Is it legal to make a biographical film without their consent?

[Esbifilms]

I'm very interested in writing a biographical film about the childhood of somebody famous.
In the same was as 'Finding Neverland' tells the story of J.M.Barrie etc.

Is it legal to do this? For example about George Harrison's childhood. (random example, thats not my idea!)
Or is there some kind of bizarre 'copyright'-type thing stopping me from doing this?

Help is appreciated
Sophie Boyce

 

[mplayer]

I would have to say its always better to get permisison. Lets say you create this film, now the person you based it upon sees it and disagrees on some of your portrayals of their life, this could cause some bad legal problems for you. More then likely you would have to contact that person or their agent and discuss a documentry with them along with legal issues and approvals.

 

[Bradley_groot]

I wouldn't do one about anybody alive or dead with a sizable estate. it's not illegal intrinsically but there is no reason they couldn't sue you.

 

[wcmartell]

Well, they could sue you for slander - so you would need to have every single thing documented as fact. You need a lawyer on board.

And your information could not come from copyrighted sources. Let's say you read a book about George Harrison - that book is copyrighted, so you would have to buy the rights to that book before using anything from it. Same with TV docs and newspaper stories and just about everything else. The exception is information that is considered public knowledge - where you have several *different and unrelated* sources that have the same information. Also, any information from your front line research - so if you interview people yourself, that is *your* information. If you want to use someone else's interview, that is *their* information, and you have to pay.

The problem with using "public knowledge" is that the information is available to everyone - so your film would just be a rehash of things we already know... and why would anyone want to see that? Everything depends on having some fresh, exciting unkown and mind-blowing information... the secret nobody but you knows.

No matter what - you'll need a lawyer to go over every single thing in the script... or permission from the subject (which is usually where those mind-blowing secrets come from).

- Bill