The Case of the Option Agreement: Erle Stanley Gardner, Intellectual Property Management, and Radio's Perry Mason

A key turning point in his management of the Perry Mason intellectual property (IP) was author Erle Stanley Gardner's licensing negotiations with independent producer and syndicator Frederic W. Ziv. Dissatisfied with earlier film adaptations, Gardner wished to exert more control over his IP, but he faced new challenges with Ziv: rather than disagreements over casting or scripts, their battle was rooted in the legal parameters of option and licensing contracts. Tracing Gardner's evolving contractual acumen allows us to not only complicate our understandings of authorial control but also begin to reconstruct the complicated legal trajectories of IP in their historically specific contexts.