What saved Ledge was a WGA-required provision in Fenjves’ contract that allows the author of a script to reacquire the rights to unproduced original material at the five-year mark; it’s not a provision used very often, since most writers don’t have the funding to take back their projects, and the time period for reclaiming the material is short.

So, is this true? And, if so, is that five-year mark something specific to this particular contract, rather than a standard period? What’s more, just how “short” is the time period for reclaiming a script?

As it turns out, the Writers Guild of America has a page on its website dedicated to reacquiring scripts, and the above appears to be true. But six conditions need to be satisfied for a reacquisition attempt.

1. Was the project theatrical?
2. Was the project done under employment or, if it was a sale, were you a professional writer at time of sale?
3. Was the project not based on any pre-existing material?
4. Has it been AT LEAST 5 years and NOT MORE than 7 years since you last delivered material to the Company?
5. Has the project never been produced?
6. Is it currently not in active development?

Here’s what we know (or don’t know) about Goners in light of the above. Goners, of course, was a theatrical project, and the script, if I’m reading the copyright record correctly, was written as a “work for hire”. (That copyright record is dated March 3, 2005. Additionally, the “short form option” for the script, between Mutant Enemy, Inc. and Universal, was recorded with the copyright office on November 29, 2007, with a date of execution of November 2, 2007.) The script was not based on pre-existing material, has never been produced, and unless something secretly has changed is not in active development.

That last point is important, and likely factors into the criteria I skipped, that of the two-year time period starting at five years out, so let’s take a moment to look at Goners’ development process as currently understood.

As far as is known, Joss has not delivered a draft of Goners to Universal since sometime in 2007, when his then-latest was “not incredibly well-received”. By the middle of 2008, the project was known to have gotten back-burnered by the studio. As late as mid-2010, Joss had indicated that there’d been some interest expressed at revisiting Goners when he was finished making The Avengers.

So, back to the critical time period criteria. Based on the above (plus this), the last time Joss delivered a draft of Goners to Universal appears to have been in 2007, which would make the start of the two-year reacquisition period 2012. This year.

In theory, then, under this particular provision of the WGA’s Theatrical and Television Basic Agreement, and if all of the above development and rewrite dates are correct, Joss has access to a process for buying back the script, during the time period running roughly from late 2012 to late 2014.

The two wild cards in all of this, however, are: the aforementioned potential for revisiting the project now that The Avengers is nearing release; and, of course, money. In the case of the former, the almost inevitable success of that film could certainly reignite interest on the part of anyone who happily turns out to own a script penned by Joss. In the case of the latter, that same success surely would yield no end of producers willing to help Joss extricate a script in which he was still interested.

And that, in the end, appears to be the most critical issue: is Joss still interested in Goners?

He certainly still was just a year and a half ago when he made those remarks about certain parties revisiting it. So, as near as I can tell and if all of the above dates are correct, beginning this year — a year which will see the release of The Avengers, The Cabin in the Woods, Much Ado About Nothing, and the production of In Your Eyes — on Goners the ball potentially could very much be in Joss’ court.

Update: Any writerly types want to weigh in on whether or not the second reacquisition type mentioned on the WGA page in question comes into play here, based on the information related above about Goners?

Update: A note about the wild card of money: Variety reported at the time of the script sale in 2005 that Universal paid “seven figures” for it, which certainly helps reflect the Hollywood Reporter remark that “most writers don’t have the funding to take back their projects”.

This site would like to humbly suggest that one way to avoid this alleged problem would be to pull Goners out of the development hell into which the studio so ignominously sent it. Then again, given his self-criticism about how poorly they’ve handled other productions, perhaps that’s not the best idea?

I’m taking no position on his observations here, but if for the sake of argument we take them at face value, if he’s correct about their mishandling of so many recent productions, maybe unshelving Goners isn’t enough.

Instead, Meyer could simply choose to free it, thereby allowing it to pursue production elsewhere. That wouldn’t much help with Meyer’s charge against his own studio, but it would at least get things moving again.

He noted during this presentation, with a completely straight face, that one of the executives who had read the script had told him that they liked it but that “it has the burden of not being a sequel”. Joss found that statement to be a really depressing commentary on the way Hollywood is falling apart, and believes that such decay is increasing at an alarming rate.

There’s nothing in this specifically to suggest whether said executive was criticizing or merely observing, but it perhaps provides some context for the seemingly endless studio notes/rewrite process that at one point had been underway at Universal.

(Perhaps not so incidentally, given Joss’ prior experiences with Wonder Woman and Goners, Cabin was presented to MGM in a take-it-or-leave it fashion, with Joss and Drew insisting that greenlighting the picture was a condition of its sale.)

Parent and the financially-beleaguered MGM then parted ways in October 2010 (with The Cabin in the Woods produced but unreleased), finally landing an arrangement with Paramount (more here) this past February.

In his August 2010 remarks in Sydney I posted earlier, Joss said the following perhaps-relevant thing about Goners.

It may not be dead, It may not be entirely dead. The producers that were attached to it still are attached to it emotionally, and the regime at Universal has changed, and I actually met with them recently and they were saying, “You know, you’ll be finished with the Avengers in ten or twelve years, so why don’t we revisit this.”

It’s not especially clear from this with whom he met — the producers that were attached to it (presumably Mary Parent and Scott Stuber) or the “regime at Universal”. If the former, it remains to be seen whether Parent is able to make anything happen with regards to Goners, since her deal with Paramount gives them first look at any projects she generates, the copyright on Goners is held by Universal Pictures as a work for hire, and the length of their option on it remains unknown.

But since I offered occasional updates on Parent over the years here, it seemed a good idea to catch up with her whereabouts.

Goners, written after Serenity wrapped, sounds a bit like the way Buffy started, with a female character, Mia, who encounters horror in the real world but combats it with a strength she’s learning to use. Words Joss has used to describe Goners include “dark,” “darker” and “horrific.”

Joss has said he envisions Goners as the antidote for torture porn and called it “inspirational.” If anyone could merge heartfelt positive emotion with mutilation, it would be Joss.

Joss announced this “fantasy thriller” in September 2005. I’m writing this in January 2011.

What happened?

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what pushed Goners to the back burner, but other projects obviously got in the way. However, someone at Universal Studios had real intentions to make this movie: an official website, gonersmovie.com, was created but was later taken down without comment.

Goners’ IMDB page once stated that the movie would be released in 2010; currently, it says the movie will be released in 2011, which is unlikely, considering Joss’ current commitment to The Avengers.

However, Joss was quoted as saying that he wants to return to Goners after he’s finished with The Avengers. Whether it happens remains to be seen.

One thing in the above that’s decidedly wrong: the referenced website was a fan site, not an official one. Hopefully Blastr’s contention that Goners is a project that will never happen will prove to be just as wrong.

Most recently, he had some lengthy remarks about both the movie itself and its status at an appearance at the Sydney Opera House in August 2010.

Goners was typical of my career. I wrote it, was very excited by it, had a lot of heat, sold it… into the vault never to be seen. Yeah, I was talking about that when Serenity was going up because I was going to make it at Universal, but, err, that didn’t really happen did it?

Not really sure what to say about it. It’s about a young woman with “special powers” and she gathers a group of people with “special powers”, they conflict, in the end they work together. Wait a minute, I do suck. Wow, it’s weird to realise that in this room.

No, it probably was as close to myself, what I’ve been describing of myself today, as anything I’ve written, because the lead character Mia is painfully shy and very much alone and it’s a movie that is all about being alone, which is ultimately the thing which I’m writing about all the time. And it’s also a horror/action/super awesome thing.

It may not be dead, It may not be entirely dead. The producers that were attached to it still are attached to it emotionally, and the regime at Universal has changed, and I actually met with them recently and they were saying, “You know, you’ll be finished with the Avengers in ten or twelve years, so why don’t we revisit this.”

So, keep your fingers crossed.

Before that, back in a September 2009 interview with Blastr (still SCI FI Wire at the time), he made something of a plea to the studio.

What about Goners?

Whedon: I wish I could say something about Goners. Universal, release Goners into the wild so it can be free again.

I use these two updates as a way to re-launch What Is Mia Made Of, in the hopes that with the wide-ranging attention and mainstream appeal of the Avengers, the long and frustrating banishment of Goners into develoment hell might, at last, in the coming years, come to an end.

On the one hand, Joss says the project “has gotten backburnered”. However, despite that, and despite intimations in a number of statements that he perhaps has been less than pleased with the studio process on the script, he also is quoted as saying this: “I still have hope for it, though.”

Whedon once told us that he was writing a script for a movie, which he called a “very personal thing about human connection and questioning whether there is such a thing at all.” It was to be an original story, a horror fantasy, “a little darker than I’m used to,” about a young woman who gains some powers. “Not something I’ve written about before,” he joked, “but I’m excited to try some new territory.” Universal, however, has not been quite as excited just yet, as “Goners” “has gotten backburnered,” Whedon said, meaning it’s still in development. “I still have hope for it, though.”

Variety is reporting that Mary Parent, former vice chair of worldwide production at Universal Pictures (and then the Parent in Stuber/Parent) and the person interested in Goners, has taken a new position at MGM.

Of course, most of this is academic at this point, since Joss is focusing on getting Dollhouse up and running. Nonetheless, it seemed an item of note.

Addendum: There’s more at the Goners Blog and some discussion at WHEDONesque.