ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

9 years, 1 month ago - Marie-Helene Boyd

Hello, I'm looking for a non disclosure agreement. did you ever get one? if so from where?
Thank you.

9 years, 1 month ago - Marlom Tander

Why do you want one?

It will put some good people off, indeed for people who really know what they are doing, requesting an NDA for something as vague as a scenario and then presenting what is clearly a boilerplate document will flag you as someone who doesn't know what they are doing.

NDAs have their uses, but those uses are generally to compel secrecy re certain limited specific unique information, (e.g. "Judy Dench is on board, but you can't tell anyone until we issue the the release". For an NDA to be valid re a scenario you need that scenario to be something so new, so different, that IF it was used, it would be obvious that it was yours. That's doable for a script - if someone rips off your one liners, you can show they did, but a scenario?

Courts will not enforce NDAs that are too wide. If your scenario is a boy meets girl from feuding families, and someone goes off and writes something similar, the defence is "Shakespeare did it first". The only scenario I think you could NDA would be a biopic where you had the agreement of the person/estate, and they wanted confidentialty while a script was worked up.

If you do want an NDA, PAY a lawyer. You need an NDA that is clear and tightly focused on the details of what you want kept secret.

Cheers

9 years, 1 month ago - Dan Selakovich

Marlom is absolutely right. Re-read everything he wrote!

I've probably signed a couple of dozen NDAs in my career. But my career is fixing films in trouble. More than half those films I directed additional scenes and pick ups. On all of them I re-edited. An NDA was absolutely necessary in these cases. I couldn't, nor would I want, to take credit away from the original director. The downside is that I have to work uncredited. These NDAs go in perpetuity and basically say I don't exist.

If you were trying to get me to sign an NDA simply for reading a script, I'd tell you to get bent. As Marlom says, it marks you as a rank amateur. Beginners are so scared to put their scripts out there. I take the opposite approach: I register the script with the copyright office, then shotgun the thing to as many people as I can. It will be better protected if 100 people read it, than 2 people. If theft occurs, which is incredibly rare, you've got 100 witnesses.

Listen to Marlom. He knows what he's talking about.