STEAMBOAT WILLIE: Using Famous Characters to Break-In!
Every year, famous pop-culture characters enter the public domain, and nothing is stopping them from catapulting a screenwriter's successful break into today's show business market. This live webinar will demystify the process of utilizing pop-culture characters from the past to create brand new intellectual property. Participants will learn how to search public databases including from the U.S. Copyright Office, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, to find defunct brands and fictional characters they can populate their writing with – to increase the chances of their work attracting a buyer.
We’ve all grown up with characters from popular culture that have inspired us to create our own works of fiction. Some of us have even written “fan-fiction” for our favorite shows and movie franchises. This live webinar will describe in detail how a writer can now take beloved characters and their backstories from the past and repurpose them in a contemporary framework that will bring them back to life for a new generation. By the end of this webinar, writers will learn how to search and acquire intellectual property from the past legally, by researching which characters and brands have fallen into the public domain.
Join Jon James Miller, award-winning screenwriter, novelist, and professional story editor, to learn the tools necessary to take advantage of brands and characters everyone knows and loves to shine a limelight on their own original work. He’ll explain how to bring these characters back to life with unique narrative techniques intended to engage readers and keep them reading. Writers will come away from this webinar with a knowledge of how to incorporate public domain properties and reintroduce them to today’s audiences.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
- How to search public databases to find public domain intellectual properties
- How to incorporate pop-culture characters of the past into your writing
- How to recapture the magic of a pop-culture character from the past
- How to recreate and old character’s backstory for a contemporary audience
- How to secure the rights to characters and brands everybody knows from the past
- How to maximize public awareness of past intellectual property to benefit your work
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
- Writers who want to take an old character or brand and make it new again
- Writers who want to market their work utilizing public domain properties from the past
- Writers who want to build a new franchise using old intellectual property, legally
- Screenwriters who want to recreate the magic of an old character from the past
- Writers who want to know how to search public information databases for new content
- Screenwriters who want to boost their chances of a sale by using beloved characters
- Writers who want to acquire defunct brands and bring them to today’s audiences
- Screenwriters who want to increase their chances of sale by using familiar characters from the past
Instructor
Jon James Miller started his Hollywood career as a script reader for producers at 20th Century Fox Studios, Paramount Pictures, and MGM Studios. Jon co-wrote Adapting Sideways: How To Turn Your Screenplay Into A Publishable Novel (Komenar Publishing), which chronicled the process of adapting his award-winning screenplay into a novel. Jon’s debut novel, Looking For Garbo, was published by Amphorae Publishing Group in 2019. Jon has been featured in Creative Screenwriting Magazine and is a frequent contributor to SCRIPT Magazine. He is represented by the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
This is an onDemand webinar.
The Writers Store does not offer any refunds. All sales are final.