Understand contractual, legal and ethical obligations in the television and film industries

To understand the contractual, legal and ethical obligations in the television and film industries, I’ll have to research the some of the contract processes, looking at the codes of practice and at a board of classification to see the legal issues.
Firstly I’m going to start off with the types of contracts there are in the industry there are the confidentiality and the exclusivity contracts, confidentiality is when a deal and/or the project is kept under wraps from the public, examples of this in the film industry include Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace where production of the film was kept secret and no one in the public knew of the films existence until a trailer was shown, a more recent example is J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, in this case production of the film was known, but it was done on a closed set and the way the characters looked were kept under wraps from the public. There aren’t as many examples from the television industry that apply to the confidentiality ruling, although having said that it goes without saying that production on television shows are kept under wraps and only occasionally are ‘spoilers’ or on-set photos getting out to public knowledge. The other type of contract is exclusivity; this is when for a period of time a production company has the right to produce an idea into a film or television programme, this is most common for an adaptation of a book, which a company buys the rights and has a period of exclusivity in order to produce it, an recent example would be the adaptation of Watchmen that went round all the studios until Warner Bros. finally developed it into a film. Overall the different types of contracts used in the industries determine what can be known about the project as well as who has the right to produce it.
Other aspects of a contract include the employment legislation, which include the sort of terms and conditions of the employee’s rights, some which are paramount for production, others that aren’t as important and a few more that don’t usually apply to the production process. To start it off, health and safety is written into the contracts to make sure the person contracted understands responsibility of action, should accidents or unforeseen consequences occur on set, the studio isn’t liable any injury caused to the crew member.
Another obligation that is considered in the contract is the employee rights. In the contract it can be clearly stated that the employee can’t be discriminated in any shape or form, whether it is age, sex or race when being refused work on those sorts of grounds, it works just the same in the Film and TV industry, where equal rights to work on a project is enforced. There is also a minimum wage as well as equal pay, going back to be discriminated for being different despite doing the same amount of work.
Intellectual Property is a very important aspect for contract as it literally protects a companies name and image, with copyright laws no one else is able to develop an idea that is similar, if not the same, as what the company is already producing or produced over a period of time without permission. A normal copyright law would consist of no one being able to reproduce a project for a period of around 70 years, however whoever holds the copyright for it can sell it on to another company so they can have the right to reproduce it, this is very similar to the exclusivity types of contracts that was mentioned earlier the only difference being that the company who now holds the rights can remake a project for their own workload.
Other obligations that are important in the industry are ethical ones; the codes of practice plays a big part in this obligation as it allows filming to take place with permission, as long as the crew keeps to the code they can work on filming. For example if they were a scene where guns are being used, the local police would have to be informed otherwise they’d be a mix up on set, filming permission would be denied and the crew would be out of work for not following the codes of practice. Certain procedures must also be obeyed in order for crewmembers to not only work but also get paid.
One final obligation is legal ones. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) acts as a regulator for the public, classifying film projects to see how suitable it is for certain audiences, they organise the films suitability through: language, sex, violence and other themes that may be unsuitable for certain audiences, then categorise the films into different age groups based upon what the film contains. If the distribution company wants a specific age rating in order to maximise the profits, they sent the film off to a company like the BBFC to get it classified, if it comes back with the rating they didn’t want they’d re-edit it until they get the desired classification. An example of this is the latest Die Hard film, where the company 20th Century Fox wanted have the film a 12A, PG-13 in America, to make its audience wider and therefore make it more profitable, to do this they` re-cut the film removing some of the profanity and violence so it can fit into the lower category Without a rating a film can’t legally be released and therefore no money can be made, so it is paramount for a film to be sent to the BBFC and other companies like it, making it one of the most of obligations in the film and television industry.
In conclusion looking at the contractual obligations we can see why confidentiality and exclusivity is important for companies to control how much can be known to the public and what can be produce, for employees it protects their well-being in the workplace. Ethical and legal obligations also make sure that a production crew is working to the right conditions and a project isn’t too unsuitable for its desired target audience.