Frustrating

Collin and I met with Ha Le (of "White Light" fame) today. She's extremely nice. And for some reason, the contract she is trying to get us to sign, and what she tells us our agreement will be, they seem totally contradictory -- still.

I know I unfortunately cannot trust her word -- it's really only what the contract says that matters. People can seem like the nicest people in the world, but the contract is what holds up when things get dicey. And this contract says specifically that all of the look machine music would be considered "work for hire" and the copyright would belong to White Light Productions, LLC.

She wants us to do the following:

* Do the instrumental music for the movie, and also the trailer that she's creating by the end of the month.
* Do 3 songs with lyrics
* Appear in an 8 minute party scene

Now all of this is pretty cool, and could be good exposure for us. BUT, she's not paying us for this stuff, and she's also not paying for studio time to get it recorded. We're on our own with that. And, we have pretty tight turnaround times on everything -- like 5 days once we get the footage for the trailer and 1 month once we get the footage for the whole movie. So, we don't want to do all this work if we can't reuse it for our own purposes, and if we don't own the music.

On the off chance that White Light isn't a huge blockbuster, we'd like to be able to put these songs on our own releases without having to secure permission from and pay royalties to an entity that did no work and lent nothing creatively to the songs' creation!

Ha says that they have to own the music because they can't risk us changing our minds about how they can use it for the movie and then hamstringing the distribution of the entire film project, of which the music is a relatively small part. But -- I think we could overcome that by just writing something in to the contract that says that we license use of the music to White Light via all available distribution channels -- including but not limited to internet, overseas, DVD, Video, Cable, Satellite, etc etc. .. We then won't be able to change our minds (and again, why would we want to / need to anyway?) because we are contractually bound to that agreement. But we can't just give away the fruits of our labor!

I checked, and 2 other movies that I can think of that do this kind of thing (where a band / artist writes most of the music) -- the Graduate with Simon and Garfunkel, and Harold and Maude with Cat Stevens, still have the artist or their publishing company still holding the rights to their songs -- NOT the movie production company. So, just like our buddies Paul, Art and Cat, we will have to hold out for the same thing.

At this point I think that we're going to have to try to just rewrite their contract, and that's what we'll sign. I've asked for her to rewrite it a couple of times, and nothing really changes. Still "work for hire," still the copyright belongs to them.

Yes, we might miss out on the opportunity, but we can't risk getting burnt. And in reality, it probably isn't that huge of an opportunity. I doubt it's going to get wide release, and it likely won't get that much exposure, in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks to Steve from Jealousy Curve and Josh from Boysetsfire (who both gave good advice) for looking out for us here and warning us about the dangers of contracts -- we appreciate it.