal News

Harvey Weinstein Full of Warm Fuzzies After Project Runway Settlement

By Ashby Jones

It struck us as one of the odder post-settlement statements we’ve ever read: one party congratulating the other on its “success in the litigation.” But that little nugget indeed emerged from the deal announced today between the Weinstein Company and NBC Universal over the fate of the hit show Project Runway. The upshot: Weinstein gets its $150 million deal to move the show from NBC’s Bravo Network to Lifetime; NBC gets an undisclosed amount of money and these kind words from Harvey Weinstein:

I want to personally congratulate Jeff Zucker and NBCU on their success in the litigation and thank Jeff for resolving this in a professional manner.

Click here for the NYT story; here for the LAT story.

As we’ve blogged before (here and here), NBC Universal, which ran five cycles of the show on its Bravo cable network, filed a lawsuit against the show’s producer, the Weinstein brothers’ Weinstein Co., for selling the rights to Lifetime Networks. Here’s a copy of the complaint. In the suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, NBC claimed that it had a right of first refusal on the show.

NBC and its outside counsel, Gibson Dunn’s Orin Snyder, requested an injunction to keep Lifetime from airing the show, which was granted by a New York judge last September. The judge, Richard B. Lowe, ruled that the Weinstein Company closed a deal with Lifetime without granting NBC a last opportunity to match the terms of the deal. At the time, David Boies of Boies Schiller & Flexner, the lawyer for Weinstein, promised to fight on.

And now this, a settlement, in which the Weinsteins get their show. Without knowing the financial terms, it’s hard to tell who got the better of the deal and why we had this weird one-way congratulations. A spokesman for Weinstein declined to comment on the settlement terms. “All of the parties are pleased with the outcome,” NBC Universal said in a statement.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 01, 2009 (boomark / email).