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You should consult an attorney
- If you are interested in getting an LRA, you should consult an attorney. An experienced legal professional can walk you through the terms of an agreement and advise you on your specific situation.
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May 24, 2022 · HOW DO I GET A LIFE RIGHTS AGREEMENT? You are ready to move forward with your new project and getting a life rights agreement sounds like the next logical step. Now what? If you are interested in getting a life rights agreement, you should consult an attorney. An experienced legal professional can walk you through the terms of an agreement and ...
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Do I need a lawyer to write a life rights agreement?
What is a life rights agreement?
Do you need a life story agreement?
What should be included in a life rights agreement?
Oct 21, 2020 · Simply put, a Life Rights Agreement (LRA), also called a Life Story Agreement, is an agreement that grants a person or company the right to purchase and develop someone else’s life story into some type of media.
- Scope of Rights
- Archival Material
- Level of Cooperation
- Geographic Location
- Timeframe
- Consideration
- Fictionalization
Will the film cover your subject’s entire life (like Amadeus)? Will it cover a defining period of her life (like The Social Network)? Or will it jump around to specific events (like Steve Jobs)? Before you start writing, you and your subject need to hammer out what parts of her life are up for grabs, artistically speaking, and what parts are off li...
Sometimes writers and producers want access to archival material the subject owns (or owned), such as photographs, videos, diary entries, etc. While these things tend to get used more in documentaries, they can still provide valuable insights for a script writer. If your subject or her estate possesses these, the agreement should specify whether yo...
Is your subject going to co-write the script with you, or will she simply be a rubber stamp to anything you write? How involved she’ll be in the writing process is something you want to agree on early, preferably before you start writing. This will prevent confusion and antipathy later on. If the subject is alive, you also want to get in writing ho...
Even if you and your subject are based in the United States, what happens if you get a French or German production company interested in your script? Determining whether your grant of rights is focused only in the U.S. or is applicable worldwide is worth discussing.
How long will you have the rights? Will you have them in perpetuity or will the subject only grant you the rights for a certain period of time? Most of the time, writers and producers don’t acquire life rights for an indefinite period. They usually have a fixed timeframe in which to exercise their option on the rights (i.e. get a movie made). When ...
“Consideration” is legalese for compensation. For a contract to be valid, the parties need to exchange something of value. Usually it’s money, but it can be anything, really: stock, services, tangible or intangible assets. Even something as innocuous as promising to help get a movie made can be sufficient to meet this requirement. That said, compen...
Since life doesn’t play out in a simple three-act structure with convenient plot points and a tidy resolution, many biopics will fictionalize events and characters. How much of that will your subject permit? Obviously, this isn’t an exhaustive list, but it gives you a sense of what kinds of things you want to cover. Even outside the scope of your a...
Mar 24, 2008 · The agreements can be set up in a variety of ways. Subjects can restrict the deals to certain periods of their lives, or they can retain certain rights, such as the right to tell the story in book form, even if they give a studio permission to develop everything else from feature films to video games.
Dec 1, 2020 · One critical purpose of a life story rights agreement is to obtain a waiver and release of claims from an individual being depicted so as to foreclose the possibility of a claim, irrespective of how unfounded or unlikely to succeed it may be.
Nov 18, 2017 · A lawyer will explain what is acceptable and what is not, and will draft an agreement with the appropriate provisions to secure ownership of life story rights. Understand that negotiating these agreements involves competing interests between you and the subject of the story.
Aug 25, 2015 · In the end, the decision to pursue a life rights agreement is a personal one for each filmmaker that can come down to a few simple questions: Do you need or want access to the individual? Or can you make the film you want to make based on information that's in the public?
