A producer claiming she rescued the horror hit Obsession is now suing her former colleagues for cutting her out of millions in profits. Leonora Ann Darby filed a sweeping breach-of-contract lawsuit against Tea Shop Productions and its top executives. She alleged a years-long pattern of broken promises and unequal pay.
Obsession’s wild $505 million success story just got a lot more complicated
Darby detailed the exploitation behind one of the most profitable independent films in recent memory (via Deadline). She claims Tea Shop founders James Harris and Mark Lane brought her aboard in 2019 with promises of equal partnership. But they treated her as a subordinate while she carried significant production burdens.
The lawsuit, filed on August 28 in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleges that Darby received verbal and written commitments for one-third of the net profits on films she co-produced. For Obsession, that would have translated into enormous earnings. The film cost under $800,000 to produce. However, it went on to gross nearly $510 million globally after Focus Features acquired it for $16.2 million at the Toronto Film Festival.
Darby’s complaint describes how she stepped in to fix Obsession during troubled post-production. She claims she restored director Curry Barker’s creative control and guided the project to completion. Without her intervention, the filing suggests, the film might never have reached its blockbuster status.
Instead of rewarding that work, Darby alleges Tea Shop paid her one initial sum plus a $300,000 bonus. It then shut her out of profit participation entirely. The suit describes this as the culmination of seven years of gendered mistreatment by two older male producers toward a younger female colleague.
Beyond Obsession, Darby demands an accounting for several other Tea Shop projects. These include A Banquet, Bull, The Wasp, The Cut, Into the Deep, Tornado, and The Surfer. She seeks unspecified damages and wages, with a jury trial requested.
Tea Shop, its various business entities, Harris, and Lane all face individual liability in the suit. Focus Features and executive producer Jason Blum remain absent from the defendant list. For now, Darby’s legal team at Singh, Singh & Trauben will push forward with what could become a landmark case about profit participation in independent film.
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