DVD Diffs *spoiler alert* S3.2 "May"
quote:
Originally posted by Camelyn:
Warning: potentially ignorant question for Aleck.
Salter Street is now owned by Alliance Atlantis. Do they not have any say in the marketing of Lexx? Does Salter still have all the rights to Lexx, or does Alliance just not give a horses patoot?Colour me curious
Camelyn
I’m not clear as to the question, but let me give it a shot. Salter, I believe, retains some autonomy under the ownership of Alliance Atlantis. While AA does own the programs under the Salter name, and they have a vested interest in the marketing of said programs, they aren’t micro-managing the day-to-day workings of Salter. The people we had trouble with weren’t from AA’s legal department, they were from Salter’s, and were in H’fax. I think that AA leaves a fair amount of trust in the decision-making of Salter when it comes to marketing the programs that they’ve established. We do have to run legal stuff with the DVDs by Alliance Atlantis, but most of the decision-making and approval goes through the folks in the Halifax offices. What happened, I believe, is that when the book deal with Valdron fell through, Salter panicked and wanted a seperate license for anything *resembling* a book. And if they decide that something falls under the “merchandise” heading rather than “promotional,” it’s their decision (though this distinction, I’ll add, was not made clear to us in any of the contracts signed, and the precise thing we’d prepared for the [i]LEXX[/i] sets was identical to any number of booklets we’d done for other programs, and we’d never had any suggestion that this was out of line), and if they say that what we have is a book rather than a promotional DVD insert, well, they can call it a book if they want. It’s their intellectual property we’re using here, and they have the rights to make whatever distinction they wish. Alliance, probably wisely, doesn’t enter into the picture unless it gets past the approval of Salter and then *they* decide not to approve it. It’s like the situation with Wilco’s last album, [i]Yankee Hotel Foxtrot[/i]. Reprise, their record label, decided that the album was too strange and uncommercial to release, and Wilco were booted from the label. They took the album to Bar/None records, who were happy as clams to put it out. Both labels are owned by AOL/Time/Warner. The parent company probably didn’t pay any attention to anything that went on, and trusted the decision-making of the respective label heads.
–Aleck