Don_DickleHow do first time movie writers ensure someone along the way won't get ripped off? Like say Jay in the mail room sees your scripts and develops it himself, what recourse is there against mail clerk?
Why do you hate Jay? Why not the Postman/woman/person?
Jay
KoboldCoterieThen why were you lurking suspiciously in the mail room in the first place? Tell us that!
With the candlestick too!
ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠Most scripts in Hollywood are worth less than than the paper they’re printed on. And if you can separate the value from the slop, you’d make more money working for the industry than stealing from it.
Dr. BobAdding to this that anyone worth pitching does everything they can to avoid contact with unsolicited scripts. When they want one they grab one they’ve already optioned or go with established pros. So if the mailroom guy is your worry, then you’re already out of the running. And the mailroom guy won’t have any better luck with it anyways.
For legal protection you register your script (e.g. in the USA with the WGA or USCO) or you maintain evidence. Whether or not you should worry about it is debatable. And it might be different everywhere. But first time movie writers, especially in Hollywood, should rather worry about getting into the industry in the first place. And for that, no matter what some scammy gurus, who teach you the 3 act structure like some form of deep complex science, tell you, your screenplay matters very little.
And, along with this, you have to be able to show that the writer(s) had access to this information while writing the script. To give you an hour long media analysis video to watch, here’s some Lindsay Ellis:
The summary of it was that animators saw The Thief and the Cobbler and might have used some of what they saw as inspiration for some of the character design in Aladdin, but the writer of Aladdin didn’t have access to the movie so Disney could credibly say they didn’t steal the script.
Did Disney Really Steal Aladdin?
Your ideas aren’t original anyway. For every script that makes it to production, there’s another 1000 in the rejection pile that have the same basic story and probably a lot of similar dialog and jokes.
How does a first time chef ensure someone along the way doesn’t rip off their cheeseburger recipe?