Chapter Twenty-One:  A Secret Publishing Clause

The paragraph granted exclusive motion-picture, television and adaptation rights.

It said nothing about publishing.

A single paragraph, buried on page fourteen of a document that ran to nearly sixty, granting the studio "exclusive motion picture, television, and adaptation rights" to the manuscript titled Purradise, along with "sequel, prequel, and franchise rights derived from characters and settings as depicted in the Picture," and nothing whatsoever about the underlying prose itself, the actual sentences Localad had written, which remained, as they had from the very beginning, entirely his.

“This is not a loophole,” Priya explained, when Localad called her that evening, still turning the pages over in his mind, half-convinced there had to be some catch he was missing. "It's just what publishing and film rights have always been, legally, two separate bundles of rights that happen to originate from the same piece of work. Studios option film rights all the time without touching publishing rights, because most first-time novelists sell their book to a publisher first and the film rights get optioned afterward, sometimes years later. Your case was unusual because you sold the film rights before the book was ever published at all. Desmond's team structured the deal around the movie because that's what they wanted. Nobody on their side was thinking about your publishing rights because, frankly, nobody expected an unpublished small-town bookstore owner to have any leverage worth worrying about. “A loophole is an unintended gap. This is a door they never purchased.” 

“Why didn’t they?”

“Because they wanted a film. Also, probably because no one believed the unpublished book had independent commercial value.”

“Well that’s encouraging.”

“It is quite strategically useful to be underestimated. Emotionally, I admit, the branding requires work.”

Priya sent him a marked copy of the contract. Her annotations were neat, surgical and occasionally chilling.

The restraint clause prevented Localad from criticising the adaptation publicly. It did not prevent him from publishing his own novel. It did not require him to praise the film. It did not require him to stop other people comparing the two either.

“Can I say, ‘This is the book, not the movie’?”

“Yes.”

“Can I say, ‘Jasmine is a woman’?”

“Yes, as a factual description of your own character.”

“Can I say, ‘The Wound does not explode’?”

“You may discuss your book,” Priya said. “Its themes, characters, writing process and publication. You may say it is the text you wrote. You may say it is unchanged.”

“You may describe whatever occurs in your novel. But please, avoid saying the film’s choice was idiotic.”

“What if Mrs. Alvarez says it?”

“Mrs. Alvarez did not sign your contract.”

This was an alarming amount of freedom to place in Mrs. Alvarez’s hands.

"So, I can just go ahead and publish it? As is?"

"You can publish it exactly as you wrote it," Priya confirmed. "You'll need to be careful about a few things. if the finished book uses any specific proper nouns or plot elements that got added during the screenplay process and aren't in your original manuscript, those might belong to the production in some derivative sense, so it's worth being precise about publishing your original text rather than some hybrid version. But the version you finished eighteen months ago, before any of this started? That's entirely yours. Nobody bought it. Nobody can stop you."

Localad sat with that information for a long moment, feeling something unclenching within his chest that had been knotting for a while, for the better part of a year and a half.

"There's a no disparagement clause," he said slowly, working through the shape of the plan even as he spoke it. "I can't say anything negative about the film at all?"

"Correct."

"But I'm not talking about the film. I'm publishing a book."

"That's exactly right," Priya said, and he could hear, again, that careful note of excitement in her voice. "You're not disparaging anyone. You're not giving interviews about how the adaptation betrayed your vision, you're not going on record calling Brick Holland miscast, you're not saying a single critical word about the studio, the director, or anyone associated with the production. You're simply publishing a novel you wrote, under your own name, and letting readers draw whatever comparisons they want to draw on their own. There's nothing in that restraint clause that requires you to prevent other people from noticing the differences themselves."

It was, Localad thought, the kind of plan that felt almost too clean, too neatly satisfying, the sort of thing that happened in the stories he wrote rather than in the actual messy business of contracts and studios and legal departments with more resources than he'd ever have. He found himself waiting for the catch, the way he'd been trained to wait for one over eighteen months of every good piece of news arriving wrapped around a worse one.

"What's the risk?" he asked. "Realistically. If I do this."

Priya was quiet for a moment, choosing her words with the same care she brought to everything. "Realistically, the studio's legal team might send a letter," she said. "They might argue that publishing the book now, with this level of public attention on the film, constitutes some kind of bad-faith interference with their marketing or their sequel plans. I don't think that argument would hold up, legally. You have every right to publish your own novel, and timing your publication to fully coincide with the public’s interest in your own story isn't disparagement, it's just good business sense, the kind any published author would use. But I want you to understand there's a difference between 'this is legally sound' and 'this will definitely be comfortable.' They may not be happy. Desmond may not be happy. You should decide whether you can live with that before you decide whether to do it."

The risk was real. The studio might object to the timing. It might claim Localad was exploiting public confusion or interfering with sequel prospects. Priya believed such arguments would fail, but the law did not prevent wealthy organisations from sending letters. It merely gave those letters somewhere to go.

“Are you prepared for them to be unhappy?” she asked.

Localad thought about the past eighteen months full of accommodating unhappiness belonging to everyone except himself. The six-figure deal balanced against Jasmine's flattened arc, the shop's saved finances balanced against a soundstage explosion drowning out the quietest scene he'd ever written, the studio's praise-then-cut emails balanced against a shouted line replacing twenty years of grief and found that the question of comfort, at this point, had very little pull on him at all.

"I can live with it," he said. "I think I've been living with something much worse than an uncomfortable letter for a year and a half."

He called Desmond next.

Desmond listened without interruption as Localad explained the plan.

When Localad finished, there was a long silence.

“You’re going to publish now?” Desmond said.

“I’m going to publish what I wrote.”

“The studio will see it as a response.”

“It is a response.”

“You can’t say that publicly.”

“I’m not public.”

Desmond exhaled.

“I should warn you not to.”

“But?”

“But I’m the man who found the book and then helped bury it beneath a film. So my moral authority has become mostly decorative.”

Localad waited.

Desmond’s voice changed. The producer receded; the reader from Harbour & Page returned, the man who had once missed an exit because Jasmine would not let him stop.

“What the Hell, go ahead and publish it,” he said. “I don’t know what it will cost me. Publish it anyway.”

This was not absolution. Desmond did not ask for that, which was the first sign he might eventually deserve some.

Localad called Marjory that night, and for the first time since the premiere, he told her the whole plan, start to finish, and she was silent for so long after he finished that he had to check whether the call had dropped.

She had listened to the entire plan without interruption.

“Well?” he asked.

"Localad," she said finally, and he could hear, even over the distance, that she was smiling. "Come home. Bring the plan with you. Bring the contract, the manuscript and any suit expensive enough to sell. Let’s do this from the shop, where it all started."

“I don’t own the suit.”

“Then leave it. We do have standards.”

Localad smiled.

“Marjory?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For keeping the original version of me in stock.”

Her voice softened.

“Low turnover,” she said. “Difficult item. No one else would take it.”

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