Misconceptions about Using Someone Else's Music in Your Play

When it comes to using someone else's music in your play, misconceptions and convenient but dangerous rationalizations abound.  As someone who has integrated copyrighted music into plays (The Devil's Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith and another that I'm working on now), I'm here to say that pretty much everything people tell you is wrong.

Misconception:  Go to the Voluteer Lawyers for the Arts and they will make a contract for you.  They have standard contracts. 
I have consulted with the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, and, although they are generous and well meaning, they knew no more about acquiring music rights than I already knew when I consulted them (to my disappoinment).

And, no, there is no standard contract with respect to acquiring music rights.  Each agreement is particular to the show. How many songs are you using? How many different writers of those songs are involved? Are the songs used cabaret style (meaning sung anywhere in the show for entertainment value) or are they used to advance the plot? (It makes a difference.) In a standard musical, the royalties are usually divided into three equal portions among the composer, lyricist, and librettist (script writer). Consequently, if you're writing a musical using already existing music, you may be asked to divide as much as two-thirds of the royalties among those who hold the music rights. One tries to negotiate less, of course, but this is what you may be up against.

Misconception:  You don't need to worry about rights until you're ready for production. 
You absolutely do need to concern yourself about music rights long before you go into production. Acquiring music rights can take many months, even as long as a year. Music companies and other rights holders move at a glacial pace. If you wait until the last minute to acquire rights, you risk delaying or blowing your production.  Or worse, you might find that the rights are not available. 

Misconception:  Acquiring music rights will be done by the producer. 
Acquiring music rights is up to the creators of the show, not the producers, not the director, nor the hosting theatre. When you sign a production contract, you will see in no uncertain terms that the playwright (or creators if it's a team) is responsible for acquiring all necessary rights and permissions, and, more ominously, if a lawsuit is brought against the production for violation of copyright, you (the author) are liable.

Misconception:   It's okay to use a few bars of someone else's music without getting permission.  There is no such right to use a few bars of music or any other bits of copyrighted material without the permission of the author. That is, for lack of a better way of putting it, an urban legend. It is true that it's not likely MGM is going to come after you for using two bars of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," but you could get a cease-and-desist letter.

There is no way around it; you need to get permission when you use any material belonging to someone else, and the sooner the better. 

12 Not-So-Secret Secrets to Success in Playwriting (and Other Writing, too!)

1.  Create a clear Protagonist
Be sure you create a clearly identifiable protagonist – the character whose journey the audience is following.  The audience needs to know up front who to root for. 

2.  Create a Formidable Antagonist

Be sure your protagonist faces a character (or thing) that presents ongoing and escalating obstacles to the protagonist’s success.  Never make it easy for your protagonist. 

3.  Know Your Characters as Well as You Know Your Best Friend

The key to successful characters is detail.  The more you know about your character, the more genuine his/her behavior will be.  Think of all the things you know about your best friend.  When your knowledge of your characters - all of them - is as detailed and intimate as is your knowledge of your best friend, then you will instinctively know what your characters will do and say under the given circumstances of your play.  How to do this?  Write the biographies of each of your characters. 

4.  Be Sure There is Continual Conflict

The essence of compelling dramatic writing is conflict.  And conflict is not argument.  Conflict is characters having opposing objectives, desperately struggling to come out on top. 

5.  Be Sure the Stakes are Clear and Important

It should be clear to the audience why the protagonist’s mission or goal is vitally important to him/her.  When the audience understands, the audience cares what happens and emotionally goes on the journey with the protagonist. 

6.  Write a Tightly Structured Story

It all starts with the story.  Your story should have a clear spine (also referred to as the story’s “arc” or “through-line”), meaning it should have:  a beginning (the introduction of the characters and launch of the protagonist’s journey); a middle (the protagonist’s struggles to achieve his/her goal against the efforts of the antagonist); and an end (the climax, the moment the audience learns if the protagonist succeeds ... or crashes and burns). 

7.  When You’re Stuck, Get Mean

When you’re stuck for what happens next, ask yourself this question, “What’s the worst thing that could happened to my protagonist at this moment?”  And make it happen to him/her. 

8. Include but Limit Exposition

Exposition is the judicious and skillful revelation of past events (things that happened before the play).  But include only those events that are absolutely necessary to make the characters' motivations and stakes and the story clear.  And the exposition should come into play only when the characters need to trot out the information – in other words, exposition as ammunition.  Rule of thumb on exposition:  less is more. 

9.  Don’t Sweat Originality – it Ain’t What it’s Cracked up to Be

Don’t knock yourself out trying to find a subject or story that’s never been dramatized before.  Storytelling has been around as long as humans have, so you’re not likely to come up with a plot no one has ever come up with before.  Originality lies in how you handle a subject – your spin, your characters, your dialogue, your retelling of the story.  After all, what is West Side Story?  What is Titanic (the James Cameron version)?  They’re both Romeo and Juliet with their own unique take on the timeless plot:  young lovers kept apart be forces beyond their control. 

10.  Care About Your Play

Write about something you care about, something that’s important to you.  A play can take anywhere from a year to two or more years to write, develop, and stage.  It’s your passion for the subject matter that will sustain you when the going gets tough.  (And it usually does.) 

11.  Don’t Try to Hide

Theatre is not a place in which you can hide.  The unique gift you have to offer the world is you – what you think, what you have experienced, and how you see the world.  Anyone can learn technique.  What will set you apart is how much of yourself you’re willing to share.  Put another way, the best place to hide is out in the open.  “Let it all hang out,” as the hippies used to say, and your plays will engage audiences and touch hearts. 

12.  Buy Playwriting for Dummies

Run over to your local Barnes and Noble or go online to Amazon.com, whatever, and get yourself a copy of Playwriting for Dummies.  It’s the most practical, thorough, readable, savvy, and fun book on playwriting ever written ... ever written by me that is.  It’s both a great primer for beginners and an invaluable refresher for experienced playwrights. 

Is "Formal" Training Necessary for Playwriting?

Recently, a neophyte playwright posted online the question whether "formal" training is necessary to be a successful playwright.  In a word, it's a must.  (Okay, three words.) 

Formal training - be it in a school, a playwriting workshop, or with a theatre organization that offers courses - in my opinion, provides a number of important advantages. First and foremost, as I tell my students (and wrote in my book "Playwriting for Dummies"), know the rules before your break them. If you want to take theatre in a whole new direction fine, just know what it is you're departing from. As Newton (Isaac, not Wayne) said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Second, participating in a playwriting program of some sort teaches you how to take and make use of constructive criticism. It's something some of us do better than others but something we all must learn. It's better to find out early, in a supportive environment, that your play needs work than it is to find out before a paying audience of strangers. 

A third reason is networking. When you're in a playwriting program, you meet people whose experience and contacts you can benefit from. As competitive is playwriting is in terms of the relatively few production opportunities, I've always found playwriting colleagues to be willing to share contacts and point out relevant opportunities.

Fourth, theatre is a collaborative medium. Writing a script is not the endpoint but only the beginning of the journey, a journey that involves a host of other people with different skills. So you might as well get comfortable with the give and take of collaboration sooner than later.

Last (for now), is the opportunity to have public developmental readings of your play in progress. Yes, you can arrange a reading on your own, but it is much easier (and safer for your fragile psyche) and the audiences much larger when your reading is arranged and moderated by a school or theatre organization. 

Adapting a "True Story" to a Play or Movie

Recently this question was posted on a theatre industry chat site:  Would anyone have any advice on how to proceed with getting a book made into a play or a movie? A friend of mine wrote an award-winning true account about having been a hidden child during the Second World War and the characters would lend themselves to a fantastic movie. I'm trying to get the word out about it.  This was my contribution to the discussion. 

 

Your question is difficult to answer because you mention adaptation to a "play or a movie."  The processes of writing, developing, and producing plays and movies are different.  Nevertheless, there are some thoughts I can offer. 

First and foremost (and forgive me for saying so), if I were a producer and you pitched to me the project as described above, my answer would be "been there, done that."  What I mean is there are lots of stories of people being hidden to save their lives during WWII, not the least of which is "Diary of Anne Frank."  Does that mean you're dead in the water?  No.  You, as the writer, need to be very, very clear on what makes your story different from the others out there.  What's your "hook"?  In other words, it's not the sameness of your story (no matter how worthwhile) that will interest a producer, it's the uniqueness.  And you need to identify and be able to speak passionately on what is great about your story and what sets it apart from the others. 

Second, execute an agreement between you and your friend, the book author.  I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, "but we're good friends.  Why do we need a contract?"  Why?  To stay friends.  Memory can play tricks on people, particularly when it comes to who has final say in a disagreement or how money is to be divided if the project succeeds.  You don't need a lawyer.  The Dramatists Guild has a collaboration agreement that can be customized to your needs.  Or you can probably find an adaptation agreement template on the Internet.  The agreement should specify these things:  you have exclusive rights to make a play and movie adaptation of the book for a certain period of time (24 months is common).  You should specify how much you're paying for the rights to do these things (you can put down $1 if you like).  It should be specified who (you) has final say if you disagree on something in the script (the considerations for writing a successful play or movie script are different from those in writing a book, and book authors sometimes forget this.  Which is one of the reasons why savvy script writers do not give script approval to the book authors).

Finally, that the story happened does not carry as much weight as you might think.  The fact it is the "reality" can sometimes hinder progress.  You can't allow yourself to get stuck on the facts.  The writer of a play or movie needs to have the flexibility to fictionalize.  Sometimes events need to be changed or dramatized (events in life, while powerful for the participants, are not necessarily a compelling story for others); events need to be created to make the story flow more smoothly; tons of characters (okay in a book) need to be pared down or combined into fewer characters (especially for a play).  If you want a lesson in the freedom to make things up, read the factual news accounts and then see the "based on a true story" movie "Argo."  Much of the film script, particularly the ending, was fabricated to make the movie a nail-biter.  But who cares?  It was a whale of a ride.  In other words, don't let the facts get in the way of creating a great script.

Musicals: They Ain't Just Plays with Songs

Recently, a novelist who is writing a musical based on a book she wrote, asked for general advice from those who've written musicals.  What I told her is this ...

While it is possible for folks to give you a valuable pointer or two about writing the book (script) for a musical, if you've never done it before you'll need more than a handful of tips from colleagues.  The expectations and constraints that relate to the writing musicals are different from those concerning the writing of a play.  As the author of the critically acclaimed show, The Devil's Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith, and Playwriting for Dummies, I would strongly suggest you go to Amazon.com for a book or two about writing musicals.  There are lots of them, like The Musical Theatre Writer's Survival Guide by David Spencer or Making Musicals by Tom Jones.  If you're a beginner when it comes to musicals, it almost doesn't matter which book on musicals you read, but do do your homework. 

All that being said, I do have one important piece of advice:  remember that the songs in a musical are part of the storytelling.  Songs (and dances) are not thrown in randomly for the purpose entertainment only.  The songs in a musical are, in effect, musical dialogue, and must either reveal character or advance the plot.  If you can take a song out or move it to another spot in the show with no impact on the show, then that song is superfluous.  If you were to take "I Feel Pretty" out of West Side Story, you would not understand the depth of Maria's elation and the validation she is experiencing over having connected with Tony the night before.  And the song helps explain why she is willing to so quickly and fully commit herself to Tony.  In other words "I Feel Pretty" is a wonderful song and dance, but it serves an important dramaturgical purpose. 

The Seductive "Jukebox" Musical

In recent decades, there's been a proliferation of the "jukebox" musical, a musical show that takes a collecton of songs of a group or of a period, and tries to wrap a story around them.  Unfortunately, what might seem like a simple way of creating a musical is not at all simple. 

Most musicals fail because of a weak or non-existent book - the play/story component of the show (dialogue and stage directions).  In other words, creating a viable story for a group of songs that were never intended to be part of a show is a real challenge.  (See pages 244 and 311-312 in Playwriting for Dummies.)  I speak from experience (www.thedevilsmusic.biz). 

And then there's the 800-pound gorilla in the room:  the unavoidable necessity to get (and pay for) the rights to use any music created after 1923.  Never assume music rights are readily available and easy to acquire.  Check it out before getting to deep into your project.  And never ever stage a show using someone else's music without written permission.  You will be sued, "you" meaning you, the show's creator. 

The bottom line is, it's not enough to have a collection of "can't-miss" songs.  Audiences go to musicals for the music, yes, but also for an engaging and entertaining story.  Resist the temptation to skimp on the latter.  For every Jersey Boys and Mamma Mia, there are dozens of jukebox musicals that crash and burn.  When it comes to jukebox musicals, many are attempted but few succeed. 

Is My Play Idea Comedy or Drama?

Professor, is my idea comedy or drama? 

This may seem like an odd question, but, more often than you'd think, I’m asked by my playwriting students if a play idea they want to work on ought to be written as a comedy or a drama. 

Well, you can deal with almost any issue or storyline as either a comedy or drama.  Take, for instance, the story of a man’s startling discovery that his old-maid aunts have poisoned a dozen or so lonely old men, and had their bodies buried in the basement of their home.  Mass murder hardly seems a likely subject for humor; drama would appear to be the right genre for this material.  Yet the preceding is the storyline of one of the funniest stage comedies ever written, Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring. 

My comfort zone as a playwright is somewhere in between drama and comedy, but closer to drama than comedy.  To date, though I fancy myself as having a robust sense of humor, I’ve not been able to write an out-and-out comedy.  Because I tend to see life as a mixture of dramatic situations and humorous moments (hardly a philosophical breakthrough), when I’ve tried to write a pure comedy, the play inevitably ends up drifting back into the sphere that comes naturally to me — the drama with humor, or dramedy as the hybrid is sometimes called. 

 

The choice between comedic or dramatic treatment of an idea rests in good measure on your slant on the story.  Is your exploration of the idea primarily serious in nature, or do you see it as mostly ironic and humorous? 

As indicated above, another important factor is your particular gift as a writer.  Do you have an inclination toward envisioning and creating dramatic situations, or do you have an unrelenting sense of humor and the knack for writing witty lines?  In the final analysis, the subject matter, along with your writing skills and propensity will take you in one direction or the other. 

Don't Downplay the Director

Recently, a playwright posted online the following amazing statement:  "Playwrights should ... self-direct at least once, if for no other reason than to see that directing a play isn't the rocket science some would have you believe."  That playwright followed up with this:  "Most of directing is finding good actors, a good script, and getting out of the way." 

Yipes!  How could anyone who knows anything about theatre make such assertions!?  Directing is a specialized skill set that involves artistic insight, many hours of script study and preparation, the ability to conceive of a stage picture and blocking, excellent people and problem-solving skills, the knowledge of the different approaches to acting that actors employ, enough knowledge about set design, costumes, lighting plots, sound design, etc., to pass judgment on the designs presented by the various stagecraft people, and more.  

I studied directing for years, not because I wanted to direct, but because I wanted to know what goes into directing so that I could prepare my scripts in a way that directors would relate to and to understand what it is that directors do.  You don't learn to be a dentist by pulling your own teeth.  To put down directing as not being "rocket science" does directing and directors a grave injustice.  I can tell you that I'm personally indebted to directors who, working with actors, have elevated my work to levels even I wouldn't have imagined. 

Theatre is a collaborative medium.  Everyone brings something to the table.  And to deprive oneself of the skill and insight of one of the team players - the director - arbitrarily deprives you of a talented mind and shrewd pair of eyes.  And why would you want to do that?  To have it all your own way?  Not wise.  Directing, like acting and playwriting, is not something one does lightly and without training and learning.  Not if you respect the various disciplines.  Not if you respect theatre.  Not if you respect yourself.