Studios in a stew
Broker sold VIP passes for profit: suit
Some of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters have sued a major ticket broker — claiming his company sold free, non-transferrable tickets to movie premieres and awards shows for profit.
For 13 years, Craig Banaszewski and his Hollywood Entertainment Group improperly sold the free VIP tickets they wrangled from the true recipients — sometimes for as much as $5,000 a pair, the suit, filed by Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony and Warner Bros., claims.
Banaszewski’s and his VIP Concierge site had previously rankled the Grammys and Victoria’s Secret so much that in 2015 they obtained injunctions against the executive and his site.
The studios in the present suit seek the same remedy.
Warner Bros. claims one customer paid Banaszewski $5,000 for two tickets to the premiere of “Transcendence” — only to be told by the studio he couldn’t go.
Disney had to escort a mom and her three daughters off the red carpet for last April’s Radio Disney Music Awards, after they forked over $3,600 to VIP Concierge to attend the event, it said in court papers.
NBCUniversal cites VIP Concierge’s selling “Saturday Night Live” tickets emblazoned with “COMPLI- MENTARY TICKET - NOT TO BE SOLD,” while Sony claims infringement on seeing the site advertise “tickets for sale to private, invitation-only events” for 10 of its movies.
The suit doesn’t address how Banaszewski acquires the tickets, but in a 2006 interview with the Orange County Register, the broker admitted to relying on “‘brute force networking’ with industry insiders — agents, execs, publicists — who trade passes to premieres and parties for cash.”
Banaszewski was more circumspect when asked by The Post about the tickets.
“No one is getting snuck in,” he said in an interview conducted via e-mail, leaving no doubt that he considers himself a champion of the little guy.
“Heaven forbid these Hollywood elites meet a real person,” he said.