It’s not very smart, in my opinion, to invite a playwright (scroll down) to a production of his play… and fail to sign out the rights to perform that play. “We’re going to steal a hundred dollars or more from you! Want to come by and watch?”
To be honest, there’s at least a small chance that Victoria Schwarz and her theater group are entirely innocent. I spent some time talking to people at Samuel French, and have learned that over the past couple of years, they have gone from a fairly disorganized company to a completely dysfunctional one. Their amateur leasing division — which is to say, the very core of what this company does to earn money — is staffed by exactly two people. They had a third person, but he quit two years ago, and was never replaced.
So you’ve got two people responsible for handling queries from every high school, summer camp, and non-professional theater group in the country. I’m told these people don’t even answer the phone most times. They simply can’t. They’re too busy. So if you’ve got a question about that play you want to perform, or a problem regarding the details of licensing, you are most likely going to be out of luck. You can leave a voice mail, but they get a hundred voice mails every day. I’m sure more than one theater group has said, “Screw it. They’re not returning our phone calls, so why should we bother paying them at all? If this is how they run their company, they’ll probably never notice that we performed the play royalty free.” And that group would be correct.
Samuel French is losing a ton of money through its negligence, and some of that money would be mine, and that pisses me off.
So maybe Victoria Schwarz tried to sign out the rights to 1000 Babes. But then again, maybe not. Lord knows that many theater groups never learn just how awful Samuel French is to deal with, because it never crosses their minds to contact them and pay the proper royalties. These are the groups that think, ”We’re too small.” And also, “We don’t pay the actors — why should we pay the playwright?” And also, ”Hell, nobody will even know we’re performing the play, unless we do something dumb like contact the author personally.” And finally, “It’s not stealing. If it was, we’d probably feel bad or something.”
Let me explain something about the business of playwriting: I get 10% of book sales, so if you buy six copies of my script, I’m going to earn, these days, about $4.00. But when it comes to performance, the ratio completely reverses itself: I get 90% of that money. So if you were charmed by a play and have decided to perform it, sign out the rights to do so. It doesn’t cost a fortune, and for most playwrights, that little bit of extra money in the pocket is way, way more flattering than that effusive e-mail you’re planning to send. Although feel free to send the e-mail, too.
And if you try to license one of my plays, and Samuel French stonewalls you, drop me a line, so I can go kick them in their understaffed butts.
8 Comments
People are very odd when it comes to copyrights. Nice little old ladies who would never stuff 20 copies of choir music in their purses have no compunction about running off twenty copies and handing them out to the choir.
Fascinating. Mind if I give this more exposure if I have the time to do so?
By all means.
Have you emailed Ms. Schwarz about this, and if so what was her response?
The last time I had this problem, with a group out in Los Angeles, Samuel French’s more-organized LA office took care of the matter for me, which is what they are supposed to do. It took some effort just to get through to them, but now that I have, the NY office told me they’re now looking into this. I haven’t contacted Ms. Schwarz myself.
I lurk in a forum used by people who ought to know better, yet when one of them posted the [to me] obvious fact that “owning physical music gives you no rights to that music,” readers were stunned. If musicians aren’t being taught about copyright in school, I’m willing to bet actors aren’t, either. I guess they were never bored enough in rehearsal to read the inside front cover of the script.
I have to say that I think it was incredibly irresponsible of you to write about this incident before receiving a reply from Samuel French. Even though you say that it is possible that Ms. Schwarz applied for the rights and that something had maybe gotten lost in the shuffle, you strongly imply that you don’t believe this to be the case. You refer to Ms. Schwarz as stupid simply because she was thoughtful enough to invite you to a performance of your play – something she obviously thought would be a nice gesture. But instead of taking this invitation as such, you respond with a gross misjudgment about Ms. Schwarz. Here is a girl so enamored with your play that she has decided to put on a production of it (which, no matter how small a production, or how “armature” the level, is still not a cheap endeavor), and you denounce her action without so much as a hint of real evidence on your side. Had you bothered to wait for Samuel French to get back to you regarding this matter, you would have known about their billing screw-up, and you would not have attacked someone who was guilty of nothing but admiration of you and your work. I guess in this instance it is clear – you misjudged Ms. Schwarz and she apparently misjudged you.
You’re absolutely right, and I apologize to Ms. Schwarz and the rest of her company.
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[...] The theater group in question did indeed sign out the rights to the play. Samuel French didn’t have a record of this because the bill had not been paid. The theater company claims never to have received the invoice, and considering what I wrote the other day, it seems a pretty safe bet that it hadn’t yet been sent. It has now, and all is well. [...]