Ramapough Indians sue 'Out of the Furnace' filmmakers for $50 million for Woody Harrelson's offensive character

Out of the Furnace might have one of the most impressive casts of the year, but it is still a box office disappointment. Released at the beginning of December, the Scott Cooper film has grossed only $10 million in the box office and has received negative reviews. As if things couldn't get worse for the filmmakers behind Out of the Furnace, a lawsuit has sprung up claiming that some of the characters in the film are offensive to the Ramapough Indians. This community of people living in the Ramapough Mountains is suing the filmmakers for $50 million.

Woody Harrelson portrays the film's main antagonist, a notorious criminal running a drug ring named Harlan DeGroat. Both this last name and another character's last name of Van Dunk happen to be actual surnames of the plaintiffs.

The attorney for the Ramapough Indians taking up this case against the movie had this to say in the court statement:

"[By setting scenes] in the Ramapough Mountains of New Jersey, by referring to the criminal gang and/or community as Jackson Whites and by using the DeGroat and Van Dunk surnames for the principal villains, all of which make for a ready association between these plaintiffs and the movie."

Meanwhile, director Cooper had this to say about Harrleson's character:

"Woody's character is based on someone who did touch my immediate family in a very tragic way, and you know, it's difficult to write about those sort of things."

Cooper added: "I've always been interested in kind of the blue-collar milieu or people who are disenfranchised who live on the margins of society. But I also wanted to tell about a place in New Jersey that not many people knew existed. Unfortunately, for all the people I know who kind of know about New Jersey, it isn't just a gorgeous mountain region....I mean, look, the people in the film could just as easily have been Virginia or West Virginia or Spain or wherever. I just happened to choose that location because it's so close to Manhattan and people didn't even realize it existed. And it was also about five or five and a half hours from the Pittsburgh region to give it a sense of feeling almost foreign to the people in Pittsburgh, in Braddock, where I wrote the piece. So I'm not making any pejorative statement about people who lived in the mountains of New Jersey. I don't want it to come across their way."