Recently, I took my daughter and several friends to the movie Eragon, a film based on the best-selling YA novel by Christopher Paolini. On the drive home, the girls were talking about their favorite scenes, the actors who were cast to play the main characters, how well the actors matched up with the characters in the book —the things we all talk about when we see a movie based on a book we’ve read and enjoyed. The girls also talked about the characters and scenes from the book that were left out of the movie. They asked me why that happens so often in movies based on books. I told them there probably were a lot of reasons, one of which is that sometimes it’s just not possible to condense a several hundred page book into a two hour film. Another reason, I explained, is that authors of books often are not involved with writing the screenplays for the movies based on their books. This took the girls by surprise.

When authors sell the movie rights to their books, they seldom retain control over the screenplay, the scenes that are included and omitted, plot twists, even endings.

Movies are expensive and risky to make. Accordingly, movie producers want the freedom to make the decisions about how they use the book rights they buy. They use special contracts called “option contracts” when purchasing movie rights from authors. Under the terms of these option contracts, the producer has a period of time, usually a term of months or years (the “option period”), during which the producer can try to obtain financing to make the movie. In exchange for this right, the producer pays the author an “option payment.”