Just as the 35mm Kodak stock 5219 film begins to roll on Star Wars Episode 7, a legal battle begins to emerge in regard to the films extras. Mad Dog Casting, a casting agency based in the United Kingdom has filed papers in the High Court of London against former employee Eleanor McLaughlin in the amount of two hundred & fifty thousand pounds (about $405,000.00 in US dollars) after she quit the firm, started her own casting company and begun directly competing with her former employer as she tried to poach the Star Wars Episode 7 extras contract valued at 1 million pounds (about $1.4 million in US dollars). Mad Dog is claiming that they had already entered mature negotiations a year ago to provide extras for crowd scenes that involve aliens and other creatures.
McLaughlin, whose credits include Skyfall, Pirates of the Caribbean and World War Z is also being accused of stealing a database that included personal information of at least 1,000 individuals. She then allegedly promised there was work available for them at her casting company We Got Pop. She has denied these accusations.
I sure hope that something like this wouldn’t delay any of the filming, but I imagine it would be hard to shoot a practical crowd scene without any extras. The article seems to think it will. What do you think?
KevMerica