I recently read What’s Next: A Backstage Pass to The West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service by Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack. The book is a history of the television series The West Wing.
One of the anecdotes related in the book is the making of the 2012 campaign ad for Bridget McCormack, who was running for office and is the sister of Mary McCormack. Several West Wing cast members appeared in the ad playing their characters from the show.
One of the things they mentioned was that they had to seek Aaron Sorkin’s permission (which he gave) to use the characters. Which surprised me; I didn’t know that he still “owned” the characters in 2012.
So Sorkin could have said no? If NBC wanted to make a West Wing reunion movie, Sorkin has veto rights?
The series was made by John Wells Production, which made the series which was then sold to NBC for broadcast. So I would have assumed that at some point Sorkin had sold his rights to the show and its character to the production company. But this wasn’t the case?
Sorkin left the series after the first four seasons. If he had wished to, could he have shut down the series at that time by denying John Wells Production the right to make new episodes?
I’m using The West Wing as an example here but I’m more interested in the general topic of who owns any given television series.
Okay, but I’m wondering about the general pattern. Was Sorkin’s ownership of The West Wing characters the norm for a series creator or was it an exception to the usual practice?
According to this it seems that what generally happens is that the writer/creator sells the rights but there may be conditions. For example, the lawsuit by Michael Crichton’s estate alleges that when Crichton sold ER to Warner Bros, he would have to approve any revival or future production related to ER.
My guess is that Sorkin was a big enough deal that he was able to retain rights to the characters in at least some circumstances - maybe his permission was needed for an ad, but John Wells Productions didn’t need permission for a reboot or a reunion movie.
The creator or production company usually owns the rights to characters and particular settings for original creations but those rights can often be distributed around depending upon who is involved in the production. If it is a derived property (from a novel or film) then those rights can become very complicated, even moreso if one of the original copyright holders is deceased and was not specific about those rights being distributed to specific heirs. or if there are music or derivative publications involved.
An example is the Star Trek franchise, where the estate of Gene Robbenberry owns ‘basic rights’ to the characters and various other IP associated with the original series and (to some extent The Next Generation) but Desilu had film and television distribution rights as well as (most of?) the merchandising rights, so basically Roddenberry and his estate get residuals but have had no real creative or business control, and don’t actually have any overall rights to other Star Trek franchise productions like Deep Space 9, Voyager, or Enterprise. All of those rights got parceled out to various production companies over subsequent decades resulting in a divergence between the film and movie productions (and other properties) and were only recently brought all back under one umbrella.
In the case of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin has been very particular in contracts about maintaining both creating and production control over his films and television shows because of his experience in dealing with large production companies and distribution networks. That is not unheard of—Desilu was started by Lucille Ball and then-husband Desi Arnaz specifically to maintain ownership over I Love Lucy and other productions—but is not generally the norm as most creators are forced to share some rights in order to secure funding and distribution.
It’s apparently common for the music to be owned separately. WKRP In Cincinnati was unavailable for years because of issues over music licensing, and the original version is still unavailable.
Music licensing deals that were cut at the time of production covered only a limited number of years,[42] but when the show entered syndication shortly after its 1982 cancellation, most of the original music remained intact because the licensing deals were still active.[43] After the licenses had expired, later syndicated versions of the show did not feature the music as first broadcast, with stock production music inserted in place of the original songs to avoid paying additional royalties. In some cases (such as during scenes with dialogue over background music), some of the characters’ lines were dubbed by soundalike actors, a practice evident in all prints of the show issued since the early 1990s, including those used for its late-1990s run on Nick at Nite.[42][43]
The expense of procuring licenses for the original music delayed release of a DVD set for years.[44] When a Season 1 set was finally released, much of the music was again replaced and the soundalike vocal dubs were present. Some scenes were shortened or cut entirely,[45] but some deleted scenes that had not been included in the original broadcast were added.
John Wells Production, which is not owned by Sorkin. It is, not surprisingly, owned by John Wells, who also produced Shameless (another series where Wells did not create the characters). Wells is also the guy who took over as showrunner for The West Wing when Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme left after the fourth season.
Another West Wing specific question. Who owns the characters of Matt Santos, Arnold Vinnick, Kate Harper, and Annabeth Schott? They entered the show after Sorkin left so presumably he didn’t create them. Does he own them because he originally created the show they were in? Or were they owned by Wells, who took over when Sorkin left?
Similar question with other series. Let’s say Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry created all of the main cast so he owns them. But what about a character like Cyrano Jones? He appeared in a season two episode (“The Trouble With Tribbles”) that was written by David Gerrold. Does that mean Gerrold owned the character of Cyrano Jones? When Jones was used years later in an episode of Deep Space Nine, did the producers have to get Gerrold’s permission to use the character?
Ironically, Annabeth Schott was played by Kristin Chenoweth, who was dating Sorkin at that time (though, as you note, it was after Sorkin had left the show).
Again, it’s all going to depend on the contracts in play.
At that time, Gerrold was 22 or 23 years old, and that was, I believe, the first TV script/story he had ever successfully sold – it was one of several story ideas he had been invited to submit to Star Trek producer Gene Coon, after Gerrold had sent in an unsolicited story idea on spec.
Gerrold likely had zero pull, as far as retaining any rights to anything original in his story, whereas Roddenberry (the show creator, and what we’d call a “showrunner” now) had a fair amount of pull. It would not surprise me at all if Gerrold’s contract for The Trouble With Tribbles granted him a writing credit (and some money), and that’s it.
Note that Gerrold did get a credit in the Deep Space Nine episode, for “based on the original Star Trek episode ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’.” However, he apparently had no idea that the DS9 episode was being created, until he was tipped off by the New York Times (as per the Wikipedia entry on the episode):
The above strongly suggests that Paramount, and the Deep Space Nine producers, were under no obligation to get any permission from Gerrold to use Cyrano Jones, or even inform him that an episode based on his old script was being produced.
These are the kinds of questions that keep entertainment lawyers endlessly employed. Even what Roddenberry “owned” in terms of Star Trek setting and characters is subject to interpretation; basically he could try to forbid the use of those characters in other productions (and apparently frequently attempted to in battles with Paramount when it came to the movie franchise involving the original characters starting with Wrath of Khan onward, and lost every time because of agreements he signed when producing Phase II and then The Motion Picture).
Generally speaking, the writers working in the production bullpen have no story or character rights and get a pittance of residuals (literally often checks for a few cents per quarter). A writer-for-hire might get some additional rights to particular creations (and an executive producer credit) if they are some kind of superstar but typically they just have to sign away all of their rights to IP to get paid, and resign themselves to getting whatever residuals they were due (which is also a noteworthy challenge, particularly with Star Trek and Paramount which became notorious for using ‘creative accounting’ to short writers, directors, and even actors on their shows).
A noteworthy example of a writer who maintained full IP rights is Michael Connelly who not only had executive and creative control over the adaptation of the Harry Bosch movies to the Amazon series but also ‘owns’ the new and composited characters that were created specifically for the show. But Connelly was also intimately involved in production and the creative process. If you are, say, Tom Clancy and just sell creative and distribution rights to a studio wholesale for a big dump truck of money, you can whinge and whine all you want about how you don’t like the casting and story choices but as far as courts are concerned you should take your money and shut the fuck up.
I rewatched the ad (which I linked to in the OP) and I noticed that while Will, Josh, C.J., and Carol were all addressed by their characters’ names, nobody ever addressed Mary McCormack as “Kate”.
Contracts didn’t keep up with or predict new technology. No one thought that people would own DVDs or stream a show. Now those things are taken into account for any show or movie. How those things are handled was a big part of the recent strikes of the entertainment unions.
It’s not just that; it’s that copyright is systematically locking away our culture. Most older music isn’t available at all.
I’m pretty sure that in few hundred years the modern era will be considered a cultural void, because virtually everything will have been locked away by copyright and forgotten as the storage medium decays.
IIRC (while not a TV series) the excellent animated movie Heavy Metal could not be released on VHS or DVD because the individual music groups could never decide on a way to divide the revenue among them. The music was a big part of that movie but does Blue Oyster Cult (as one example) get a big percentage because they were big when the movie came out or a little percentage because some years later they were a has-been?
No one could agree so the movie was never released to video (at least not for a long time…it is available now so I guess somehow it was sorted out…probably when everyone realized they were just losing money).
I assume the studios learned a lesson from that mess and make sure the contracts have such things sorted when signed.
For those who may not have heard the back story to this, I Love Lucy aired prior to the availability of videotape recorders. IIRC Ampex introduced the first VTR around the time of the show’s final season. It was usually impractical and expensive to film shows, so they were either broadcast live or the network ran low-quality kinescopes, basically films made directly off a studio monitor.
CBS planned to air the show live in the populous eastern time zones, and the delayed broadcasts farther west would be lower quality kinescopes. This meant the show would be staged in New York City, but Ball and Arnaz didn’t want to leave Hollywood, so they made a deal with CBS to pay for filming the show out of their own salaries. In return they asked for syndication rights, which CBS was happy to give them, believing that no one would want to watch a silly sitcom in syndication.
Boy, did CBS get that wrong! I Love Lucy become the most frequently syndicated show in television history, making Desilu tons of money and helping to make Ball and Arnaz very rich. They might have had a fairy-tale Hollywood marriage if Arnaz had not been such a philanderer. But thanks to their decision, an important piece of television history was preserved on film.
Another series that was almost lost was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. At the time, the BBC inexplicably had a policy of erasing taped shows and reusing the tapes as a cost-saving measure. So normally, Monty Python would have been taped and broadcast - and then erased a few months later.
But when Terry Jones heard about this, he offered to buy the tapes from the BBC and give them new blank tapes to replace them. The BBC agreed and so Monty Python’s Flying Circus was not lost.
Mrs Cad is going through the old SNL seasons. Many of them don’t show the musical guest and I suspect it’s for the same reason the original Beavis & Butthead re-releases didn’t show the musc videos. That the show only had rights to the music for the first run.
Worst yet was the Dumont network that just dumped their tapes in the East River to not have to store them.