An auction atmosphere generally works to the advantage of the seller of rights, and this effect has been demonstrated regularly at the Sundance Film Festival during the past several years. Even in this year of diminished activity, the pulses of buyers at Sundance were quickened by films considered to be potential box office winners. In the case of “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”1 (“Precious”), the story of a young black woman’s hardships, frenetic negotiations led to a lawsuit in which one distributor claimed to have won exclusive rights in a film before its producer granted those rights to another.
That negotiations at Sundance and other film festivals could lead to litigation is not surprising. The process might begin with a distributor making an offer that includes a handful of principal terms and telling the sales representative for the picture that if he or she leaves the table, the offer is withdrawn. The representative then might take that “withdrawn” offer to the next distributor to try to do better. If the representative accepts a distributor’s opening proposal, they hurriedly negotiate a written deal memo using the distributor’s “standard form.”
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