David Boies Loses $20 Million Natalie Portman Movie Flop Case

David Boies had a funding-fraud case rejected by a Florida appeals court, leaving the superstar lawyer and his business partners holding the bag for a wayward $20 million investment into a Natalie Portman western flop.

The Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal summarily rejected Boies’ arguments Thursday with a single word^, “affirmed.” That ended a multi-year legal drama seeking reimbursement for cash lost by Boies’ backing of Portman’s 2015 “Jane Got A Gun,” the worst-performing western movie in modern history according to the defendants.

“I have nothing but the greatest respect for Mr. Boies as a trial lawyer and person. But in this case he gambled on a movie and lost and unfortunately tried to make our clients foot the bill,” said Alan Rose, attorney for the consultant defendants.

The case centered on meetings in Florida and New York City between Boies and consultants seeking to raise cash for a series of Hollywood productions. Boies, his daughter, and the son of his firm partner Jonathan Schiller, under the name Boies Schiller Film Group LLC, claimed that the consultants over-hyped their assets in an effort to get Boies’ group to loan money for production.

There was one problem though: there wasn’t written proof to back up those claims, and a proposal document that the plaintiffs leaned on to show fraudulent or negligent misrepresentations had a disclaimer, retired Palm Beach Circuit Judge Peter Blanc, acting as the group’s private judge, ruled last year.

“The problem with these arguments is that they are long in inference and short on attribution,” Blanc said. For example, over 11 private trial days the plaintiffs introduced pieces of evidence like magazine articles that indicated the consultants would be funding the production. But there’s nothing in the stories to indicate the defendants—Peter Nathaniel or Impala Partners—were the sources for the assertions in those pieces. And third-party witnesses had foggy recollections over the facts.

The court said the consultant’s statements to Boies and Schiller were a “broad statement of intent and ability to fund and not sufficiently detailed to support” the suit. Vague statements about the possibilities of the film, which generated roughly $3.7 million, weren’t enough because there were no written records of the defendants promising to put up their own cash, Blanc said.

“The entire case was a highlight of my career, and cross-examining David Boies was a huge if not the biggest part of that,” Tal J. Lifshitz, a partner with Kozyak Tropin Throckmorton and lawyer for the defendants, said in an email. “It was challenging and required tremendous preparation because I was cross-examining a master cross-examiner.”

In the end, it was a he-said he-said case.

“There’s 1100 documents in evidence, there’s not a single piece of paper that mentioned our clients investing money, or that mentioned the net worth of our clients,” said Rose, a Mrachek, Fitzgerald, Rose, Konopka, Thomas & Weiss P.A. managing shareholder. “Other than the word of a renowned trial lawyer.”

Tyler Ulrich and Michael C. Mikulic of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, and Santo Digangi of Critton Luttier & Coleman LLP represented the plaintiffs. They didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The case is Boies Schiller Film Group, LLC v. Impala Partners LLC, Fla. Dist. Ct. App., 4th Dist., No. 4D2023-0886, 9/26/24.