In a rare leading role, Bonnie Bedelia’s excellent performance lifts the movie above the standard crime thriller fare. It has a few steamy moments, especially the opening murder scene on a train, but it also has the feel of a television movie, probably due to its low budget. Although Gwen is assigned as the judge in this case, unfortunately for her most of the evidence points to herself as the killer.Īlthough the story is nothing new, the eventual unraveling of the mystery, coupled with the surprise villain, makes the movie a very enjoyable watch. Soon afterward, her old mentor and close friend Charles Mayron (Dabney Coleman) is murdered late one night in his office. Bored with her staid husband (Will Patton), Gwen begins a brief affair with the charming library worker. There were similar (and better) movies of its type released that same year (‘The Client’ and ‘Disclosure’), but this rain-soaked thriller is fairly gripping with a talented cast and a rather surprising culprit.ĭistinguished Judge Gwen Warwick (Bonnie Bedelia) meets a young clerk, Martin (Billy Wirth) in a library one day. In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger famously came up with a thought experiment: Put a cat in a closed steel chamber along with a tiny bit of radioactive substance that will release poison upon possible decay.Starting out looking more like an erotic thriller, the 1994 crime drama ‘Judicial Consent’ actually turns out to be a pretty good courtroom suspenser. The Austrian physicist noted that before anyone opens the chamber and makes an observation, that cat exists in an indeterminate state between life and death. As evidence, let’s turn to a defamation “lawsuit” “filed�� Monday by Ryan Kavanaugh against the podcaster Ethan Klein. This is no ordinary case, and lawyers, reporters and others would be wise to pay attention as it’s headed toward exploring the quantum state of litigation and the privileges that observers of our legal system think they have about repeating, and commenting on, allegations.īefore getting to what Kavanaugh alleges, it’s necessary to introduce this controversial entertainment industry veteran as well as discuss a quirk of jurisprudence in Los Angeles that hardly anybody knows about.
In 2004, Kavanaugh made a splash by founding an indie studio, Relativity Media, that had supposedly cracked the tough business of moviemaking.
Meaning, he had a quantitative approach toward production. Perhaps partly due to the success at the time of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, Kavanaugh’s methods attracted interest. And the man had a lot of connections, too. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, for instance, was an investor, and for a brief period, Relativity’s co-chairman. The company burned through hundreds of millions of dollars before one of the most notorious Hollywood bankruptcies ever in 2015. And Kavanaugh, feuding with investors, wound up on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter. Since Relativity’s bankruptcy, Kavanaugh has been involved in all sorts of projects as well as legal entanglements. In 2017, Kavanaugh launched a new company, Proxima Media, and along with an individual named Elon Spar, he pursued a new entertainment stock exchange. This endeavor, however, got off to an inauspicious start with Kavanaugh and Spar pointing fingers at each other over funding and secrets. Spar even accused Kavanaugh of operating a “Ponzi scheme,” which Variety picked up for the headline of its own story on the controversy.
This will become relevant later more on what happened in a bit. In the meantime, just know that Kavanaugh and Spar were able to find some sort of resolution. Kavanaugh’s Proxima then acquired a majority interest in Triller, a social media site that, among other things, has distributed pay-per-view boxing matches featuring notables like Mike Tyson, Roy Jones Jr. And when people started pirating those fights, Triller filed many copyright suits. One of the targets was Ethan Klein, whose H3 Podcast used a clip of a Jake Paul fight. This has led to yet another feud for Kavanaugh, one that has escalated over the past several months. Klein has attacked Kavanaugh mercilessly on his podcast.