The Privileges and Pitfalls of Making Movies About Real People

The specter of lawsuits like that one, which successfully halted distribution of the film, have helped fuel the now common practice in Hollywood of acquiring “life rights,” said Jorge L. Contreras, a transactional law scholar and one of the article’s authors. With such deals, Contreras said, there is no actual legal guarantee of exclusive access to someone’s story, but the agreements do serve to prevent defamation lawsuits over fictionalized accounts and stave off competition from other filmmakers.

For “Maestro,” the biopic about Leonard Bernstein’s career and marriage that received seven Oscar nominations, there was something tangible at stake when the movie’s star and director, Bradley Cooper, approached Bernstein’s three children: the rights to Bernstein’s music.

“Once he had permission from us to make this film, he had the option of never talking to us again — it was his movie,” said Jamie Bernstein, the composer’s oldest daughter.

But Cooper went the opposite direction, she said, sending frequent questions about their parents and their upbringing, texting the siblings in a WhatsApp group, sharing iterations of the script and showing them edited footage in a screening room at his home. One limitation, Bernstein said, was that the family never visited the production during filming, describing it as a “closed set.”

The blessing of Bernstein’s children also provided a layer of protection when Cooper, who is not Jewish, was criticized for using a prosthetic nose to portray Bernstein, who is Jewish. “Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that,” the Bernsteins said in a statement before the film’s premiere, which seemed to put much of the criticism to rest.

That level of protection was not universally viewed as a benefit: In his review of “Maestro” for The New Yorker, Richard Brody criticized the film for what he called a “scrupulous avoidance of controversy,” raising the estate’s cooperation as one potential factor.