Deleted Screenplay Fails To Make Money

mytrip writes to mention the confusing case of screenwriter Nicholas Boyd, who tried to strike it rich by suing SBC, and got more than he bargained for. When an SBC technician accidentally deleted the aspiring screenwriter's work, he brought a lawsuit against the company claiming that a million dollar deal was in the works. Reality disagrees somewhat with his assertions. From the article: "The jury apparently didn't believe the German witness' testimony that a $2.7 million deal was in the works. Jurors found that Boyd could recover out-of-pocket damages of only $60,000 and said that he was responsible for 55 percent of the fault resulting in the deletion of the screenplays ... Both SBC and Boyd appealed. The California state appeals court (second district) eliminated the punitive damages, upheld the compensatory damages--but said Boyd must pay for SBC's legal fees for the appeal, which could easily be in the range of his $27,000 compensatory damages award."

Comments

Clarification Required

[slashbob22]

If Aurora Media had offered a contract (pending funding) then they must have seen the screenplays. Even if they were hardcopy Boyd would not have lost his material, sure he may have had to retype it though. I don't see how he can claim that because this overzealous technician deleted everything that where were NO backups of it anywhere. Could someone explain this to me, is there a screenwriter's code I don't know about?

Re:I'll keep track of my own data, thank you.

[dynamo52]

You did... y'know... read the article, right? A little bit?

The document was stored on his own PC, not an SBC server. That does not make him not an idiot but you aren't coming off all that bright right now either.

Re:Backups

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"It won't serve as a wakeup call to anyone. Anyone who isn't already backing up their work won't start until the same thing happens to them. He wrote the stuff, if he can't recreate three screenplays from memory then he's screwed. It's not like it was three huge, thoroughly researched sci-fi or historical fiction novels."

I'm impressed you guys actually think he didn't have a backup. If there was a million dollar deal in the works, surely he had sent the script to somebody to read and say "we might be interested".

Re:I call Bullshit

[1u3hr]

I only write short stories for the interweb, and even losing a day or two of work (much less a whole novel) would be devastating....He could redo it, maybe even come up with something better. But it would never be the same.

Scripts are always rewritten, often dozens of times, by several writers, committees, the producers, the director, the actors. What ends up being shot can be unrecognisable from the original script. Hollywood is full of stories of sometimes great writers who were lured there and were paid huge amounts to do a script treatment; then more to rewrite a dozen times; then it was handed over to a hack who completely rewrote it; then the financing fell through and it was shelved. If redoing a day's work would devastate you, don't even think about Hollywood.

Re:Why would I cut an obvious idiot slack?

[shidarin'ou]

As someone who works in Hollywood and with screenwriters, and counts many of them as friends, I can tell you that this guy was an idiot, and he's probably not a real screenwriter (IE, he just moved to Hollywood and is just starting out).

Every screenwriter I know- even the most tech backwards ones- are so incredibly anal about backups that it drives me mad. You'd think there'd be a reasonable limit on the amount of CDs or floppies they mail to their friends for safekeeping- some even out of the state incase of a statewide disaster.

The techbackwards ones- rather than burn to CD or floppy or zip or upload to file servers actually print out copies and mail the copies out, or leave them in old places at places they used to work at or go to school. Know that no one ever goes behind the orange box in the storeroom? PERFECT PLACE FOR A SCREENPLACE ARCHIVE!

So, these were probably his first screenplays, and he hasn't learned how to write screenplays yet (apparently), it wouldn't even surprise me if they were Word documents- from the facts we know about I can easily make the reasonable assumption that his work is shit, because no one makes even a D movie screenplay their first time around, and no wannabe screenwriter is in Hollywood for more than 3 weeks without becoming obsessed with backups.

And one more thing, if there was a bright center of money control in the universe known as Hollywood- the real creative people are on the planet furthest from- so simply by you have "money" and "creative" within two sentences of each other I can also deduce that you were likely no where near the real creative people.

Re:Backups

[Wavicle]

I'm impressed you guys actually think he didn't have a backup. If there was a million dollar deal in the works, surely he had sent the script to somebody to read and say "we might be interested".

I suspect the jury thought much as you do. They completely dismissed his attempt at compensation for the $2.4M deal that was supposedly in progress. The money they awarded him was for the time it took him to research and write the screenplays. And they found him mostly at fault for the permanent loss.

I strongly disagree with the jury however. I find him 95% at fault for not taking the computer THAT DAY to a service place and asking them to recover the files. The guy added over 4000 files AFTER the deletion. He was looking for a payout from the beginning. He knew he had no chance of selling them.

Re:Dishonest?

[OverflowingBitBucket]

I'm sure when the tech guy came to set up his DSL, he wasn't thinking, "Oh man, I got to make sure my files are secure." I can't imagine that anyone would have this thought first and foremost every living second.

A previously unpaid writer who (basis of lawsuit) thinks that he may be coming into $2.7m soon due to his writing probably does have the scripts foremost in his mind. Unless of course he was distracted at that very moment wondering where the best place would be to procure some good coke and hookers. This isn't a matter of hindsight or forbidden techie knowledge. Hindsight is when you lose a couple of weeks work due to a destructive virus that you forgot to back up. Techie knowledge is knowing about regular backups and that computers can be unreliable. Having one copy of a (potentially) incredibly valuable script in a single location and mysteriously having no recent printouts to OCR or any backups of any sort (hard or soft) anywhere isn't just something you attribute to lacking hindsight or tech knowledge. That's just plain gross negligence or stupidity on his part. The point of my post is that he certainly wasn't acting consistently with someone who seriously believed that he was about to come into a healthy chunk of change.

Oh, and your comment on deleting from the recycle bin (assuming Windows) necessarily being malicious seems flawed. There may have been insufficient space on the drive and so the techie could have (stupidly) permanently deleted the file to make space.

The techie, assuming the charges are true, was a twit. And don't trust techies with valuable data- even if they are good they need to know that something is valuable and to protect it. That's as far as I can agree with you, I'm afraid. The rest, not so.