Evidently feeling the need to clarify (if not defend) himself, Morris responded today to Hollywood Elsewhere:

"As documentaries have become more and more mainstream entertainment, people are aware that there is money involved. The more successful documentaries become, the harder and harder it is to get people to do them for nothing.

"People [are] aware of my success and respond accordingly. I never paid people for the interviews in The Thin Blue Line, but Stephen Hawking was paid a lot of money for the rights to his book and his participation in A Brief History of Time. ... It is difficult to ask people for such an investment of time without taking care of them in some way — and that may involve paying them.

"I paid the 'bad apples' because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise. Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know their stories. I can live with it."

In other words: "Without these extensive interviews, I wouldn't have had a movie." We don't generally look to Errol Morris for these glib oversimplifications, but there you have it. The whole thing gets us wondering who else has commonly been paying their subjects over the years; we can envision Morris's old friend Werner Herzog wandering into the jungle with a camera and a checkbook as he retraced Dieter Dengler's steps in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, or... Wait, what? That version was called Rescue Dawn? Never mind! As you were, Errol. We just know that Ben Stein would damn well never pay off a source — and God knows he can afford it.

• As Long As it's Truthful [Hollywood Elsewhere]

We can hear the legal saber-rattling from here, but we also know there's precedent — and it favors Wall Street.

In a nutshell, the two-phase Melrose fund underwrote up to 20% of net production costs on films like Mean Girls, War of the Worlds and even The Stepford Wives — titles with wide-ranging but ultimately profitable gross performances based on factors beyond box office (product placement, television licensing, toy deals and more). The Melrose group said that results for Melrose I "collapsed" after Dolgen and Lansing left, with even successful films failing to turn a profit for the investors.

Making matters worse, a source close to the situation tells Defamer that spending on P&A went up almost 50% under ex-Paramount COO Rob Friedman and nearly doubled under Grey; an advisor to the group describes Grey's takeover as "[o]ne of the most stunning exercises in spending (he's) ever seen in his thirty-five years."

A studio source said the results of Melrose II "make Melrose I look like investing in Google pre-IPO," while an investor said: "Since we had no say in what movies were being made, what [we] were backing was Dolgen's conservative risk management strategy which had proven successful in the past. Once he was gone, fiscal controls began to deteriorate and when Brad Grey took over they went out the window altogether."

With Melrose II still in force and Grey apparently tightening the reins of late, we hear the investors reportedly want Paramount to credit a "retroactive reduction in P&A spending" to its account — like, yesterday. Again, this isn't necessarily new: Sony agreed to something similar earlier this year for investors in its Gun Hill Road fund. But Melrose's financial terms aren't specific, and best of all, even Viacom CEO Phillippe Dauman reportedly has told the investors to stand down or face a counterclaim.

It's not the sexiest contretemps in the Official History of Hollywood Pissing Contests, but with Grey on the hook, it bears noting. What do you know about it?

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]