Dana Stabenow Quotes

Those writers that have zero say in their movie adaptations have zero say because they sell it. If you don't sell it, and you do it yourself, and you wait until the screenplay is ready, you don't have to worry about that.

I'm totally open to it being a movie or a television series or whatever, but truthfully, if no one wants to do it right, I'm also happy for 'Ex Machina' to only ever exist as a comic book.

I knew 'True Detective' wasn't something I could allow anyone else to develop. But by the time HBO expressed an interest, I still had no real experience.

I turned down all the requests for the rights to the books, for years, mostly because they wanted the rights to the characters, and to turn it into a TV series. This would have allowed them to do anything they wanted with the characters, and that just wasn't an option for me.

And usually the studios they don't want you to have credit for your movies because they want to take credit for the movies because if you get credit for your movies they've got to pay you more.

I am currently talking to one of the studios about making American Star as a TV series.

It's quite common for a television show to start off as one thing and end up as something completely different. There are so many cooks in the kitchen - the network, the studio.

On one level, all of the characters in 'Game of Thrones' grow out of George R.R. Martin's imagination. Therefore they are his. As long as they are in the novels they are his. But the moment they step forth onto the TV screen, they become filtered through the showrunners. In a business sense, it's the same way with comics.

Before, I was writing a script to make a movie. At a certain point, I became A Writer in Film and Television. So I got TV deals to write stuff, film deals to write stuff. But it's dangerous. I got into the WGA, and I became kind of, you know, a slave! They just pay you to write a script, and it's hard to make the movies.

I think that one of the most useful applications of the Creator's Bill of Rights is that it clearly indicates for creators what rights they have at the outset.

The copyright bargain: a balance between protection for the artist and rights for the consumer.

I want all of my films to belong to me.

When a writer makes something, it's theirs forever. That is the magic for me.

After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.

If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.

The business side of film has goofed up so many things, but even that's changing. It happened to the music industry and now it's happening to the film studios. It's crazy what's going on. But artists should have control of their work; especially if, as I always say, you never turn down a good idea and never take a bad idea.

The Screen Directors Guild was organized solely by and for the motion picture director... We are not anti-anything: The Guild being formed for the purpose of assisting and improving the director's work in the form of a collective body, rather than as an individual, as was necessary in the past.

The idea of being a show runner was very attractive to me, to create and control something.

With network shows, writers can be so protective of every syllable.

I went to Washington to ask for a little residual payment for the people who had written films in the early, early days, people who never got any residuals on tapes or anything at all.

Typically, when you sell your story rights to a movie production company, they can do whatever they want with it. The writer is typically not involved anymore.

Copyright is too valuable to be wholly renounced.

When people slave over those scripts and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for them, they don't usually want you to add farts.

The fact is that television, even before the movies, offered the chance to control our work and to get to do it again when we did something right. So television has always been better to writers than any other medium for a long time.

That's the hard part of television: When you walk into the network tests, you're signing away seven years of your life.