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

The First Rule

[shidarin'ou]

The First Rule of screenwriting is to back up everything on multiple formats, in multiple places.

As this idiot can now attest, you never know what will happen to one location, one computer or even one draft- especially when the stakes are between zero dollars and 2.7 million.

What would he have done had his apartment been destroyed by fire? Sue the complex for the same thing? What would he have done had a random computer virus deleted or overwrote the files, sued the virus protection company whose software he declined to keep up to date?

Nothing to see here but idiocy at work.

German witness?

[SteeldrivingJon]

Was it by chance Uwe Boll?

I call Bullshit

[im_thatoneguy]

Let me get this straight: a writer is closing in on a multimillion dollar deal with a production company to buy his screenplay. And I'm supposed to believe they signed on without ever receiving a copy!

When you submit a screenplay to an interested party, the first thing they usually do is start photocopying it. Dozens even hundreds of times depending on how far through the process the screenplay makes it. When someone buys a screenplay, they usually run it past dozens of individuals before it's even looked at by someone with decision making power.

Many of the modern screenplay formatting rules have come from the need to photocopy it with as little degradation as possible.

The good news is. It shouldn't take him more than a a day or two to rewrite it. Once you know your story and characters, and have worked on the screenplay in your head for a number of years it shouldn't take you more than a couple of days. Besides who buys a screenplay and doesn't do a rewrite?

God I have like 20 copies of several screenplays from college just lieing around in a box in my closet. I can't believe somebody would never print off, backup or email a copy of his screenplay over the course of time it took to write it.

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:No Brainer

[im_thatoneguy]

It actually does say in the article that he did eventually get a forensic recovery of the data. But he didn't set aside the hard drive and the files were overwritten by Napster and other data.

Does this mean that the entertainment industry can say that it lost another $2.7m to napster?

Is there no common sense anymore?

[Mike Kelly]

Burgess Forensics said the reason was that 4,134 files were saved to the hard drive after the screenplays were deleted--overwriting the unused space that could have otherwise been recovered. (Additions included Napster and RealPlayer and their related media files.)

If he dropped a hard-copy on the sidewalk and could only find a few pages when he came back the next day, isn't that his own fault? He should have unplugged the computer and taken it to an expert immediately! I guess he was having too much fun with his new broadband to notice that his "multi-million dollar" script was missing. /sarcasm

Re:Obligatory Soviet Russia

[Ohreally_factor]

Which you would need to do anyway to register it with the WGA. Oh, wait, my bad. You can now register your screenplay online in whatever file format you wish.

The fee for non-members is $20. The fee for members is $10. Registration lasts for 5 years, and then may be renewed. Protecting your copyrights and getting a back up thrown in!

Seems like a no brainer if you're a screenwriter.

Nothing adds up

[Zadaz]

It seems like the correct outcome has been reached in this case (Fired the guy who deleted his stuff and paid for data recovery.)

Everything about this guys sounds like a money grubbing loser. He had previously never made a penny on his screenplays (Or, apparently from any writing at all, ever.) and yet he claims that the lost screenplays were for "far better" movies than "Gladiator," "Schindler's List" and "Ben Hur."

Now comes the amount... $2.7 million dollars? It's been a while since I've been a professional writer, but $2.7 mil is a stupidly outrageous amount for unknown writer with unproven properties and a small movie company. Even being generous and accounting that it's for three screen plays, $900,000 per screenplay is still stupid money.

Also they didn't delete the guys brain. Screenplays don't really have that much text in them. They are usually around a hundred pages with a couple hundred words a page. If the writer is familiar with the characters, plot, etc, they should be able to rewrite a whole screenplay in under a week. At least good enough for a first draft. (And if I was interested enough to pay $900K for a screenplay, I'd happily wait a week or three for a screenplay.)

Thirdly, Who the hell is Aurora Media. I can't find any information on these guys. Seems nowadays if you have the ability to produce movie scripts you pay millions of dollars for, your company should have -one- hit on Google.

Seems that if there was actually $2.7 million worth of interest by Aurora Media then either:
1) There should be a printed contract somewhere.
2) (As many people pointed out) They should have a copy of the screenplays somewhere.
3) They should be the ones suing SBC (Or perhaps the schmo.)

i've already backed up my screenplay

[circletimessquare]

i've already backed up my screenplay on the intarweb using a patented methodology i call "astroturf steganography":

1. i broke my screenplay up into paragraph fragments

2. i used a script to comment spam these fragments into random blogs with a unique identifying string, namely "I'm making a Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NY [griefmovie.com]"

3. when i want to recover, i simply do a google search on "I'm making a Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NY [griefmovie.com]"

voila: instant backup ;-)

oops... i've just given my script away for free to anyone who reads this comment

dang

well, maybe i can sue you under DRM for breaching my cryptographic techniques to access copyrighted material

for reading this comment, you owe me $3,500

awesome!