What IP-Related Rights to Ask For

There can be no perfect answer to the question, what IP rights should I ask for in a licensing or a purchase situation. It will vary from case to case. But some examples might suggest both the problems and the opportunities.

The musical stage version of Mary Poppins recenntly closed on Broadway after a half a dozen years. It had debuted on the London stage. It is, for those who have not seen it, a musical with half of its songs from the 1964 Walt Disney movie and the other half new songs. The book is totally new and the Disney songs have been shoehorned into the new book.

The reason for the hybrid nature of this situation goes back to the Disney contract with P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, to make a movie based on the books. The contract purchased the film rights. It did not purchase the stage rights. The Disney attorneys were the best in the business. It may have made perfect sense at the time for them not to acquire the stage rights. For one thing, it would have cost more, and Walt Disney was notoriously tight with a dollar. For another, the movement at the time was not to make stage musicals from movies but to make movies from stage musicals.

The 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins came out. It was a big hit, and Julie Andrews won an Academy Award as Mary Poppins. But Travers hated it. She felt the story was too sweet, that Julie Andrews was too sweet, and that American actor Dick Van Dyke had no reason playing a cockney peddler.

Years later, the Disney company rebuilt a Broadway theatre and created stage musicals of their movie musicals. It scored big hits with The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. It made sense for the company to do the same with Mary Poppins, but when they went to Travers she said NO! Instead, she sold the stage rights to someone else and Carmen Macintosh, who had produced Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera, comissioned a new book and songs.

The problem was, as Macintosh found out, the audience was expecting to hear the Disney songs, including "Supercalifragilisiticexpialidocious." Disney executives met with Macintosh and worked out the hybrid deal, with a book closer to the original novels as required by Travers. The result received mixed reviews, had a good run on Broadway, but nowhere near Les Miserables and Phantom and none of the non-Disney songs became popular.

Even if Disney's attorneys had asked for the stage rights in the original deal, she might not have granted them. Or, having given them the film rights--and before she saw the movie--she might have.

Another example--when Orson Welles signed his deal for three films with RKO, starting with Citizen Kane, the agreement gave him complete control of the final film. Welles was so "hot" at the time and RKO so anxious to have him that his negotiation path was easy. The released film was controversial, nominated for the best picture Oscar, but otherwise underappreciated at the time. It later became regarded as one of the best if not the best movies ever made.

Years later the Welles contract for Citizen Kane saved its from being colorized by Ted Turner, who was making color films of black and white films using the newly-developed colorization process. Welles' estate objected and even Turner's attorneys agreed that the "complete control" provision probably prevented colorization. Turner gave up on colorizing Kane and later appeared to give up the process altogether.

Asking for the moon can cause the other party to dig in and possibly deny you points you otherwise would have achieved. You need to get what you need, what you can reasonably project you need, and as much else as you agreeably can.

Copyright 2013 by John T. Aquino