Despite claims by former NFL player Michael Oher, no one made millions of dollars from the movie “The Blind Side,” said Michael Lewis, who wrote the book the movie was based on.
Lewis, in talking to The Washington Post, responded to accusations by Oher in a petition filed Monday that claims the Tuohy family — who took Oher in when he was homeless during high school — schemed to hoard profits from the film adapted from Lewis’ book.
“Everybody should be mad at the Hollywood studio system,” Lewis said. “Michael Oher should join the writers strike. It’s outrageous how Hollywood accounting works, but the money is not in the Tuohys’ pockets.”
Oher and the Tuohys were the subjects of the blockbuster film that told the story of Oher’s life from just before the Tuohy family took him into their home until he was drafted into the NFL.
[ Attorney: Michael Oher attempted ‘shakedown;’ Tuohys talked about movie on reality show ]
In the legal filing, Oher alleged the Tuohy family promised to adopt him, but instead used a conservatorship to avoid paying him any profits from the movie. According to the filing, the Tuohys and their two birth children each received $225,000, plus 2.5% of the film’s “defined net proceeds.”
According to Lewis, that is not the way the money from the movie broke down.
Lewis said Twentieth Century Fox paid $250,000 for the option to make “The Blind Side” into a movie. Lewis said he split that money with the Tuohy family. The Tuohys have said they split their share evenly with their family members, including with Oher.
However, Fox never made the movie. According to Lewis, Alcon, a small production company backed by Tuohy’s neighbor, FedEx CEO Fred Smith, took over.
Instead of paying the actors and Lewis large salaries, Alcon offered them a share of the movie’s profits.
The film made around half a billion dollars, but the equity stake in the movie was not as much as it would seem to be, Lewis explained.
He said that after agent fees and taxes, he and the Tuohy family received around $350,000 each from the profits of the movie.
The Tuohys said they planned to share the royalties among family members, including Oher, Lewis said, but Oher began declining his royalty checks. Lewis said he believed the Tuohy family had deposited Oher’s share in a trust fund for Oher’s son.
“What I feel really sad about is I watched the whole thing up close,” Lewis said. “They showered him with resources and love. That he’s suspicious of them is breathtaking. The state of mind one has to be in to do that — I feel sad for him.”
Oher claimed in the court filing that the Tuohys tricked him when they promised to adopt him but instead had him placed under a conservatorship.
[ ‘Blind Side’ subject Michael Oher suing ‘adoptive family’ to end conservatorship ]
Tennessee law says a conservatorship is “a proceeding in which a court removes the decision-making powers and duties, in whole or in part, in a least restrictive manner, from a person with a disability who lacks capacity to make decisions in one or more important areas and places responsibility for one or more of those decisions in a conservator or co-conservators.”
Barbara Moss, an attorney in the state who is experienced in conservatorships, told the Post, “You have to have a doctor say you have a mental or physical disability in whole or in part.” From an outside legal perspective, she said, the arrangement with Oher and the Tuohys was “bizarre.”
“I’ve never seen something like that happen,” she said. “From what I know of Michael Oher … he wouldn’t have qualified.”
[ ‘Devastated’: Sean Tuohy responds to ‘Blind Side’ subject Michael Oher’s allegations bd ]
The Tuohy family’s attorney, Martin Singer, said the Tuohys established the conservatorship because Oher was over the age of 18.
The Tuohys have “always been upfront about” the details of his conservatorship, which was apparently “established to assist with Mr. Oher’s needs, ranging from getting him health insurance and obtaining a driver’s license to helping with college admissions,” Singer said in a statement to People.
Singer said Oher tried to “shakedown” the Tuohys for $15 million, saying if he didn’t get the money, he would release a negative story about the family.
Lewis told the Post he believed the Tuohy family chose a conservatorship because the process was quicker than traditional adoption.
Oher claimed that he did not know about the conservatorship until February of this year.
However, according to TMZ, Oher was aware of the conservatorship and mentioned it in a book he wrote in 2011.
Oher wrote “I Beat The Odds: From Homelessness, to The Blind Side, and Beyond” — a memoir that was released in 2011 — and specifically talked about the legal relationship he had with the family.
“It kind of felt like a formality, as I’d been a part of the family for more than a year at that point. Since I was already over the age of eighteen and considered an adult by the state of Tennessee, Sean and Leigh Anne would be named as my ‘legal conservators,’” Oher wrote.
“They explained to me that it means pretty much the exact same thing as ‘adoptive parents,’ but that the laws were just written in a way that took my age into account. Honestly, I didn’t care what it was called. I was just happy that no one could argue that we weren’t legally what we already knew was real: We were a family.”