Most fantasy readers know (and love) The Last Unicorn, which Peter S. Beagle describes as “the book that people know who don’t know anything else I’ve ever written; it will probably haunt the rest of my career…” The 1982 animated feature (left, click to enlarge) is a cult favorite; the recent DVD release sold at least 300,000 copies in less than two years. But–as Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing discovered last weekend–Beagle’s not getting any money from the movie, even though he wrote the screenplay. So his business manager, Connor Cochran, is urging fans to contribute funds to help Beagle fight Granada Media for the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” Cochran claims he ought to have received, whether it’s by outright donation or buying audiobooks of The Last Unicorn that come with a new novella, “Two Hearts,” set it that story’s world–the first thing Beagle’s done anything like a sequel to his best-known work.
“The original contract that Peter signed for the film rights and screenwriting of the Last Unicorn animated film specified a number of rights,” Cochran said during a phone conversation Sunday night. “Peter was guaranteed 5 percent of the gross revenues of all merchandising for the movie, which we know he hasn’t even gotten, and he was guaranteed 5 percent of the net profits from all distribution of the movie.” In the twenty-some years since the film was first released in the United States, ownership of the film passed from its original producer, Britain’s ITC Films, to Carlton Media International, which subsequently merged with Granada. Through the original theatrical release, plus subsequent showings on cable and satellite TV as well as videotape and DVD releases, the film should have recouped its production costs (in the ballpark of $3 million) by now, even taking the vagaries of Hollywood accounting into effect–but that may not even matter. When Carlton bought the ITC film library in 1999, as Cochran understands the situation based on discussions with Granada execs and his own attorney at entertainment powerhouse Hughes Hubbard & Reed, it did not carrt forward any liabilities connected to those movies…which means it can’t claim any liabilities now, and that means Beagle’s entitled to 5 percent of nearly every dollar the film has earned Granada for the last six years, including the $250,000 they made selling the rights to a live-action remake currently in pre-production
But there’s another twist of the knife. Beagle also wrote the screenplay for the animated Lord of the Rings back in the ’70s, as Cochran explains on his website:
“Producer Saul Zaentz paid Peter a ‘consulting fee’ of only $5,000…Saul Zaentz has gotten nearly two hundred million dollars out of his Tolkien rights since The Fellowship of the Ring was released. [And] the Saul Zaentz Company has so far refused to share any of that with Peter S. Beagle, not even as a goodwill gesture in respect for what his work made possible.”
If you listen closely, you can hear John Fogerty laughing. Cochran admits that Beagle’s contract with Zaentz was grossly one-sided–the result of extremely poor work by Beagle’s then-agent–but says he has some hope for the arbitration process, based on the outcome of similar California cases. If an arbitrator were to find the business practices involved in Beagle’s work on The Lord of the Rings egregiously unfair, he or she could simply rule in Beagle’s favor despite the contract and base the award on contemporary standards of compensation. That would be an added bonus for Beagle, since the current Writer’s Guild contract (the standard in question) covers work for animation, which wasn’t the case in the 1970s.