rights for real life story

[cordvision]

I saw a report on TV about a women that is now dead. Her story would be the perfect material for a feature film. How does it work with the rights to the story. Can I just write a script and produce it or do I have to pay the rights to the story from somebody?

 

[Aroon_Narayanan]

I've had no personal experience of this nature, but I can almost guarentee that you'll have to get rights from the woman's family. If they see that you've made a movie about that story, they could sue, and bad things can happen...better be safe than sorry.

 

[clang]

unless you can change the surface details to make it unrecognisable? That will of couse depend on whether the drama depends on those details - e.g. if she was a doctor and her story related to her job, you can't easily translate that to a story about an accountant. But surprisingly often you can carefully change surface details like age, gender, location, occupation etc and still retain all the essential drama that attracted you to the real story.

Of course, if you want to write a 'real-life' script, openly based on that person, then permission is a must - not just from her family but from others involved - 'based-on-a-true-story' films tend to attract lots of legal attention, especially from anyone who thinks there's money to be screwed out of 'Hollywood' or thinks they've been portrayed badly in the script.

 

[YaBoyTopher]

Exactly if you want to truly base it exactly off of this persons life you will need to go to the family and get the rights to her story.

But you can change info around such as her name and other specific details and get away with it, but it all depends on how close you are to the real story and how unique that story is...

Best advice would be to contact the family and see what you can negotiate it is the safest bet atleast...nobody likes getting sued.