IP Picks🔎: 1906 S.F. Quake Dramas, a Gay 1950s P.I. and Spooky Short Stories
âž• The tricky hurdles to making a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
We’ve got a superb lineup this week, which includes two different takes on the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake (one fictional, one factual), two genre short stories from Assemble Media (one horror, one sci-fi) and a cool period detective series with a gay lead.
I’ve been thinking about the news last week that Chris Rock was teaming up with Steven Spielberg and the King family on a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic using Jonathan Eig’s well-received new biography, King: A Life, as the underlying source material. At first blush, this is a dream team, but I think a King biopic is a much trickier lift than it appears on the surface.
There’s an IP component to this story. Back in 2009, Spielberg acquired the life rights to Martin Luther King Jr. from the Estate. As we know, life rights don't really get you anything legally. They're designed to get cooperation, to keep real people portrayed in a movie from trashing it, to get some insider access that might not be publicly available. (Whenever I try to make sense of what life rights get you, I think of one of my favorite Lyndon Johnson quotes, said about J. Edgar Hoover: "I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in." Life rights are all about keeping people in the tent.)