Writers have marginalized themselves

Although he certainly could not have imagined DVDs, streaming video, the iPhone and the Internet at the time, the novelist and screenwriter James M. Cain decided in 1947 that Hollywood studios had too much power over writers. He thought screenwriters should retain the copyright to their work (as had historically been the rule with novelists and playwrights), and he proposed a plan under which writers would lease their work to the studios and share in all resales and remakes.

By Sean Mitchell

November 11, 2007