Litigator loses case, writes musical comedy about it

Shangri-La-La poster at Arlington Drafthouse

When a lawyer loses a case, the lawyer moves on. The experience might be quickly forgotten as run of the mill, or memorably instructive. Either way, it's in the past.

Mike Meier lost a case and did something entirely different. He left practice and wrote a musical comedy about it.

Virginia attorney Meier represented the plaintiffs in Preiss v. Horn (9th Cir. 2013), filed in Nevada. Preiss, who served as physical therapist to Roy Horn, of the famous performing duo Siegfried & Roy, alleged that his services were terminated when he rebuffed Horn's sexual advances. He sued under civil rights law. Preiss's wife was a co-plaintiff, alleging infliction of emotional distress "after watching a videotape of events involving her husband after those events occurred."

The litigation failed. Preiss's claim got hung up on the question of whether he was actually employed by Horn, in the legal sense. The relationship was unclear and proved insufficient to support a civil rights claim.

Preiss's wife complained of negligent infliction of emotional distress (NIED). NIED usually is not actionable in American jurisdictions, as I've explained before at The Savory Tort. Insofar as there are exceptions, the plaintiff watching a video well after the fact did not evidence the contemporaneous observation required by exceptions for liability to bystanders.

The outcome is not surprising, and one need not think it dispositive of what happened between Preiss and Horn. Tort cases without physical injury—such as civil rights claims, defamation and privacy, and infliction of emotional distress—always are a heavy lift for plaintiffs, because they bear the burden of mustering evidence usually in the possession of the defense. Failure to prove does not establish the truth or falsity of the allegations.

Against the odds, Meier fought hard for his clients, and maybe too hard. According to a disciplinary disposition in New York (Sup. Ct. App. Div. 2018), the federal trial judge in Nevada found plaintiffs' claims in opposition to dismissal "not simply without merit but blatantly and undeniably so," insistence on the NIED claim "'absurd' and 'frivolous,'" and prosecution of Preiss's claim "needlessly, unreasonably, and vexatiously multipl[ying] the proceedings in bad faith."

The federal court ordered Meier to pay a sanction entered against the plaintiffs. His home bar of Virginia suspended him from practice for 30 days, and the New York court entered a censure.

The whole affair might have been a welcome excuse for Meier to pursue his passions quite outside the courtroom, in writing, stage, and music. His website Mike Meier Writes now boasts eight screenplays and three books, besides the present project. 

The description of the screenplay Where the Aliens Are exemplifies the sort of quirky narrative Meier favors: "In this science fiction comedy, an elderly professor, along with his neighbors, a lesbian couple and their son, set out to save the world from an impending alien invasion."

Arlington Drafthouse
marquee, July 2025
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In July at the Arlington Drafthouse in northern Virginia, I was treated to one in just a three-performance run of Meier's comedy musical, Shangri-La-La, a.k.a. All That Glitters (trailer at YouTube). The show is a thinly disguised retelling of the facts alleged in Preiss v. Horn. Meier's website summarizes:

It is a comedy about Las Vegas show business and human nature, with a sprinkling of drama and #Metoo. Joshua from Germany fulfills his lifelong dream of moving to Las Vegas. He is thrilled to get a job as the assistant to the retired Siegfried & Roy, only to find out the hard way that not all that glitters is gold. Joshua’s quest for justice culminates in a court case. But Joshua does not know about the Las Vegas tradition of "Hometown Justice." After all, that Las Vegas tradition began with Bugsy Siegel, the New York criminal who built the first casino on the Las Vegas strip, The Flamingo.

Aptly, Meier himself played Joshua's lawyer. The show pulls no punches in telling Meier's side of the story, both as to the plaintiffs' facts and his own plight as their counselor. In Meier's telling of it, he was victimized by Las Vegas insiders, a legal system under Horn's influence, and punished for daring to challenge a monied icon and power player. 

Who knows. Vegas is no stranger to corrupt influences, and stranger things have happened there.

Of course, owing to Meier's penchant for the absurd and the fictionalization of the case, the stage telling is over the top and does not purport to be factual, wink-wink. It's an amusing romp at the expense of Siegfried and Roy, who are played as buffoons, if dangerous ones. Their comical, Hans-and-Franz-reminiscent accents put on plenty of comedy mileage. Meier himself grew up in Germany, and his speech bears just a trace of authentic accent, in contrast.

Siegfried and Roy are both dead now, since 2021. Even insofar as their estates have lingering legal interests in trademark or right of publicity, All That Glitters is plainly a parody from an outsider's perspective.

The play has a dense script and an original score. Both vacillate between clever and banal. Some droll dialog earns laughs, to be sure. There is also ample jejune chatter that sorely needs rewrite by an experienced comedic editor. The songs are catchy in places, and elsewhere blister with lackluster lyrics. The cast did a superb job with what they had to work with.

To be fair, such a mixed record is to be expected in a straight-to-stage vanity project. Meier deserves credit for his determination. Polished stagecraft is not really the point. 

Meier manages to put his creative stamp on a compelling story and somehow turns sexual harassment into legit comedy. At the same time, with Siegfried and Roy gone, Meier gets the last word in his case. And he clearly has a wicked good time doing it.

You can listen to five tunes from Shangri-La-La at Mike Meier Writes. I'm weirdly looking forward to Meier's forthcoming mockumentary, "So You Think You Can Trust the Media?"

It happens, incidentally, that a couple of weeks after I saw Shangri-La-La in Arlington, I visited the Flamingo in Las Vegas. I had a fabulous time at the Flamingo-resident show Piff the Magic Dragon, starring Piff, the lovely Jade Simone, and the world's only magic-performing chihuahua, Mr. Piffles, an act of America's Got Talent and Queer Eye fame. I got to scratch Mr. Piffles under the muzzle after the show. The trio is on tour now with All-Star Vegas, appearing in Cranston, Rhode Island, tomorrow, September 18.

'Horace and Pete' captures American moment

In our fast-paced platinum age of TV, a show foregone is too often vanished in the void, maybe a gem to be unearthed by a future socio-archaeologist, maybe a treasure committed to eternity.  Subsisting with this embarrassing extravagance, I watch as much TV as humanly possible.  Last week, I wrestled a prize from the gravity of evanescence.

The Harvey Weinstein allegations splashed across the internet in 2017.  "Me Too" got a hashtag, and so many of our screen stars were plucked from reverence that it wasn't easy to keep track of who was on the outs and whom we still could watch.  Relative qualitative assessment of sin was not a lawful plea.  Hollywood was blanched in black and white, and the implicated were expeditiously expatriated.  Here, certainly, I'm not meaning to diminish #MeToo, nor to opine on the merits of any accused, but only to observe the outcome.

Comedian Louis CK was out.  He already had been grist for the rumor mill, and then ugly accusations surfaced.  King Louis was deposed before the curtain closed on 2017.  He had not been a favorite of mine anyway, so, to be honest, I barely noticed.

Edie Falco in 2009

(Photo by David Shankbone CC BY 3.0)

So there were a lot of reasons why I, and a lot of people, missed Horace and Pete (short trailer below, from Hulu via YouTube).  CK created, wrote, directed, and starred in the series in 2016.  It was a 10-episode television drama, sort of.  Really it was an experimental web series.  It was experimental in how it was made, a budget crowd-sourcing operation that filmed, episode to episode, only as funding goals were reached.  CK sought both to pioneer a democratic model for making online TV and, with full transparency, to publish the model so that others could do it, too.  That business model didn't work out.  But A for aspiration.

The show also was experimental for what it was: a TV show, on a set, yes.  But through scene structure, stage direction, blocking, cuts (or lack thereof), and especially dialog, the show exudes the intimacy of a live stage play, and every viewer has the best seats.  Sometimes the actors make mistakes, let slip a sly smile, or trip over a line, but the camera carries on.  Longer episodes even have an "Intermission"—the word burns for a minute, white type on a black screen, suggesting that sets and costumes are changing behind the electronic curtain.  One is given the impression that crowd-sourcing doesn't swell the budget for endless takes and post-production wizardry.  The ultimate effect is to make the viewer feel like an insider in the conceit of the art.

And art it is.  CK stars as the eponymous Horace, owner of a rundown Brooklyn bar, Horace and Pete's, and its apartment above.  The bar survived the 20th century as the inheritance of generations of Horaces and Petes.  Now, a hundred years on, the bar, and the family, might have entered their coda.  The script bears ample evidence of CK's signature wit, droll style, and sardonic frown.  But the story is thoroughly a tragedy.  In the distinctively American tradition of Death of a Salesman, Horace and Pete is unrelenting with its occasions for despair, and yet, somehow, manages to illuminate the silver linings of family, loyalty, and love.

Alan Alda

(Photo by UT Moody College of Communication CC BY-SA 2.0)

CK the star might be the least compelling actor of the principal cast, and that seems to be exactly his plan.  The show is sumptuously star studded, and CK wrote for himself a central yet characteristically subdued role that serves to intensify others' shine.  As Horace's sister, Sylvia, Edie Falco does her most moving work since The Sopranos.  As present-generation Pete, the abundantly accomplished Steve Buscemi has done nothing else quite like this to date.

As the elder "Uncle Pete," the incomparable Alan Alda turns in a career-capstone performance, the omega to the broken-protagonist alpha of Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen, 33 years before.  Jessica Lange brings elegance to the dispirited surviving love interest of an elder Horace, and Aidy Bryant is incandescent as the aggravatingly unforgiving estranged daughter of CK's Horace.

The cast is rounded out with a stunning breadth of stand-up talents, often offering edgy and well-tuned comic relief, who take turns as bar flies.  The list is too long to give it its due, a who's who of contemporary American comedy.  So I'll mention only my favorites: Steven Wright and Kurt Metzger banter throughout the series.  Amy Sedaris, Michelle Wolf, and Colin Quinn get an episode each.  And there are cameos, too.  Mayor Bill de Blasio drops in the bar as himself, and magician David Blaine tries to trade a trick for a drink.

CK with a Peabody in 2013
(Photo by Anders Krusberg
/Peabody Awards CC BY 2.0)

Horace and Pete earned some critical acclaim before it dropped off the radar.  It won a Peabody Award in 2016 "[f]or a truly independent and groundbreaking demonstration of how quality television is expertly done in the new media environment, all the while building upon decades of artistry and craft."  And then there was 2017.

The show might be rising the recommendation ranks at Hulu now because CK spent 2020 at hard labor on the rehabilitation road.  Again, I'm not opining on the appropriate consequences for, or redemption eligibility of, a #MeToo offender.

The fact that I cannot escape is that too many people gave too much and worked too hard on Horace and Pete, and the sum of what they made is too valuable, to write it off.  Label it with whatever disclaimers one must, #MeToo and financial failure.  Amid our transition from broadcast frequencies to the electronic multiverse, Horace and Pete nevertheless represents a pivotal moment in cultural creation and a searing snapshot of the American condition.