Kullervo, are you really sure about your facts? Most book publishing contracts (in their generic form) reserve the film, broadcast and other ancillary rights to the publisher, unless the author or agent has negotiated those out of the contract (which they usually - but not always - will). Meanwhile, most agents I've known want to reserve for themselves a piece of any film or ancillary rights, and it would be damn tough to talk them out of it. In other words, even if the author is approached, it likely isn't the author doing the deal-making.
Authors I know (including myself) who've been approached for movie rights to their published books have been contacted every time by production companies, not by screenwriters. Often these companies buy options on film and/or broadcast rights on a shotgun approach, just to make sure no one else gets them, in the hope that one will go into development and reap them a big profit. Fees offered of course have been laughable, but more like "equal to or less than a thousand dollars", not "less than a hundred dollars".
As for the 99.9% chance that no movie will result or, if a movie is made, no further dimes will be earned by the author, I can confirm that for sure.
The above is my limited knowledge, which is all from outside Hollywood, but still includes places with sizable film production industries (Hong Kong, Australia, France, UK).
It is a standard thing to request, but then again, if you look a little bit further down on "generic" contracts, you'll generally also find a standard request for your first born child and a vital organ of the publisher's choice.
The fact that A) they ask for it and B) if you don't know any better, you'll give it to them --
-- doesn't mean that publishers, as a rule, get their hands on those rights. It's strictly a matter of how much or how little they want to publish what you have to sell.
What *should* be the standard deal between an author and a publisher is *first North American printing rights* -- everything else that they tell you is standard -- especially including reprinting in any electronic media, is bullshit.
They may get those rights anyway, if you have no agent and if it comes down to "take it or leave it" -- but don't buy any of this "standard terms" stuff.
The only thing that's standard in the publishing industry is the same thing that's standard in every other industry -- and that's the unrestrained greed of management.
In terms of who it is that, in the majority, ultimately acquires the rights to published material -- it may very well be that a great many screenwriters will pick up the phone and ask about rights, but in the end, in terms of those who actually go through the whole process of negotiating the option of the acquisition of rights -- because this isn't, by any means a "do it yourself" deal -- it's not like you can just down-load a standard "rights acquisiting" contract and fill in the blanks.
You pretty much have to have an entertainment attorney negotiate the deal and draw up the contract -- because you can bet that neither the writer, nor his agent, nor his lawyer, nor the publisher, nor any rights holder, is going to pay to draw up the contract. That costs money. It's billable hours. And it's going to be your lawyer and his hours and your bill.
And even if it's an option that runs a few hundred dollars -- or a free option, the money comes from paying your lawyer to draw up the contracts.
Now, unless you have a lawyer working on commission -- which means that you have some other revenue stream that's paying him (because drawing up a contract for a low budget option isn't paying him anything), that means money out of your pocket -- and when the average writer realizes that he's going to have to spend money to acquire a property -- and not even permanently (because options revert after a set period -- a year, or eighteen months, or whatever) -- they generally get cold feet.
So while I do know some writers who have actually optioned books (I know a writer who once optioned one of the Stainless Steel Rat books -- and then proceeded to write an abominable screenplay based on it -- option cost a few hundred dollars, lawyer bills ran a few thousand. Option lapsed. He never sold it), most books are optioned by production companies and producers.
In fact, even if you happen to be a screenwriter, the act of optioning a property really makes you a producer, whether you want to be one or not -- because now you are not simply someone looking to sell your services as a writer, or even to sell a finished spec screenplay. Now you are someone who owns a property -- in this case, the rights to the underlying book (as well as the screenplay). Anybody wants to make the movie -- they've got to deal with you, because you have the rights to the book.
That makes you a producer, like it or not.
And even if you weren't interested in writing the screenplay at all -- and you had the rights to the book -- that'd make you a producer too.
So I'd tend to agree, that the majority of rights that are actually acquired will end up in the hands of production companies -- even fairly modest ones, rather than out-and-out screenwriters who are simply looking to acquire a book to adapt for themselves.
A whole industry has grown up designed to search for books that might make for good movies. Most things that come out have already been read and covered when they were in galleys. Anything that seemed at all likely would almost certainly have already been optioned before it ever even hit the bookstores or got reviewed in the New York Times.
Even rather obscure books, if by reasonably well-known authors, were likely acquired, simply as a matter of course, on the off-chance that they might be made into movies.
I was interested in pitching a take on a book written by T.H. White (who'd written Once and Future King) -- this was an obscure book, it had been written in the fifties. It had never been adapted before.
The goal, of course, was to have whoever I pitched it to acquire the rights -- but as it turned out, the rights had already been acquired. A studio owned them - had acquired them along with everything else that T.H. White had written way back when. So no rights were available. I could pitch it one place -- but that didn't really make sense.
And it's not even as if they were doing anything with any of this stuff. They simply had it. It was there in their library of stuff along with who-knows-how many other things to which they owned the rights. Probably thousands of things.
I'd be willing to bet that most studios only have the most passing sense of what they actually own in terms of literary properties.
And these are outright sales -- not options.
Oh, well. Something else I'll probably never write.
NMS