After all the stress of travelling, life returns to normal and problems that seem to be a hill of beans suddenly loom too large to forget them when I leave the office. Today’s was dealing with a producer (producer 1) who commissioned an adaptation, paid the commencement and (eventually) delivery of the first draft, only for us to discover that he didn’t have the rights to the underlying book.
He had warranted in the writer’s agreement that he did have those rights. After lots of discussion with various parties including producer 1 we were no further. He claimed to have an understanding with producer 2 who did own the rights, but producer 2 wouldn’t accept his proposed deal. Unsurprisingly producer 2 said producer 1 wouldn’t accept his deal. Stalemate.
One lawyer came up with the advice that the writer’s agreement wasn’t valid because the writer would not have signed the agreement if she had known that producer 1 did not own the underlying rights, and that clearly fraudulent misrepresentation had taken place.
Another lawyer said that the assignment of rights was actually valid but because of the misrepresentation there was a legal remedy to get the rights back and we could apply to the courts to enforce this.
Before doing that, however, we should send a lawyer’s letter to producer 1 pointing out that he was in breach of his warranties, that there was misrepresentation, that is he agreed to assign the rights back to the writer she would agree that he would be paid back what she had been paid (less the legal fees incurred). If we went to court we would win and producer 1 would end up paying all our costs as well as his own.
Producer 1 would have to warrant that the rights that had been assigned to him were unencumbered so that he could re-assign them, that he had not used them as a charge with his bank or brother-in-law, because without proper re-assignment back of the rights my client could not assign them freely to anyone else, which she dearly wants to do as producer 2 wants to make the movie.
Watch this space. It is good to be back!