An introduction to
LEGAL "BLASTS"
by Bill Rebane
Legal "Blasts" is a column and a news venue to expose idiocy and examine from a non-lawyers standpoint, questions of justice, injustice and law turned upside down for the benefit of the crooks and con-artists that know how to use the system to cheat you. You, the unsuspecting film maker, producer and movie investors.
Legal "Blasts" is devoted primarily but, not exclusively to the business of movies and the Motion Picture Industry as a whole.
It all began with my book "Film Funding 2000" writings about unscrupulous film distribution practices commonly known as creative bookkeeping. While many of my readers in the independent film world expected "Film Funding 2000" to be a production how too book, it was not. Subsequently, many young film students and up and coming film makers were disappointed, if not turned off.
They didn't want to hear about how to finance and protect their film/video endeavors. They were far more interested, I must assume, in how to make movies with lots of production values on short dollars and miniscule budgets. While I may have short changed those hopefuls, the book became well received by potential movie investors and past investors, who found out of what is happening to their movie investment dollars and what goes on behind the scenes of producer/investor distributor relationships.
Legal "Blasts" today is an extension of those initial efforts prompted by years of education and experiences in the new digital world of film making and primarily distribution and DVD-HD-Blue Ray marketing.
Legal "Blasts" is and "IP" (Intellectual Property) expose. If not heeded, corruption can reach deep into your pocket and rob you of everything you have worked for. Your creating, sweating and bringing your hard earned intellectual work to fruition, will not mean a thing, because it can be abused, stolen and pirated. With you the creator not ever seeing a penny from and for your labors.
Unfortunately, most of us who have creative dreams and ideologies that propel us into making movies, think mostly or only in artistic and creative terms much too often neglecting the essential legal and business world that lurks out there, only to entrap the unsuspecting film maker, physically and intellectually, stealing him blind. The results, you have worked for nothing. You get a little bit of temporary fame and fade into oblivion. Plus, your investors will never speak to you again, or may even sue you.
Read: Legal "Blasts"
Personal experiences that will inform, educate and hopefully help the reader avoid similar detrimental movie making and distribution experiences. Legal "Blasts" is a must for every film maker.
