Reader Question: How to track down who owns the rights to an obscure story?

From Matt S:

Hi Scott-

Long time listener, first time caller here. I love your blog. It’s the one of the most helpful, fun, inspiring screenwriting sites around.

I read and fell in love with a sci-fi short story by [name omitted to protect Matt] from [the 1940s]. I think it would make an amazing movie and want to write the screenplay. But I have no clue about obtaining rights, as most of the information online seems ancient. Here’s what I know:

The story was published in [omitted], then adapted into a radio play and an anthology TV program in the early 50s. As far as I know, that is that, as far as its legacy.

[The author] died, followed by his wife. He is survived by [some children]. He also has papers donated to a university.

I wrote the university to see if they knew who had rights. I am trying to track down the sons to do the same.

Do you have any advice or know of any resources about tracking down rights to an old and somewhat obscure short story? I’m flying blind here, as screenwriters often do.

My guess is your best bet is to contact the heirs. In this day and age, I can’t imagine that would be too difficult to find them. They should know the status of the story’s rights.

That said I wanted to post this for the GITS community because this issue of trying to track down rights to old, obscure books, stories, etc is probably something several readers have dealt with before. Perhaps somebody would have additional or different advice.

This raises a larger question: What resources are there that have aggregated old stories? For example there was this deal that went down today where Warner Bros. secured the rights to four sci-fi books published between 1996–2001. What about book series older than that? Or some of those short story anthologies from the 40s like Super Science Stories or the 30s like Astounding Science Fiction?

We spend so much time coming up with original ideas, yet there are literally hundreds of thousands of stories that have been published before us. Is there gold waiting there for us to mine?

Comment Archive