How to Identify and Secure IP for Adaptation: Producer Chris Goldberg Explains

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Chris Goldberg, former studio exec and studio book scout, producer at Winterlight Pictures, discusses a pragmatic approach to turning existing intellectual property into film and television. This includes sourcing promising IP, vetting legal encumbrances, structuring options and purchases, and using attachments and financing to close deals.

Securing adaptation rights begins long before a draft is written. Goldberg outlines how producers evaluate material for adaptability, how to map the rights landscape, and how to translate that map into a contract strategy — option agreements, step deals, and purchase agreements that protect both creative intent and future revenue streams.

He also explains the practical steps a producer uses to make a package attractive to financiers and distributors: attaching a director or star, clearing chain of title early, and negotiating reversion and escalation clauses that align incentives across development and production.

What formats count as IP?

Obviously books, comic books, short stories, articles, and podcasts. But also: video games, board games, toys.

It doesn’t have to be published to be IP. Unpublished books and short stories are absolutely IP. Still, it’s important to understand the difference between the legal definition of “intellectual property” – what’s commonly referred to as “IP” in industry shorthand.

Technically and legally, a spec script is “intellectual property,” but in industry lingo, there are original screenplays and IP-based projects.

While there’s a legal argument that any written document is automatically “intellectual property,” pitch decks and treatments are not considered IP. Finally, an “idea” is not copyrightable and is definitely not IP.

Can you give a general overview of the typical steps involved in securing IP?

There are different stages. Often these days, a producer may start out by asking for a “shopping agreement” with the IP holder.

This can be a free shopping agreement or for a small fee. You’re giving the producer an exclusive right to shop the rights over a set period of time. Increasingly in a competitive market, IP needs to be packaged with a filmmaker, showrunner, or talent before a studio, streamer, or financier will show interest. These agreements give a producer time to put that package together so it can move to the next stage.

Most people have heard of an “option agreement,” which would come next – or if there’s enough interest, it just starts there. When IP is optioned, that means the rights holder is paid for a set period of time to let a company develop the project, including script adaptation and packaging.

Every option agreement includes a “purchase price.” If the project goes into production during the option period, it triggers the purchase price which is significantly larger – sometimes ten times more money.

For example, you might give an author $10,000 for an 18-month option. If the movie or series isn’t put into production, there’s often an extension – for the same or similar price for another 18 months. Then, if it’s produced, the purchase price might be $100,000. Every deal is different.

Timelines vary wildly. The 18-month option is fairly standard, as that’s a reasonable amount of time to develop a script, package it, and secure a green light. But some IP is optioned, renewed, and re-optioned for years and may or may not ever get made.

The fastest I’ve seen is The Martian, which came around when I was a book scout for Fox. Back then, I was part of a team that acquired IP for films like The Martian, Gone Girl, and The Fault in Our Stars.

The Martian took about a year and a half from being optioned to produced. That’s fast. Other projects have taken much longer. At Fox, Life of Pi took ten years. The Barbie movie was in development for decades before WB made it.

Where do you search for potential IP to adapt and how do you decide whether it’s viable?

As a studio book scout, this was my full-time job for ten years. Now as a producer and writer, I have to balance that out with the other work I need to do.

Projects can come from a lot of different places. Incoming submissions from agents, managers, and potential producing partners is one way. Since I’m trained as a scout, I like to be proactive.

Chatting with book editors with similar taste to see what they’re excited about. Checking out publishing deal announcements and reaching out to agents. The past few years, I’ve gotten even more proactive: creating my own IP.

Working with journalists to reverse-engineer great true stories into articles we can sell for film and TV. Developing high-concept short stories with established author friends. Writing my own short stories. (Some of those have been optioned and developed with producers, filmmakers, etc.)

What are some of the less common places to find IP?

I know you interviewed David Boxerbaum at Verve. He and manager/producer Scott Glassgold have quite famously sourced unpublished and self-published short stories from places like Reddit and packaged them into huge sales.

They’re not the only ones thinking like this. I’m not a Reddit guy, but I’ve built a substantial presence on Substack under my pen name Max Winter, which seems like a good platform for this, although I wish they’d actively pursue it at a corporate level.

There’s a real market in film/ TV right now for high-concept, genre short stories — but little interest whatsoever for them in traditional publishing. Many people are looking to fill the void and create a home for this kind of writing. Nobody’s cornered the market yet.

Related: Anatomy of a Production Deal

How do find the rights holder and what is the process to secure them?

Shout out to my friends at RightsCenter.com who I’ve worked with for years. They’ve built a service to help track down the agents, managers, and lawyers who rep authors and estates. I’m so old I remember having to fax publishers to request this information. Yeah. Fax.

It’s a lot easier to find these days. Once you get a hold of the correct contact, you negotiate. Relationships matter. I always try to meet the author or rights holder directly during the process, not just reps. Each situation and project is different. My business is built on relationships with the rights holders. Straight shooting and being communicative helps.

How do you proceed if you can’t source the rights holder?

I have an agent friend who has become like a Jedi when it comes to this. He loves the challenge. It’s almost like an investigation.

For me, I have to prioritize what is worth my time and how far I want to go. Rights issues can really slow or even kill a project if it’s not clean when you’ve reached the buyer stage. You have to be careful. But like I said, in the information age, it’s easier to find the right people.

What are the key deal terms that you negotiate? Which are essential and which are optional?

Every deal is different. One important thing to watch out for is reversion. Let’s say you’re a rights holder and you option your book or even get a purchase price triggered by a studio — but for whatever reason it’s not produced. Do you get the rights back? And how soon?

This might seem obvious, but it’s one way people and projects have gotten screwed.

One optional thing that seems increasingly smart is a “set up bonus.” If you option your IP to a small producer, and they turn around and sell it to a studio, you can build in a payment.

This happened to me as a writer. I optioned a short story to a director’s small company for a small amount. They sold it to Netflix, which triggered a bonus for me — which was appreciated, to say the least. We’re in an era where it often takes a layer of hustle and packaging before the big buyers will move on something. Having a system where the IP holder is rewarded when the project makes that big leap makes sense.

Otherwise, you can option something to a small company and they could add a big actor and suddenly trigger a huge buy. You don’t want to be stuck with the initial, modest option leaving a production green light as your only hope of being paid more.

Can you describe a recent case study of how you secured IP?

Sure. One of my areas of focus is older books that have great writing, concepts, and characters, that may have been optioned at some time in the past, but didn’t get made for whatever reason. I’ll pick one that’s been announced: The White Van by Patrick Hoffman.

Patrick’s a great crime writer and I developed one of his books in my last exec job. I was obsessed with his debut novel which was older and had been optioned over the years, but was available when I launched my company. I started sharing coverage of the book to potential producing partners and financiers, but I wasn’t getting anywhere.

Then, I watched the movie Reptile on Netflix and saw something in it. I had a feeling the writer/director Grant Singer would vibe with Patrick. When I had coffee with Grant, I pitched him the book. He read it quickly and loved it. Black Label Media, who financed Reptile, optioned it and made me a producing deal. Grant and Patrick did vibe. They wrote the script together.

That’s a good example of how things come together for me. I don’t have my own development financing. I’m out there hustling and matchmaking people with similar taste.

Other than registering with the Copyright Office, how can writers ensure they legally own their work?

It’s funny, I don’t even bother to register my own stories with the Copyright Office. Nothing wrong with that. Doesn’t hurt. But it’s a formality. If you write something, it is automatically covered by copyright whether you register it or not. However, registration does create legal evidence of ownership.

A lot of green writers seem paranoid about people “stealing” from them. Are you gonna turn on Netflix one day and see a movie based line-by-line on your work, but you didn’t “protect it”? Highly, highly unlikely.

But could you sign away your IP to someone in a bad deal? That happens all the time. The biggest threat to new writers is bad deals. So, the most important thing is never sign anything without having an experienced entertainment lawyer review it.

Describe how separation of rights across formats, platforms, and territories works?

Publishing, audio, and “dramatic rights” are all separate. Dramatic rights include film, TV, streaming, and even stage adaptation rights.

Interestingly, an emerging category of dramatic rights is the Vertical Drama space, and many deals separate vertical rights from film and TV.

Publishing is often by language or territory. For example, when we sold the book I co-wrote, we sold North American English language rights first, and then about 10 other languages and territories separately.

Most big studios, streamers, and financiers are looking for worldwide dramatic rights. You can build into your deal what would happen if they started with a film, but then produce a TV series later or whatever — but it’s usually an all-in-one deal.

For example, Warner Brothers wouldn’t be interested in just getting film rights and letting you sell the TV rights to Apple separately. That’s not how it works.

They also want sequel rights. You get paid more if they make a sequel, but it’s not like you can just shop the sequel to another studio.

It even comes down to “character rights.” When JK Rowling sold the Harry Potter book series, it’s not like she can write a spinoff with Harry or Hermione, or even a minor character, and sell that version to Universal. The characters are part of the IP.

Famously, somehow Hannibal Lecter is controlled by the author Thomas Harris, but Clarice Starling is controlled by MGM. So, when MGM made a Clarice spinoff series, they couldn’t even mention the existence of Hannibal Lecter on that show.

Some authors have made their rights a nightmare by having key characters pop up in cameos in otherwise unconnected books.

Finally, what about AI? How will it affect the IP space?

It definitely already is. Obviously there’s the lawsuits over LLMs that were trained on copyrighted material without the author’s permission or compensation. Major issue. And controversy over books pumped out by major publishers that turn out to be AI slop.

But it’s way more than that. Personally, I’m not an anti-AI absolutist. It’s inevitable and it’s not going anywhere. It’s a reality of life. In the best cases, it’s a powerful tool. One area I’m most interested in? AI enhancement of scouting and IP databases. AI may have a much bigger impact on discovery than creation.

Imagine being able to search millions of books, articles, podcasts, and stories for material that specifically matches a filmmaker’s taste, budget range, genre interests, or specific tropes or key words? If done right, that would lead to more human writers getting discovered.

Using it on anything adjacent to actual writing can feel more dubious. Research? Yes. Structure? Outlining? Coverage? Notes? Where’s the line? Obviously prompting ChatGPT to spew out “creative writing” and passing it off as your “work” is horrific. But no matter how “good” it’s bound to get, I still think the one thing that will remain valuable in an increasingly dystopian world is a unique voice.

I had a meeting as a writer with an A-List producer and the first thing he said was: “I wanted to meet you because of your voice. Your writing doesn’t sound like AI!” In this moment, I thought, that means I’m doing something right. Writers too human and original to ever be mistaken for a robot are the ones whose IP will be coveted in the future.