EXCLUSIVE: After five years in the Writers Guild of America’s really bad books, The Irishman producer Randall Emmett has settled his debt with the Guild over not paying four scribes for work on a TV series.
Under an agreement with the Guild worked out over the past few weeks, Emmett wired $630,000 to the WGA West this morning. The Guild confirmed to Deadline that the funds have been received, but had no further comment.
Emmett will be coming off the Guild’s Strike/Unfair List, I hear.
The producer has been on the WGA Strike/Unfair List since 2020 after two of his companies — Emmett Furla Oasis Films, LLC and Pumped, LLC — failed to pay an arbitration award of $477,000 to four writers for work they did on the never made TV series Pump. The show was supposed to star Arnold Schwarzenegger but he exited the project, bringing it to a premature close.
With interest, that sum owed over Pump had gone up to over $757,000 as of earlier this month.
The $100,000-less figure that was sent over Friday was the result of negotiation between Guild lawyers and Emmett’s counsel as a way to ensure the entire principle and most of the interest got in the hands of the writers in question. Perhaps sending up signals, the WGA had kicked off an #EndLatePay campaign on its social media feeds earlier this month.
Now, they have a feather in their collective hat going into next year’s contract talks with the AMPTP.
The money sent Friday also puts paid to what had become a production and publicity problem for the prolific Emmett. “I’m happy to put this behind me with the WGA,” the producer said when contacted by Deadline today. “I took on the obligation personally because it was the right thing to do,” he continued, noting the money was actually owed by Emmett Furla, which shuttered in January 2020.
“I will continue to focus on producing good movies in a very difficult time in our industry alongside the WGA and its members who are beyond important to the filmmaking process,” Emmett added. In that vein, Emmett’s 2022-formed Convergence Entertainment Group, LLC shingle just finished production on the John Travolta, Lukas Haas, Rebecca De Mornay and DJ Kahlid-starring action flick The Gentleman Thief. In his long term relationship with the Pulp Fiction star, Emmett directed last year’s Travolta feature Cash Out under the pseudonym Ives.
As recently as last August, as Deadline exclusively reported, the producer was ensnared in another dispute with the WGA over financial concerns on multiple films that were being produced in part under his newish Convergence. Outside of his business affairs, Emmett hit the public eye in a whole other way with his tumultuous and eventually unsuccessful involvement with Vanderpump Rules regular Lana Kent – much of which played out in front of the cameras.
More recently, Emmett hooked up again with Martin Scorsese (who BTW is a WGA member) for Convergence to produce and fully finance Wall of White, a narrative adaptation of the documentary by Jared Drake and Steven Sig. The project is out looking for a director with plans to start production later this year, as my colleague Mike Fleming Jr. reported in March.
