Remake and Adaptation Question

Remakes and adaptions at least 99% of the time come from the studio level down. A producer decides a certain idea looks sexy again or a certain book has commercial promise on the big screen and then goes and acquires the rights with money. They then hire a writer, who is established and has proven they can make money to write it, then put together actors directors budget and so forth.

Sometimes they'll even attach directors and actors before they even hire the writer.

At any rate the writer is pulled in on the project.

The only way I could possibly see a writer starting it is if they are well established in the industry, has some high level buddies he could pitch the idea to, if they loved it they would then go through all the above steps and hire the writer to write it. The writer could never claim the original work and even if they copyrighted it all they can do is own the parts they came up with. If it's a book adaption just how much original stuff are you talking about? Not much. You are in fact violating the original author's copyright just by writing it without having secured the rights to do so.

Any film from the 1940s or 50s almost certainly is still under copyright with that studio.

If, however, you are talking about an adaptation of a work in public domain (Dracula, Count of Monte Cristo, Persuasion, The Brothers Karamatzov, etc.) then you at least can write a script as a showpiece of what you can do. Be tricky with foreign-language novels, however. The books themselves may be in public domain, but you have to check to see if specific translations are as well.

You would not be submitting a "rewrite" as a spec. You'll get nowhere.

If you have credits you might be able to get folks interested in a remake, but otherwise--forget about it. The only other way to waste time even faster is to try and get a television series off the ground without being a showrunner.

hi

rmcnelty said:

I have a quick question concerning remakes and adaptations that's always bugged me...

How exactly does one write and then sell/market a remake? Say you wanted to write a remake of a 1940s or 1950s film, would you then option it to the studio that owns the rights to the original movie?
Could you even legally copyright the new script, since you don't own the original script?

I wondering if remakes only come about when someone at the studio says, "let's remake [movie X]!" and then they contract writers to do the remake.



On a similar note, how does one adapt a novel into a movie? Can anyone write an adaptation of a Dean Koontz novel (for example) and pitch it?
Or does it work the other way around, where whoever owns the movie rights to the novel then hires someone to write a screenplay.


Thanks in advance for the help!

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mate,

any copy right holds good until 60 years (somebody correct me if I'm wrong) after the death of the owner then it gets into public domain. check out the exact date of the copyright.

if you want the b'ness side on adaptations of novels I say check out who has the rights first and see if they hav sold to any film company if not and you got good negotiation skills then you might possibly get him to give to the rights to make a spec script and try to sell it. EVERYBODY will be fine with some extra money.

on the artistic side of adaptations, you have to figure out what the spine of the story is and then stick with it in the screenplay if it has more than one spine then go with the one that you think is very interesting.

regards,
Ace.Inc1

aceinc1 said:

mate,

any copy right holds good until 60 years (somebody correct me if I'm wrong) after the death of the owner then it gets into public domain. check out the exact date of the copyright.

if you want the b'ness side on adaptations of novels I say check out who has the rights first and see if they hav sold to any film company if not and you got good negotiation skills then you might possibly get him to give to the rights to make a spec script and try to sell it. EVERYBODY will be fine with some extra money.

on the artistic side of adaptations, you have to figure out what the spine of the story is and then stick with it in the screenplay if it has more than one spine then go with the one that you think is very interesting.

regards,
Ace.Inc1

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Here is a document that addresses the question of copyright and public domain:

http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

NMS

Films in the 40's and 60's are still copyrighted as are any novel since 1923-1924 or thereabouts. The only way you could adapt a novel is to get an agreement with the author in question.

I'd like to add a relevant question. I'm toying around with the idea of writing a screenplay for a true crime that took place in California almost 100 years ago. The best and most thorough documentation of the events are written in a non-fiction book that was published fifty years ago.

Is it possible to write the script and then shop it around, with an upfront page-one explanation that the rights haven't been obtained yet from the author or the publisher? I've obtained tons of newspaper articles and government documents, as well as some books that are in the public domain, but the last book published remains the best source and the most adaptable to a screenplay.

Stijn Hommes said:

Films in the 40's and 60's are still copyrighted as are any novel since 1923-1924 or thereabouts. The only way you could adapt a novel is to get an agreement with the author in question.

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That's not exactly correct.

The way the law is structured now -- everything published prior to 1923 is in the public domain.

But at the time the existing law required that copyrights be renewed after 28 years. The renewal extended the copyright for an additional 28 years.

For those works published between 1923 and 1964 and which were *not* renewed -- they are now in the public domain.

For those works pubished between 1923 and 1964 for which the the copyright *was* renewed (and published with notice-- that is, they had the copyright notice attached) -- those works fall under a revised copyright statute and they are under copyright for 95 years from date of first publication.

But this can a tricky business. The only way you can be sure is to do a copyright search -- to try to find out if the copyright for the work in question was renewed and that's not necessarily so easy.

You can search and not find it and that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't there somewhere. The Library of Congress is a big, huge, cluttered, moth-eaten place full of documents and they don't promise anything.

So you can search yourself through public records. You can pay for a copyright search and those searches can turn up nothing and maybe you'll be all right -- and maybe you won't.

I'll tell you -- back when I was working at my old development company I found an old comic strip written back in the forties that I thought would make a great movie. The trouble is -- the artist was long dead, left no heirs. The company that printed the comic was long out of business. Their assets? We had no way of knowing.

Copyright search turned up nothing here, nothing abroad, nothing anywhere.

We couldn't locate any heirs for the artist/writer.

Couldn't locate anyone who owned the assets of the company -- and had no way of telling whether the heirs to the artist (if there were any) or the heirs to the company (if there were any) even owned the rights to the strip -- or if it was in the public domain.

What we needed was something definitive.

Yes -- the strip was owned by X.

Or yes -- the strip is definitely in the public domain throughout the world (and it's got to be throughout the world if you're going to make a movie).

And we just couldn't be sure. There was no way to know whether somebody somewhere, thirty years ago or forty years ago had bought the movie rights to this thing in England or France or Mexico and once we went into development would suddenly pop out of the woodwork.

So we never went forward with the project.

NMS

Julie Howe,

You could branch out and find other avenues where the crime was mentioned. If you're citing several sources, you can work out your own screenplays and avoid strict adaptation.

JulieHowe said:

I'd like to add a relevant question. I'm toying around with the idea of writing a screenplay for a true crime that took place in California almost 100 years ago. The best and most thorough documentation of the events are written in a non-fiction book that was published fifty years ago.

Is it possible to write the script and then shop it around, with an upfront page-one explanation that the rights haven't been obtained yet from the author or the publisher? I've obtained tons of newspaper articles and government documents, as well as some books that are in the public domain, but the last book published remains the best source and the most adaptable to a screenplay.

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Copyright really isn't relevant here. You can't copyright a real event and while the non-fiction book is a major source of information for you, you won't be copying any of it verbatim. Unless you decide to copy large sections of the work in question, don't worry. You don't need to ask permission to do proper historical research for your screenplay.

Thanks!

JulieHowe said:

I'd like to add a relevant question. I'm toying around with the idea of writing a screenplay for a true crime that took place in California almost 100 years ago. The best and most thorough documentation of the events are written in a non-fiction book that was published fifty years ago.

Is it possible to write the script and then shop it around, with an upfront page-one explanation that the rights haven't been obtained yet from the author or the publisher? I've obtained tons of newspaper articles and government documents, as well as some books that are in the public domain, but the last book published remains the best source and the most adaptable to a screenplay.

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The only cautionary note that needs to be sounded is that non-fiction books often have a certain amount of -- well, "fiction" interleaved amongst the facts.

That's why it's always best, when you're doing research, to have multiple *contemporary and independent* sources for whatever you put in your screenplay.

I emphasize contemporary and independent because it is very common to have multiple sources for a particular thing that you've gotten, say, out of that one book that sounds really great -- but when you dig a little bit deeper you find that all of those other sources have actually gotten that particular thing all from one place.

The one source in that book -- and the particular incident just doesn't seem to be described or reported anywhere else by anybody else.

Now, just maybe the original writer interviewed some first-hand witness and has a transcription of that particular thing in a box somewhere that's fifty years old.

Then again, maybe he just made it up to make the whole thing a bit more exciting.

Who's to say?

And don't think that the current copyright holder of that book won't sue if material in your screenplay that is *unique* to that particular book, and doesn't exist in any other *independent* source, even if the book purports to be a non-fiction account of actual events -- ends up in the movie.

That's why writers who do research in non-fiction love things like court records and depositions and sworn testimony and *original documents* that can take you back as close to the original people and the original events as you can get.

NMS

rmcnelty said:

So basically, scrap any plans to rewrite Four Frightened People (1934) or Attack of The Crab Monsters (1957) because remakes are made from the top down.

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Yep, that's exactly right. You could do it for practice if you had no ideas of your own and just wanted to flex your writing muscle, but you could never use it.