Neil Simon's Mistake

If you enjoyed the plays or movies Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, Brighton Beach Memoirs, and Biloxi Blues (among many others) you've enjoyed Neil Simon's work. He's one of the most successful and funniest modern writers. He's won several Tony and Emmy awards and was nominated for four Academy Awards, all while making millions of dollars from his writing. He became known early in his career for helping rewrite shows out of town before they premiered on Broadway. His play doctoring work was how he got the nickname of "Doc" Simon. I've been a fan of his work for many years, and had the good luck to work as an assistant on his play Actors and Actresses. As Neil Simon writes in his memoir, "Rewrites," his talent as a writer did not always translate into business. In 1965, after Barefoot in the Park and Odd Couple were big hits on Broadway, Paramount approached Simon's business manager to buy the company that held all the rights to those two plays. Paramount offered $125,000, which was a significant amount of money in those days. Simon had misgivings, but because his business manager told him it was a good deal, he ultimately decided to sell. That meant that Neil Simon, the creator and author of the play "The Odd Couple," received no money from the run of the TV series, or any ancillary revenue from DVDs and videocassettes. He receives no royalty money from stage productions of Barefoot in the Park, which is still performed all over the world. For a $125,000 fee, Simon literally gave up tens if not hundreds of millions in revenue. In his memoir Simon takes responsibility for this decision. He says, "No one forced me to make the deal. It was a judgment call, and I let the wrong person sway me in making that judgment." Of course, when he made this deal in the sixties, very few people realized the amount of money one could make from ancillary markets for content. However today we expect that the number of outlets for our content will continue to expand in ways we can't even predict now. Hence the phrase in many content contracts - "all rights in all media currently existing or that may exist, in perpetuity." Never sell all rights to your content to a third party. If your business manager tells you to sell all your rights, get a new business manager. If your content reaches a good sized audience, it may provide you with an income for many years (see my earlier post about Norman Greenbaum, who still lives off royalties from his one hit, 'Spirit in the Sky.'). Of course, like Norman Greenbaum, you should license your content to third parties for distribution and collect your fees and royalties; just don't sell all the rights. I've advised never to sign any contract without having it reviewed by a lawyer. Don't even bother having your lawyer review a contract asking you to give up all rights to your content in perpetuity. Just don't sign it. I should add that Neil Simon wrote a lot more hits, and made a great deal of money from them. Even with this success, it still bothered him that he no longer owned the rights to two of his greatest plays. Learn from Doc Simon's mistake. Own your content.