“The Blind Side”, released in 2009, told the story of the Tuohy family, who courageously adopted Micheal Oher so that he could achieve the full potential that the family saw in him, both academically and in football.
However, after years of talks about the blatant white saviorism that this movie praises, the story gets even worse. At age 37, Oher is suing the Tuohy family for allegedly coercing him into signing a conservatorship that they still have over him today. Oher also claims that while he received nothing from the 2009 movie, the Tuohys profited.
On Aug. 16, the Tuohy’s changed their story. Despite originally refuting the claims that they had a conservatorship over Oher, lawyer Randall Fishman confirmed to “The Athletic” that the Tuohys have agreed to end the conservatorship.
“Micheal got every dime, every dime that he had coming,” Fishman said.
This leaves a lot of room for speculation of who got to decide how much money Oher “had come.” Fishman also claims that the Tuohys decided at the time that a conservatorship benefited Oher the most and was not done for personal profit.
The Tuohy family’s attorney, Mary Singer, said that Oher’s claims were “hurtful and absurd,” and told multiple news outlets that Oher has “tried to run this play before.”
One can assume from the family attorney himself that Oher has tried many times before to end the conservatorship for almost two decades. If the conservatorship was, in fact, done for Oher’s benefit, it is strange that those attempts were denied.
Micheal Lewis, a childhood friend of Oher and the family and the author of “The Blind Side” book, told the “Washington Post” that no one “made millions” off of the film adaptation.
“Everyone should be mad at the Hollywood studio system,” Lewis said.
According to Lewis, when the profits from the movie came in, no one in the original story benefited at all in comparison to how the producers, directors and actors benefited.
Lewis also claims that he and the Tuohys made around $350,000 each after taxes and that the family wanted to share the profits with all family members, including Oher, but he started declining the royalty checks.
Kurt Streeter, a sports column writer for “The New York Times”, called the movie a typical Hollywood “dumbed-down trope about race and class in America.”
Streeter also uses his article to talk about how these types of Hollywood movies always seem to ignore the shady part of the sports industry and focus on the coal- into-diamond storyline.
With all of this controversy coming out about how the movie not only portrayed racial stereotypes but actually told a completely different story, people some critics are demanding the return of Sandra Bullock’s Oscar for her portrayal as Leigh Anne Tuohy.
This is not a likely occurrence, though, since the problems surrounding the movie had nothing to do with her performance and everything to do with the writers and the actual family that caused the issues.
While Bullock has not publicly made a comment about these discussions, her costar, Quinton Aaron, who played Oher, came to her defense, saying that these critics “do not make any sense” and that her “brilliant performance should not be tarnished by something that has nothing to do with her.”
