Screenwriting

Copyright is the law that protects the creations of artists and authors by allowing them to have exclusive rights to their creative work, and to ensure that only they benefit financially from exploiting these rights. As an author of a written work, you are the only one who has the right to exploit that work.

When you begin reading a book, it is a given that if you start on page one and read each successive page you will eventually get to the end of the story. The same goes for watching a film or a play. We sit. We watch. We leave. From childhood we are trained that there is a known route that will get us to the end of stories. Presented in these formats, stories are easy to navigate through.

Alongside our producer clients, Rudolph and Beer, LLP attorneys have weathered numerous campaigns in the trenches of independent film production. On Slingblade, Sunday, Tumbleweeds, Star Maps, Desert Blue, and many other films, we served as troubleshooters seeking to prevent problems that could devastate production.

Twice a week, Marc Bacus comes home from his day-job as an administrator at Southern Illinois University and logs on for a two- to three-hour chat session with a splinter group of screenwriters who call themselves the Viewmasters [www.viewmasters.org].

During the Q&A after the first screening of American Movie at Sundance, director Chris Smith hailed his subject Mark Borchardt as "the ideal independent filmmaker"--which, in many ways, he is.