I've recieved dozens of e-mails wanting to film the short "The Bench", I can say yes to all of them right? It's not going to come and bite me back in the ass, is it?

You can, unless somebody is offering to buy it from you, then it would be theirs and theirs alone.

I wouldn't recommend letting too many people film it though.  With that many floating around you could possibly have your film in a festival twice.

Check into their previous work if any is available, and use your discretion from there.

Yeah, take Mike's advice.

From my experience, a lot of requests to produce a short never come to fruition. For Anniversary, I had 15+ requests, and so far it's been produced once, and to a pretty poor standard. I turned down many requests for this, accepted a few, one of which made it to the storyboarding stage but got no further.

I have similar stories for my other shorts.

My advice, keep your options open and maintain regular contact with the producer. If possible, have a contract drawn up to ensure you receive sufficient credit and a dvd copy. Nobody wants to get credited as 'special thanks' even when their voice over is butchered by a prepubescent teen with a breaking voice.

Am I bitter?

Yes.

Good luck.

A lot of filmmakers get upset if they're producing your script and find out that you've given the rights to other people as well.  

I had this happen with my short Suicide.   I would give permission out to people and nothing would come of it.  After a certain point, I e-mailed everyone.  They all said that they decided not to do it.  It wasn't until the fourteenth guy that Suicide actually got produced.  And then there was the one guy who I forgot about.  He produced it, too, which really pissed off the first one.  The second guy agreed not to enter his production of Suicide in any film festival, which made the first guy very happy.  

Directors don't want different versions of the same scripts floating around.

It took four tries before For Entertainment Purposes Only made it to production.  While it was being done, a film student asked to produce it.  I spoke with the first director who wasn't fond of the idea but we came to an agreement that if the second one would not be entered in festivals, it'd be fine.

If you have several people who want to produce something you wrote, you can pick and choose who does it.  Ask them to send you samples.  I've since decided that only local people will produce anything that I wrote.  THis way, I get to meet the people face-to-face so I can size them up.  I have a little more control of things this way and it's easier to stay in the loop.  Of course, living in New York City makes this easier to accomplish.


Phil