Todd Remis was very unhappy with the photos from his wedding, which occurred in 2003, and so six years later, at the last possible legal moment, he decided to sue the studio he had hired. But Remis, who says the camera crew missed the last fifteen minutes of the ceremony, isn’t just looking to get his original $4,100 back — not even close. He also wants $48,000 to re-create the whole wedding, which is not only an absolutely absurd request, but one made tougher by the fact that Remis and his bride, Milena Grzibovska, separated in 2008, and are now divorced. She may have moved back to her native Latvia, but no one seems very sure.
“He wants to fly his ex-wife back and he doesn’t even know where she lives,” laughs the 87-year-old who co-founded the studio, H & H Photographers. That’s exactly right, says Remis, who also claims that the pictures were “unacceptable as to color, lighting, poses, positioning” and that the wedding video wasn’t long enough. “I need to have the wedding recreated exactly as it was so that the remaining 15 percent of the wedding that was not shot can be shot,” he said. In a way, it is cruel to allow this man to be quoted in a national newspaper. But his delusions are also wasting the time of many people.
For some reason, Justice Doris Ling-Cohan of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan is allowing the case to proceed, although she did dismiss the “infliction of emotional distress” claim.
But she displayed a good deal of amusement about the lawsuit’s purpose in an opinion in January that quoted lyrics from the Barbra Streisand classic “The Way We Were.”
It sounds like somebody is angling to play herself in the Judd Apatow adaptation.
