“Effie,” the $15 million period drama about the troubled marriage of the Victorian art historian John Ruskin, his wife Effie, and her scandalous romance with the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, has nearly completed production in Venice.

Not for the first time in its history, however, the Emma Thompson-scripted film is ruffling feathers. “Tweets posted last week reported that unpaid crew members were leaving the production in droves and that suppliers were refusing to have anything to do with the movie until they were paid,” Screen Daily has noted.

Donald Rosenfeld, the film’s producer (who was also an executive producer on Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life”), has downplayed these rumors, claiming that they were spread by a disgruntled crew member who had been fired. “She has started a Twitter campaign against me,” Rosenfeld told Screen.

Meanwhile, the legal wrangles surrounding Thompson’s screenplay remain unresolved. In February, the movie’s production company, Effie Film, sued the playwright Gregory Murphy to get a declaration that Thompson’s script did not infringe that of Murphy’s script for “The Countess,” which was modeled on his play of the same name,  the most enduring success of the 1999-2000 season. Murphy has filed a motion to dismiss Effie Film’s lawsuit, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In October, Effie Film filed a lawsuit against the writer Eve Pomerance, who in 1995 copyrighted her screenplay “The Secret Trials of Effie Gray” (Gray being Effie’s maiden name). “In the latest lawsuit, it’s alleged that Pomerance’s lawyers asserted that Thompson’s screenplay is substantially similar to the 1995 registered screenplay,” Hollywood Reporter said. Murphy made a similar claim in May and says he met with Thompson to discuss it.

“He has challenged the production company’s right to seek declaratory relief to a work which did not yet exist,” Eriq Gardner wrote in the trade paper. “It was originally stated that Thompson’s Effie could only close its financing by putting all copyright issues to rest, but Murphy’s lawyers pointed out that, if true, there was no real film by which to judge similar expression. A judge’s ruling couldn’t resolve anything, it was argued, because ‘the hypothetical film is a moving target, subject to change before its eventual hypothetical completion.'”

Effie Film’s lawsuits are intended to prevent injunctions against the completed film threatening investor funds. It seems neither situation will be resolved until shooting has wrapped and “Effie” is hypothetical no longer.

To add grist to the mill, “Untouched,” another film on the subject, was announced in November with Keira Knightley tapped to play Effie. The film will be directed by Andrucha Waddington (“House of Sand”) and written by Aleksandra Crapanzano. “Untouched” refers to the non-consummation of the Ruskins’ disastrous marriage, which lasted from 1848 to 1854.

It has been widely (and somewhat idly) speculated that Ruskin was repulsed either by Effie’s pubic hair — an idea that originated in Mary Lutyens's 1967 book about the trio — or by her menstrual blood, and was rendered impotent. Ruskin expert Robert Hewison is skeptical about this. “The whole pubic hair nonsense is like a great big wall preventing people understanding Ruskin,” he told The Guardian’s Vanessa Thorpe last year. “The idea that he did not know what women looked like is a nonsense. It is frankly irritating.”

Eleven months into his marriage, Ruskin abandoned Effie for nine months while he accompanied his parents, to whom he was unhealthily attached, on a trip to France and the Alps. “But I can’t play him as an ogre because the audience needs to understand why she married this man,” Wise has said.

After the unhappy couple vacationed with Millais in Scotland, Effie and the painter fell in love, and she sued Ruskin for divorce. She married Millais in 1855 and bore him eight children. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1896, though, because of her divorce from Ruskin, she was barred from the presence of Queen Victoria.

“Effie” is being directed by Richard Laxton and stars Greg Wise (Thompson’s husband) as Ruskin, Dakota Fanning as Effie, and Tom Sturridge as Millais. Thompson plays the pioneering art critic Lady Eastlake. Before Fanning was cast, Carey Mulligan and Saoirse Ronan had each been mooted as a possible Effie. The current cast is rounded out by Claudia Cardinale, Robbie Coltrane, James Fox, Julie Walters, Derek Jacobi, and David Suchet.

The first film to depict the affair was “The Love of John Ruskin,” in which Effie was played by the silent film star Helen Gardner, an early vamp and one of cinema’s first renaissance women.