Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Public Domain films

Public Domain Films

I am about to post an interview that I had done with a filmmaker who has decided to make a sequel to a public domain film.

To fill you in on what public domain means, these are films that are no longer under copyright protection. The most famous of these films is Night Of The Living Dead. Many of us know that Romero made the mistake of not filing for a copyright on his little masterpiece thus opening the flood gates for anyone and everyone since then to make what are known as walking dead films and even tv shows. No one had to pay for the right to do this because of the lack of copyright protection.
    
 Note, please guys take the time to protect your intellectual property. Register your scripts and copyright your finished films.

There are hundreds of films, many famous and known to you that are free and clear to be remade or sequeled thanks to the fact that they have fallen into public domain. The movie that I am doing my next series of interviews about is sequel to a 1943 Bela Lugosi film titled The Devil Bat. When I first heard about the sequel to that film I thought really, seriously. Then I watched the movie again, haven’t seen it since I was like ten, and I discovered that it was a pretty sound piece of film making. Bela was great as the lead actor. It had a basic plot that it never looked away from. At about seventy minutes in length it held interest from beginning to end.

  

 This showed me that the public domain can be a gold mine for material. After researching just some of the films that are free to remake or do a sequel to I have a list of four or five movies that I am going to talk over with my production partners. That said I have not begun to look at the foreign films that are public domain yet. I understand that there is a lot of Italian horror and thrillers that are public domain in this country. I know that we did not talk much about actual digital film making today, but this is a cool subject to look into. I have always hated the idea of remaking great films, but the idea of remaking or doing sequels to lost films or forgotten films is something that excites the film maker in me.

That will be it for today. The next post will be an interview with the film maker behind the making of The Revenge Of The Devil Bat and its crowdfunding campaign.

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