Unsure how true it is, but I was told by an accquaintance that you never send scripts to any actor or production company without having an agent represent you. He said the reason is because they ALL have been known to run with the idea, have someone else rewrite it and claim it as theirs.
I'm not sure who your friend is or where he gets his facts, but this notion crops up a lot, especially amongst aspiring writers who value their ideas more than their experience.
So it's important to be clear on certain points.
No idea is protectable under copyright law -- only that idea embodied in some fixed form of expression, like a screenplay or a treatment or a story. That means that even if you've registered the copyright, even if you have an agent, even if you've actually made the movie, that the underlying *idea* isn't protectable.
That's why, after the first Friday the Thirteenth movie came out, there were dozens of movies that ripped off the idea of Friday the Thirteenth. That's why, after Jaws came out, there were countless movies that, in one form or another, ripped off the idea for Jaws.
And it was all perfectly legal because the "ideas" for those movies are not legally protectable.
In order to demonstrate that someone stole your literary material, you have to demonstrate "significant" copying of things like characters, situations, dialogue, incidents, structure, etc.
Plus, the items in question have to be unique and original to your script, as opposed to things that would naturally and inevitably follow, given the idea in question -- if it's a bank heist story, for instance, you'd naturally expect there to be scenes involving the planning of the heist, casing the bank, breaking in, conflicts amongst the robbers, something going wrong, etc. because you'd expect those things in *any* bank heist movie.
If what your friend says is true and all of these places are desperate to rip off all of these unsuspecting beginners -- why is it that virtually every place you call, you'll find that the first question they ask you is, "Do you have an agent?" and if you answer no, they'll be happy to tell you that they won't accept un-agented submissions.
Why? Because they're desperate to rip off your stuff?
I ran into somebody who was very careful *never* to send a script anywhere without attaching a release form -- somehow or other, this person had gotten the impression that the release form protected *him.* It must have come as a real shock when I explained that the release form is designed to protect the *company* from the writer.
That's why *they* want release forms. That's why *they* want you to have an agent. Because it protects them.
In both cases, it protects them from inexperienced, beginning writers who might be inclined to sue because they don't understand how common it is for similar scripts and similar ideas to be floating around in Hollywood, given the number of people writing scripts.
I mean, for every movie you see, there are maybe fifty that went through the development process and never made it to the screen, and hundreds more that made the rounds, maybe got optioned, or never even made it past being covered and rejected.
And that doesn't include the literally thousands that got turned away at the gate and never even got covered.
People talk about the secrets of Hollywood.
Here's one of them. There are really just only so many good ideas. A limitless number of bad ones, but given the basic structure of a Hollywood narrative motion picture, the number of good ideas are actually limited.
And with literally hundreds of professional writers whose business revolves around coming up with ideas for movies -- I mean that's part of writing movies -- first coming up with the idea, and then actually writing it -- that were you to actually come up with an idea, the chances of it actually being an idea that no one else had ever come up with, would be unlikely in the extreme.
At best, if you were lucky, it might be an idea that hadn't been used in a long time, or a variation of an idea that was sufficiently new that it felt really fresh.
Sixth Sense was, at best, a fresh variation of an idea that was used in Ambrose Bierce's Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and later in Carnival of Souls. People with any kind of familiarity with the genre certainly didn't see it as anything new.
But that's beside the point -- it didn't sell because it was a "new idea" -- it sold on the strength of its execution, on its characters, its moments, its emotions.
That's not just "an idea" that someone can rip off and hire someone else to write. That's the stuff that a company wants to buy.
They didn't buy the "idea" for the Sixth Sense. They bought the script for the Sixth Sense.
And that's what aspiring writers who are trying to sell their work have to get out of thinking about -- this obsession about "ideas" -- because what's going to get you a sale isn't an "idea" -- what people are going to look for, and what they are going to want to buy from you is a "script."
The best way to protect any idea is to write it in the form of a script that people will want to buy and you won't ever have to worry about anybody stealing the idea.
NMS
