I dread reading a screenplay every time I'm asked to sign an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) by a writer wanting me to read their work.
I've signed five NDAs in the last three months and four have been totally unnecessary. So why do people get so paranoid their idea might be talked about and stolen when they really don't have anything to worry about? What do they think I'm going to do read their script and think 'by Margret Thatcher's balls that's a brilliant script, I'm going to steal it and make my fortune?' As if!
The WGGB suggest you simply put a little © by your name on the title page and leave it at that and I agree. There is no need for NDAs because anyone who wants a long and successful career in the business WILL NOT steal your work! If they did their career would be over the instant word got out. No one would want to touch them...NO ONE!
I could understand if the people in question were Hollywood writers with
potential blockbusters on their hands (not that they would come to me
anyway), or production companies with a project nearly ready to go, but
why do new writers in this country insist on having a reader sign an NDA
before they send out their script? And I have to be brutally honest here, it's usually the average scripts that come with the NDAs, the ones that don't have a killer plot worth talking about in the first place. That's not to say I haven't seen some very well written screenplays after I've signed an NDA.
Besides you can't protect an idea. Once you've written a screenplay it's your intellectual property by law, but the idea can still be written in a different way, with different characters by someone else. I can guarantee that while you're coming up with your unique blockbuster of an idea there are hundreds of other people, maybe even thousands, having the exact same idea at the exact same time. As if to prove this point earlier in the year someone pitched me an idea for a TV series to see if I thought it was any good, then last month I read the EXACT same idea had been made into a Hollywood film and was due for release soon.
So if anyone is reading this and is thinking of sending me their screenplay to read, don't ask me to sign an NDA before hand, it's not needed...honest!
5 comments:
Why do they do it? Because they're naive* newbies.
Personally I'd tell 'em to get lost - in fact by signing an NDA you are putting yourself at risk, because if you wrote something that was similar that got produced they might come back at *you*.
Any agent or producer in the UK or the US would instantaneously reject anyone who wanted an NDA signing. What the US companies demand (in some situations) is that the *writer* sign a waiver agreeing that any similarity between the work they're submitting and anything produced by the company is coincidence.
*I did use the term "ignorant" but felt that was a little too harsh. Though it's more accurate.
"Personally I'd tell 'em to get lost!"
I'll never turn paying customers away, my children would starve. Besides I read one last week that was sent with an NDA and the writing wasn't bad, the plot just needed better direction.
I honestly don't see the point of NDAs for anyone other than production companies.
Well it seems the tide of opinion flows in favour of not reading anything that comes with an NDA, so from now on that is exactly what I'll do.
What they need is educating; they need to understand that writers have the same ideas all the time, and nobody is going to steal their script.
For example, I had a TV pilot planned - then Lawrence Timms came out with something almost identical. Although we know each other we'd never discussed it.
It happens.
Here's and excellent blog about the problem of NDAs by dear old Bangers:
http://www.bang2write.com/2011/12/what-is-this-difference-between-nda.html
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