You’ve read a book, you love it. Or there is a book you’ve loved all your life. You want to write that movie. But before you start, there are things called ‘rights’ to be dealt with. Finding out who owns the rights for any book is often a laborious process – but it can be done.
Start by calling the publisher of the current edition of the book. Ask for their Rights Department, and explain what you are after. You want to know whether the movie or television rights are free. They will either tell you straight away, if they know, or pass you onto the writer’s agent, or, if the writer has passed away, whoever manages the writer’s estate.
Call them, once again asking for the Rights Department, and continue the process down the line, until you find your answer.
Negotiations
Once you are down to whoever owns the rights, then you can have the conversation. You are asking for some kind of option over the material, usually for a year or so, so you can actually have time to write the movie and stand a chance of getting production companies interested.
Be prepared for people never to get back to you at every stage of the way – even when I was working as a script editor and had the weight of the BBC behind me, publishing houses and agents would often never call me back. They get so many calls about this sort of thing that never go anywhere they tend not to take them very seriously. But if you’ve left it a week and there’s been no comeback then try again, remaining polite, and you will get an answer eventually.
Should You Write Without Rights?
As to whether you should write without the rights, well, it depends. Obviously, purely commercially, it makes little sense to write a screenplay when the rights are held by someone who will never let your screenplay be made.
On the other hand, if you are not so bothered about getting it made, and you simply want to do it as a writing exercise, then go ahead – you will learn an awful amount about story telling. (The result won’t be much good as a calling card script however, as people generally won’t look at anything but your original work before they hire you.)
It’s Not The Easy Option
Adapting a book sounds in some cases like the easy option – after all, the characters, the world, the tone, it’s all been created for you. But what goes wrong for most people is that they are too loyal to the book. A novel and a screenplay are two very different things. A screenplay needs structure. Tight, tight structure, that a novel can get away without.
If you don’t know screenplay structure you will invariably try to recreate the novel in your script. That’s, usually, a pretty instant Fail.
The art is to take the book, take screenplay structure, and marry the two together. But be prepared – it’s going to involve a lot of distillation, a lot of reduction. In some cases you must be prepared to slaughter the book in order to make a great movie.
Download the Screenwriting Goldmine for my own authoritative guide to structuring a story for the screen.