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

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.