A Berlin lawyer takes out after Tom Cruise & Co.
Sep 13th, 2007 by Paul Moor
“We are discussing the possibility of several millions.” At least in this account the young Berlin lawyer Ariane Bluttner doesn’t specify Germany’s official Euro currency, as a member of the European Union, but at the prevailing fluctuating rate that would mean substantially more than even several million mere U.S. dollars.
Bluttner, a comparative legal neophyte with only fifteen court appearances behind her, now follows the example set by massive settlements for damages in stateside cases in taking on the case of extras injured during the filming in Berlin of a big-budget United Artists film starring Tom Cruise. (Even before this additional headache came up, Cruise had found himself the target of powerful German animosity because of his activism on behalf of Scientology, which soon landed him personally under the lynx-eyed scrutiny of Germany’s equivalent of the F.B.I.)
Bluttner works for the legal firm Dr. Schmitz & Partners, located at the less pricey western end of western Berlin’s primary Kurfürstendamm boulevard. She launched her legal career only ten months ago, and thus far she’s handled such things as rent disputes, traffic accidents, and tax discrepancies. Her most recent case involved the hardly impressive sum of €100 = $138.84.
Cruise has come to Berlin to make a film called “Rubicon” (formerly “Valkyrie”), playing Claus Count von Stauffenberg, a major anti-Nazi hero in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Stauffenberg, an officer important enough to get him admitted into Hitler’s presence at his wartime headquarters on the eastern front, used a briefcase to get the bomb into the same room with Hitler, and there he placed it at a strategic point beneath the conference table where the explosion could not fail to kill the villainous dictator.
Then, in the interest of his own survival, Stauffenberg left – and hastened back to Berlin by air, spreading premature word by telephone that the bomb plot had succeeded. Soon after Stauffenberg left the room, though, someone else at that table just happened to shove the lethal briefcase into a slightly different location, and that small move caused the explosion to go off in such a way that the massive wooden table at least partially shielded the dictator. The explosion did wing him – the next pictures made, for the express purpose of proving his survival, show him with his wounded arm completely concealed beneath an overcoat draped across his shoulders, cape-style – but almost immediately Hitler fired off orders affecting all the conspirators, amounting to “Off with their heads!” As soon as the Gestapo (the characteristic German abbreviation for Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police) could round them up, they hung by the neck in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison – with their death-struggles thoughtfully filmed, especially for Hitler subsequently to gloat over triumphantly.
As part-owner of United Artists, Cruise also participates in this project as co-producer. One Sunday three weeks ago, eleven extras appearing in the film wearing uniforms of Nazi-era Wehrmacht (army) soldiers, got injured during filming (with Cruise absent that Sunday) when they fell from the bed of a truck. They required treatment after their accidents, and wound up spending that night in a hospital.
The next day one of them, apparently familiar with Hollywood epics about legal cases, telephoned Ariane Bluttner and said he wanted to sue the production firm for damages – specifically American-style damages. He knew some of the other injured extras, and said that as a group they expected several millions by way of reimbursing them for injuries the filming had inflicted upon them.
The Anglophone version of Germany’s leading newsmagazine Der Spiegel has given all this its customary expert coverage, which I make available to you by your clicking here.
