Actors Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting sue over teenage sex scene in Romeo and Juliet.

They must be crazy to think that it will do them any good. They read the script and during the filming, no doubt wore sexual contact protection.
Once they have behaved like this after the event, no production company or director will want to touch them with a barge pole, let alone sexually in the future.

 

As a grizzled old lawyer once said to me about civil litigation: "Anyone with 15 bucks in their pocket can sue anyone anytime for anything."

Franco Zeffirelli passed away 2 1/2 years ago at age 96. My guess is that the pair and their attorneys didn't want to attack him personally. They did wait until he was dead to file their lawsuit, and the primary target is Paramount, which has deep pockets. If who told what to whom in 1968 is even relevant, it's now their word against that of a person who is silently deceased.

Regarding timing, the lawsuit was filed in California, which created a window for claims by suspending the statute of limitations temporarily, specifically to allow old sexual-abuse claims against the Boy Scouts and Catholic Church. They filed before that window closed.

What won't help their case is that Olivia Hussey has said in interviews multiple times, including as recently as 2018, that the brief partial nudity was "tasteful", "necessary", and "consistent with the standards of European films of the time." Unprompted, she also said that she and co-star Leonard Whiting weren't shy at all at the time about doing it. That is only one thing that may kill their case.

Even in the US, re-releases and special showings of that particular film, were common for school-field-trip outings for 7th and 8th grade classes (students at ages 12-13) reading Shakespeare's work in the early-1970s. I'd heard there was nudity in the film, and nudity in video wasn't pervasively available then, so I looked forward to that particular field trip. I remember being greatly disappointed that there was little or no nudity.

The kind of on-screen nudity that a school could show to children even younger than Hussey and Whiting in the US at the time shouldn't make a California jury today very sympathetic to their claims. On the other hand, it was still common back then in the US for Physical Education classes for students as young as age 14 to feature full nudity for an entire class period in and around the swimming pool. There was simply a lot more nudity imposed by adults on children back then, and a jury might be made up of people young enough to be shocked, offended, and ignorant of the world in which their parents and grandparents grew up.

 

My guess is that plaintiff's bar lawyers trawled old films looking for such things when California opened this window under state law. Lawyers working on a contingency basis probably pitched the idea to Whiting and Hussey, neither of whom went on to have an illustrious or lucrative career in film. The actors won't pay anything, unless they prevail or Paramount offers something to settle it.

From a technical standpoint, they may have a case under California law, which is why a lawyer might want to take a chance on this. Paramount did distribute images of minors showing parts of their body they can't show in public. Whether they or their parents consented may be irrelevant, even though the law was intended to address pedophiles secretly trading pictures of their victims, and not a major motion picture doing things through contracts and in the open.

I think it'll be dismissed as being without merit, but a judge who has to face the voters and be re-elected periodically may do otherwise so as not to be accused of siding with child-abusers.