No longer content with taking the baby steps advocated by his therapist alter-ego Dr. Leo Marvin, Richard Dreyfuss has decided that Disney doesn’t deserve the kind of gentle hand-holding that the actor has never been known for anyway. Deadline reports that the actor, along with the widow of Turner & Hooch producer Raymond Wagner, are suing the company for not letting a firm audit the studio to see what profits they might potentially be owed. What nobody seems to be noticing, however, is that What About Bob? was always a densely coded text that secretly explains Disney’s plan to strip noted actor Richard Dreyfuss of his finances.
The 1991 movie casts Bill Murray as psychiatric patient Bob Wiley (because, like Disney’s money-hungry and clever executives, he’s “wily”—you see the dominoes starting to fall already). Wiley’s desperate need for acceptance and desire to overcome his many phobias sends him out to take over the life and family of Dr. Leo Marvin (Dreyfuss). As Marvin’s family members—clearly a visual representation of the easily-gullible public—fall hard for Wiley’s charms and turn on their increasingly embattled patriarch, Dreyfuss slowly loses his mind, ending the film reduced to a gibbering wreck in a wheelchair. You see, all of it was a hidden-in-plain-sight plan to ruin a proud actor and seize his property, much as “Bob” metaphorically seized control of the filmic family.