If Your Story Got Made Into a Movie

[Abbafan]

That sort of happened to me, only with a title.

I wrote a story called In the Tall Grass years ago. It was completely different than Stephen Kings story, other than belonging to the same genre. King's was much, much better as well. My story was sort of a science fiction monster movie. The best thing about it may have been the title!

 

[MillieDynamite]

My father has written under pennames and other people. He had an agent who said he could get him working writing for writers who had name power but weren't very good. He'd had a story that an acquisition editor sent back with changes to be made. Unfortunately, Dad got a divorce, his ex shredded all of his manuscripts, and that killed his will. When he called the publisher back, the AE had moved on to another publishing company, and they didn't have a copy of his manuscript. He got his agent anyway using the letter even though the acceptance at the Pub company fell through the cracks. So, until Dad returned to his story and found his other work, that kept him busy for a decade and lustrum. He didn't start writing again until just before they fostered me. By then, he had self-published under pen names. In addition, those he worked for never mentioned him to anyone (that's what you do when you use ghostwrites; you don't tell people about them).

Why didn't he write anything under his own name to see if that would work? I suppose the people he wrote for were better known than he was?

 

[Hypnobitch01]

In the early 2000s movie 'Big Fat Liar', slack high school student Jason Shepherd under threat of being banished to summer school actually does write a story for his English class by the deadline, but nobody will believe him when his story is stolen by a guy on the way to school. Months later, Jason is dismayed to find out the guy who stole his story is a movie producer, and sees the trailer for the upcoming film advertised at the cinema. In the sitcom 'How I Met Your Mother', Ted takes his new girlfriend to see a romantic comedy called 'The Wedding Bride', only to find out to his horror that the movie is based on him being dumped on his wedding day by his former fiancee Stella several years earlier.

On a similar note, what would your reaction be if you found the premise of one of your stories (with the erotic parts obviously removed or toned down) had been made into a mainstream movie? There's lots of threads about people's stories appearing on other websites, but this is kind of different. If it happened to me (not that it has or would), in an odd way perhaps I would be kind of flattered, at least I wrote something worthwhile. And of course there's very little I could do to stop it happening. It would be interesting to read other's perspectives.

Honestly I’m a pretty private person, I’d probably just leave it.

 

[Erozetta]

On a similar note, what would your reaction be if you found the premise of one of your stories (with the erotic parts obviously removed or toned down) had been made into a mainstream movie?

Contact a porn producer and make a parody with only the sex scenes and time stamps for when to pause the movie to play the sex scene.