Screenwriting : Producer Trying To Steal My Short Film Script For Himself by Jeffrey Bowie Jr.

Hello, my name is Jeffrey Bowie Jr and I need some basic legal advise. For context, I contacted Red Dino Productions in August 2022 by sending them a logline and synopsis of my script, Blackbird. Shawn, the head of the production, liked it and wanted to move forward with the project. I was looking for a producer to help film the script. 

Shawn did give me notes on the short script, but I didn't like them so I ignored the notes. In terms of anything else, that's the only contribution he made to the script. He didn't rewrite it. He didn't doctor it, just some notes and added a couple of words here and there, but less than 1 page of a ten page script. 

We were supposed to shoot the film in August 2023. Unfortunately, we couldn't because he backed out due to his scheduled being overwhelmed with other projects. We didn't set another date to shoot, but we promised to do another meeting to confirm another date. We never had that meeting. I tried to do another zoom call to discuss the future of the project, but he canceled in November 2023 and again in January 2024. I never heard back from him since. It felt like the project was being scrapped since it was nearly year and we still haven't come up with another date.

He finally contacted me again in June. Blamed me for delaying the project for two years, even though he was the one who scrapped the original date and kept backing out of the zoom meetings. I got very frustrated with Shawn as the conversation dived into him gaslighting the situation and putting the blame on me. He started to say I owed him money, which makes no sense since I wasn't the one who backed out of the original date. Frustrated, I decided to scrap the partnership with him.

As you can imagine, he wasn't happy. He's claiming that I owe him money, but he has yet to show me any proof that I do. Now he's claiming that he owns the rights to the script since I backed out of the production of the film. The contract states that the rights of any produced work by the production company does go to him. The film never went into production. There was no principal photography or any of that. He did get actors and locations for the film, but again, he was the one who changed the date.

He's adamant that the script was produced under him, thus he owns the rights. However, I came to him with a finished script. In fact, I still have the email where he asked if I had a finished script and I said yes.

I have no doubt that what he's doing is illegal. I keep asking about these so-called charges I owe him but he refuses to give me anything on it. I even asked to talk to his lawyer and said our conversation was over. I do have a copyright of Blackbird. My concern lies in that he may think that I don't have the money to send him to court once he films the project for himself and take sole credit for it. I also don't know if an entertainment lawyer would take a case about a short script since there's not much money into it. I've been googling trying to find an answer, but I haven't found one just yet. Does anyone know what I can do about this situation? 

Nothing has been filmed yet, but should he move forward, would a lawyer take this on? Or is he even right about owning script? Again, he simply gave me notes and that's it. He had no parts in creating this script whatsoever. I know that this post is a scattershot of everything, so I'll be happy to dive further if this isn't clear enough. I really like this script (which is actually based on a feature I wrote) and want to try to protect it, but this guy is acting so jaded and shady that I'm worried he might get away with this. Thank you in advance for reading this far.

Here is the contract that I signed: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SOdzYpJkY7Lqaztxi3il3xmlHYCr2Mlr/view?u...