If you’re a new writer or artist stepping out into the cutthroat world of entertainment for the first time, it can be very easy to get lost in a maze of red tape, content pilferers, and general bullsh#t.

Show BUSINESS is Business.

If you aren’t educating yourself in the thousands of ways a writer or artist can lose money or intellectual property, you are doing yourself an incredible disservice.

Ask any writer or artist that has navigated the waters for more than a couple years, and each one will have a war story about how they lost this or that project, or dealt with lecherous individuals promising rainbows full of cash forwards and back end payments. Even when you do try to protect yourself, you can still get caught in an unintended situation. The best way is to arm yourself.

One way to protect yourself is by reading  The Writer Got Screwed (but didn’t have to) , a Guide to the Legal and Business Practices of Writing for the Entertainment Industry, by Brook A. Wharton.

Brooke A. Wharton is an entertainment attorney who represents writers, directors, producers and actors working in the entertainment industry. Her guide helps new and seasoned writers navigate the treacherous waters of show business from Protecting Ideas, Your Written Work and Yourself to offering lists of reputable agencies, and fellowships.  With an amazing background like this, you can be confident in the valuable information she provides between the covers of this book.

At Write Vault, we’re particularly fond of the very first chapter that covers protection of your work under, “Registering You Work with the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA)” and “What is Copyright and What Does it Have to do with My Work.”

While Brooke joins other legal professionals in denouncing the sole use of the WGA (or other digital registration company like Write Vault) as a registration tool for documents, she does admit that in prior cases, having a registration like Write Vaults was used to prove prior authorship.  Her example comes in the form of  Honey I Blew Up the Kid, where the registration service was used to:

“prove the prior existence and completion date of a treatment or screenplay. (In this particular case, the writer had registered his treatment with the service prior to the time he submitted his work to Disney; through the use of the service he was able to prove the prior existence of his work before Disney made the film.)”

It is absolutely essential, as we’ve stated over and over, that copyright is your sole best option for legally protecting finished works, but to have an easy to track registered version of your screenplay, book, treatment or patterns, guarantees that extra power in the courtroom should your work face theft.  Imagine having 5 drafts on Write Vault, time-stamped over the lifespan of its initial creation, AND a copyright to allow you sue a company or individual for theft of your work. We can’t think of a more valuable security blanket than an inexpensive long lasting time stamp from Write Vault on a project.

Ms. Wharton also covers important topics like seeking out agents, working without an agent (what to expect), and the various legal differences between writing for films, television and episodic television. No writer (new or seasoned) should be without this volume in their library.  We fully admit to not buying it soon enough!

We do hope that Ms. Wharton re-publishes The Writer Got Screwed as it was originally published in 1997. It’s almost embarrassing to read the catchphrase ‘cyberspace’ when referring to the birth of digital content on the internet, because we know that a revolution has taken place for writers and artists via this medium and her updated expertise could lend a guiding hand to a controversial topic.

Wharton, Brooke A. The Write Got Screwed. New York: HarperPerennial, 1997
ISBN 0-06-273236-6

Los Angeles Library availability: available in most branches. 809.2807 W553 1997