Good point, You do have the right to say, take a picture of Paul Newman if you encounter him walking on the beach. He doesn't have the right to punch you in the nose, but he may.

Yes, I know. :-)

If you take a short movie of him and enter it at Sundance maybe there is a legal problem or maybe not.

Yeh--Robert Redford is still his friend and will find what hotel I'm at so he can come punch me in the nose again.

Also, there would be the problem that if Newman's a main character and it's a fiction film instead of a documentary about how I found Paul Newman wandering about on a beach, then I would have used Newman as a character in a film he didn't sign up for. Kind of an interesting legal precedent set by one of the actors who played in Back to the Future--his footage was being reused in a sequel and he wasn't being paid again; he sued and won.

And even if it's a documentary, I wouldn't be able to use it--the bigger film festivals, HBO, PBS, etc. all wanted signed releases from every person with screen time in a documentary--and you have to provide the same paper trail for pictures and footage used.

kq

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