Can’t wait to see Aladdin and the King of Thieves then. I’d written the series off. Now I know.
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Are you available for a little light work?
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And he did it at a discount, too — he received only $75,000 for the role.Well, that's a bit misleading.
He worked for scale – which was unusual for a star of Williams’s (the correct possessive of “Williams” is “Williams’s”, BTW – Strunk and White, page 1) caliber, but was typical for animation at the time. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen also worked for scale on the original Toy Story.
Paying Hollywood actors boatloads of cash to make animated pictures is a recent trend – and Williams paved the way for it. Aladdin was the movie that made studios realize that they could get asses in seats by casting big stars in animated roles.
Of course, the difference between Robin Williams and, say, Will Smith in Shark Tale or Cameron Diaz in Shrek is that Williams really WAS an incredibly talented voice actor, not just a guy they hired because he was famous.
There’s more via Brian Cronin’s Movie Legends Revealed.
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I would assume that they also had a written contract, and that the written contract had a clause which stated that the written contract was the only binding agreement between the parties (integration clause). In that case, there wouldn’t be an oral contract.
The “words” of this agreement (I won’t say “letter” because apparently it wasn’t committed to paper - which was his first mistake) said 25%. But the spirit of it is more along the lines of “the genie’s bounding box shouldn’t be more than 25% of the poster’s area.” Because the genie would pretty much have to occupy the whole poster for his actual area to be more than 25%.
And his bounding box is approaching 33-40% of that poster.
Anyone who quotes Strunk & White to correct a writer’s style, shouldn’t be taken seriously.
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But he’s right, isn’t he? The post-word apostrophe is reserved for plural possessive. Williams is not plural – except in the case of Williams-Sonoma, which was founded by six people who were all named William Sonoma.
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A few friends of mine and I are considering getting together on a fairly major (for us) project. Considerable thought is going into the structure of the LLC to do this because we don’t want “ends friendship,” to be a possible failure.
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Yes, in legalese, Disney’s lawyers would have put the sole agreement clause in - in full knowledge of the verbal agreement with Williams.
As it happened, I have signed one of these. You have the verbal agreement, and that stands, but to proceed, you sign it off.
Nonetheless, in any decent 1850s bar in Reno, you’d be shot if you didn’t honor the verbal portion.
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Depends on your style guide. AP recommends just adding the apostrophe (Williams’ widget); Fowler recommends adding the apostrophe s (Willams’s widget).
Here’s a google N-gram search of Williams’ vs Williams’s
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Williams’%2CWilliams’s&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CWilliams%20’%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CWilliams%20’s%3B%2Cc0
Disney didn’t break their agreement. While the Genie is big, in relationship to the other characters on the 1-sheet, in relationship to the entire work it’s no where near 25%. This isn’t something you have to guess at. It’s one of those “fact” things. And Williams didn’t do the voices for commercials, which, also, is as he wanted. This story just seems like another example of Boing-Boing’s continual love/hate relationship with Disney, that Disney probably isn’t even aware of.
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Oh yes, I think RW is morally in the right, and that a man is only as good as his word. I just think that those arguing that RW should have somehow enforced a nonexistent oral contract should be aware of the sole agreement clause.
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It certainly is a good piece of real-world information to have!
But but but… Haunted Mansion! Haunted Mansion!
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It’s also Chicago, APA, and Fowler’s style (although there is an exception for when the s is not pronounced, e.g. Descartes’.)
They add an s when the word being possessified is singular (e.g. Kansas’s (curiously, the NYT considers “Times” to be singular)) but not to a plural (Munchkins’, General Motors’.) A sometimes exception being when the -s is pronounced “-z,” as in “James’.”
The only guide I can find that eschews “____s’s” in all circumstances is AP, as newspaper typesetters were historically pressed for space.
Personally, I think “____s’s” looks stupid and I never use it, but then I use dipthongs for amœba and æsthetic, and diereses for naïve and coöperate, so I’m not exactly in step with mainstream usage.
I also think punctuation that’s not part of a quote belongs outside the quote, but that seems to be a lost cause.
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In CA, verbal agreements/contracts are just as binding as written ones. Sure, a lot harder to prove, but just as binding.
I think you’ve hit on an old school solution to corporations treating everyone like shit…
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Can we at least agree that it’s fucking-well not “William’s”?
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Though, depending on the stakes, it might be worth going in without a contract in a few cases with friends just as a way of evaluating their trustworthiness.
If a friend screws me on something, then that’s a valuable lesson about that person I’m not liable to get any other way. Better I know on a small business deal than when I loan them one of my favorite books and they lose it (or worse, fold over the page corners to mark their place)!
And again, we have no proof of this oral agreement. But in the eyes of most people, they will trust RW over Disney…
