Actor Don Johnson scored a $19 million dollar win in his lawsuit against Rysher Entertainment for half ownership in the “Nash Bridges” 1996-2001 cop show. No, the amount he accepted wasn’t even half of the judge-awarded $50 million victory his 2010 lawsuit pulled off, reports the Hollywood Reporter on Monday, Feb. 11, but appeals can go on until everyone is broke but the attorneys.
Don Johnson’s original contract gave him half the ‘Nash Bridges’profits, if the show ran to 66 episodes. It actually ran for almost twice that long. The background plot centered around a San Francisco police inspector with a troublesome teen-aged daughter and a father with dementia – all the common problems, it was hoped, designed to lure in lots of viewers, and it worked, for a few years.
Afterwards, Don Johnson needed a lawsuit to pry further profits out of Rysher Entertainment, especially when the show went into reruns. They countered with information about how expensive the cop drama – shot on locale – had been to produce. When Johnson won the first round, in 2010, the appeals court cut the award down to a mere $15 million, citing a load of technicalities.
But some behind-the-scenes compromising must have gone on, because earlier this year, Rysher Entertainment came through with approximately $19 million in actual cash. Much of that will go for lawyer fees, but it was well worth the trouble. And Rysher gains, too, because they had been required to put up $44 million as a bond, and they get more than half of that back. It’s a win all around.
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