"Boilerplate" is not synonymous with "can be ignored with impunity"

I trust that the Some Came Running read­er­ship has not been ter­ribly bothered by the lack of cov­er­age of the mis­ad­ven­tures of Charlie Sheen, and that they don’t expect much in the way of such cov­er­age in the future. I would like to register some amuse­ment with an attempt at leg­al ana­lys­is by Reuter’s Eriq Gardner with respect to Sheen and his con­flict with the pro­du­cers and the pro­duc­tion entity of the sit­com Two some­thing and its net­work, CBS. Gardner may well be on to some­thing when he says that the extant mor­als clause in that con­tract would be dif­fi­cult to apply in light of the imprec­a­tions Mr. Sheen is known, and known, and known, to have actu­ally com­mit­ted. Later in the piece, Gardner notes that if that and oth­er strategies don’t look like they’ll pan out, Warner Brothers Television, the ostens­ible plaintiff in any civil action against Sheen, “could argue he breached his job respons­ib­il­it­ies by bring­ing neg­at­ive atten­tion to the show in media inter­views.” Gardner then quotes the clause put­ting “all pub­li­city […] under Producer’s sole con­trol.” And Gardner then sort of pooh-poohs it, stat­ing, “This clause is stand­ard boil­er­plate in an enter­tain­er­’s con­tract […]” Um, yes, it sure is. As such, it’s also the reas­on most offi­cial “behind the scenes” stor­ies of the mak­ing of a film or tele­vi­sion show are so bland and pre­dict­able and full of ris­ible com­pli­ments. A few years back an act­or friend of mine was being strong-armed by a stu­dio into tak­ing a role he did­n’t want in a film he did­n’t want to be in, and was exper­i­en­cing con­sid­er­able frus­tra­tion on that account, and I recall in one per­son­al con­ver­sa­tion how he really went off on non-disparagement clauses, how these days the stu­dio had the right to approve EVERYTHING. “If you’re host­ing SNL and you wanna par­ti­cip­ate in a skit sat­ir­iz­ing one of your films, you have to get approv­al,” he marveled. Now more often than not, the stu­dio will give such approv­al, because it wants to main­tain a cer­tain “were-all-in-this-together-and-OF-COURSE-we-can-take-a-joke” illu­sion. But if it wants to be pissy, or just arbit­rar­ily bring a ham­mer down to teach someone a les­son, they abso­lutely can. To call Charlie Sheen to task for term­ing a good num­ber of the high­er level exec­ut­ives involved with his show “trolls,” and so on ought to be a fairly easy task, Marty Singer or no Marty Singer. I doubt it’ll ever come to that, in fact I ima­gine Marty Singer will have his cli­ent put in a strait-jacket before he allows any case involving Sheen’s con­tract get with­in a hun­dred yards of a judge. 

Anybody out there know exactly WHEN non-disparagement clauses became “boil­er­plate?” I can­’t ima­gine it was any time dur­ing the career of Robert Mitchum.