Author Jonathan Lethem is something of a literary badboy, and his new novel, , plays that up a bit, not necessarily with the plot, which follows an L.A. band during the height of early ’90s alterna-rock, but rather with the book’s promotion. According to this article on Wired.com, he’s hellbent on ignoring copyrights, starting with the ones on his own work.
To that end, he’s turning the book into sort-of an open-source franchise: he’s going to give away the film rights, and five years after that movie is made, he’ll make all of the rights to the book and movie public—meaning, as Wired notes, “anyone will be able to create derivative works of the novel and film—they can write new stories featuring the characters, publish a sequel to the novel or turn it into a comic book.” Or presumably make their own fan film.
For those who don’t like to wait—and in an I-want-it-now culture, that’s everyone—you can visit his website, the Promiscuous Materials Project, where the film rights to dozens of his short stories can be bought for a dollar apiece. As he says in the article, “Many filmmakers and dramatists don’t have access to the kinds of money and lawyers that are usually needed to obtain rights, so I wanted to remove that barrier.”
It’s an interesting take on things—by making it cheap enough for anyone to buy rights, why would you want to make an unauthorized fan film of his work? And yet, if you aren’t familiar with his work already, would the low cost make you want to make a film of his work that you would otherwise ignore?
I suppose it’s an interesting way to promote your book, your stories and potenitially get movies made from your stuff. After all, if all this material is just sitting around his office collecting dust, then sure, why not put it up for grabs? The more movies you get made from your stories, the more Big Money interest you generate for your future projects. Studios scap up movie rights for plenty of books before they’re even published; generating some heat for Lethem’s future projects surely can’t hurt when the price for him is to only a buck a shot.
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