Who Owns A Family Story?

About a decade ago, Ivana Lowell was staying with relatives at Leixlip Castle in Ireland when Downton Abbey came on television.

As she watched the fictional Crawley family navigate wealth, inheritance, social expectations and a changing world, Lowell had a realization.

Her own family might make an even better series.

Lowell is a Guinness descendant. The history attached to that name includes enormous wealth, political power, philanthropy, addiction, religion, scandal, tragedy and, of course, one of the most recognizable beers in the world.

She went home to Long Island and wrote a roughly 20-page treatment for a television series based on her family's history.

It would take about a decade, several rounds of development and one of television's most successful writers before that idea became House of Guinness, the Netflix series from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight.

There is a lesson in that journey for anyone sitting on a compelling family history. Lowell didn't own the history of the Guinness family, but she recognized the story inside it and did something about it.

A Family History Is Not a Story

In 1759, Arthur Guinness famously signed a 9,000-year lease on the St. James's Gate brewery in Dublin. The family story that followed spans centuries and generations.

That's fascinating history. It's also a storytelling problem.

Where do you start?

Knight could have begun with Arthur and the founding of the brewery. He could have tried to chronicle Guinness across multiple generations. Instead, he found a moment when everything changed.

House of Guinness opens in 1868 with the death of Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness.

Benjamin had helped turn the family brewery into an enormously successful enterprise. His death leaves his four adult children—Arthur, Edward, Anne and Benjamin—facing wealth, expectations and an uncertain future.

Suddenly, centuries of history become a story.

Who will control the brewery? What does each child want? What did their father expect of them? What happens to the family if they fail?

Those questions create conflict, stakes and consequences.  It's a distinction I return to often in my own work: a topic is not a story.

Neither is a remarkable life. Neither is an important event. Neither is 250 years of fascinating family history. The storyteller still must find the story inside it. Knight found his in succession.

The Long Road from Idea to Netflix

What happened between Lowell's original idea and the finished series holds another lesson.

It didn't happen quickly.

Lowell's treatment spent years in development. Other writers reportedly took runs at the material before the project reached Kudos, the production company behind Knight's SAS: Rogue Heroes.

Kudos brought the project to Knight.

Once Knight began digging into Guinness history, he found an enormous amount of material. But one of his most valuable sources wasn't sitting in an archive. It was Ivana Lowell.

Knight has called meeting Lowell the best bit of research he could have done. She offered something historical records couldn't: family stories, rumors, legends, personalities and what generations of Guinnesses believed about themselves and each other.

Research could tell Knight what happened. Lowell could help him understand the people inside what happened. Her value went beyond having the original idea. She had proximity, access and perspective.

She became an executive producer on the series, and the finished production carries a fitting credit: "Based on an idea by Ivana Lowell."

As someone developing a series based on the history of several families without any personal connection, I see how the project might improve with a similar level of access. 

But having a family member involved doesn't make House of Guinness a documentary. Far from it. It is still a fictional narrative rooted in history. 

History Provides the Steppingstones

Knight describes his approach to dramatizing history with an analogy I like. The historical events are steppingstones. The storyteller's job is to navigate between them.

We may know that someone married, inherited a business, entered politics, suffered a financial loss or died on a particular date. We usually don't know what those people said to one another over dinner, what happened behind a closed door or what someone was thinking at a pivotal moment.

Drama requires the writer to step into those spaces. House of Guinness does plenty of that.

The broad historical foundation is real. Benjamin Guinness died in 1868. Arthur and Edward became central to the brewery's future. Arthur pursued politics. Edward eventually bought out Arthur's interest and became the driving force behind the business. Anne devoted considerable energy to charitable causes. 

Knight also invents.

The riot at Benjamin's funeral doesn't appear to have happened as portrayed. The show greatly heightens the family's conflict with the Irish republican Fenians. Some relationships are dramatized or invented outright.

Most significantly, Sean Rafferty, James Norton's intimidating fixer operating around the Guinness family, is entirely fictional. Rafferty is useful precisely because history doesn't always supply the characters a dramatist needs.

Knight isn't reconstructing events; he's building a television series. And he says so from the start: the episodes tell us the fiction is inspired by true stories. Those exact words matter.

Who Owns the Guinness Story?

There is another layer to House of Guinness that I find even more interesting: the Guinness family doesn't own Guinness anymore.

That didn't happen all at once. Edward Cecil Guinness took the company public in 1886 while remaining its largest shareholder. More than a century later, in 1997, Guinness PLC merged with Grand Metropolitan to create Diageo.

Today, Diageo owns the Guinness brand.  Think about that for a moment.

One company owns Guinness the brand. Descendants of the Guinness family hold their family's history, memories, papers, stories and perspectives. Lowell originated the idea. Kudos developed and produced it.

Knight created and wrote it. Netflix distributes it. And the underlying historical events belong exclusively to none of them.

We often use the word "ownership" too loosely when we talk about true stories.

There isn't one kind of ownership.

There are trademarks. Copyrights. Life rights. Literary rights. Archival rights. Contractual rights. Rights of publicity and privacy. There are photographs, letters, diaries, recordings and other underlying materials that may have owners of their own.

Then there are historical facts.

You generally don't get to own those simply because they happened to you or your family. That can be unsettling for people who have lived through something extraordinary. Someone else may be able to tell your story.

So the better question may be: What do you control that makes your version of the story uniquely valuable?

Access Has Value

This is where Lowell's role becomes especially instructive.

She couldn't stop anyone from researching the Guinness family or telling a story. She didn't own the fact that Benjamin Guinness died in 1868 or that his sons inherited responsibility for the brewery. But she had things an outsider didn't.

Family knowledge. Relationships. Perspective. Stories passed down through generations. An understanding of personalities and family dynamics. She knew where some of the skeletons were buried, figuratively speaking of course.

Most importantly, she recognized that all of this might have storytelling value. Then she did something with it. She took history and began shaping a particular expression of it in a 20-page treatment. 

That is very different from saying, "Someone should make a TV series about my family." Ideas are easy. Development is real work. I know, because I’m knee-deep in in now. 

While I don’t need any of the families to be involved in my project, I’d welcome it if included access to source material that could enhance the storytelling. 

Even Families Don't Own One Version of the Truth

One more wrinkle makes House of Guinness even more useful as a case study.

Not every Guinness descendant likes the series. I expect some hate it or bristle at its mention. 

The current Earl of Iveagh, a great-great-grandson of Edward Cecil Guinness, wasn't involved in the production and has challenged elements of its portrayal of the family.

That's hardly surprising. Families rarely hold a single version of their own history. 

One sibling remembers an event differently from another. A child interprets a parent's actions differently than a cousin does. Family stories get polished through repetition. Embarrassing details disappear. Legends grow.

I've run into versions of this in my own true-story work. People can sincerely remember the same event differently. Proximity creates access. It doesn't create omniscience.

Which means the storyteller still has to do the work. Research the history. Compare accounts. Identify contradictions. Make judgments. Decide what matters. And ultimately, tell a good story.

Your Story Is More Than the Facts

When people think about protecting their stories, they tend to focus almost entirely on control. Can I stop someone from telling this? Do I own my story?

Those are legitimate questions, and sometimes important legal rights are involved.

But House of Guinness points toward a question that may be more useful:

What do I possess that makes me valuable to the telling?

Maybe you have access no one else has. Maybe you have photographs sitting in boxes, letters packed away in an attic, home movies no one has watched in 30 years or recordings on an old hard drive. Maybe you know the people who lived the story. Maybe you know what everyone else gets wrong.  Maybe you understand that the story everyone thinks is interesting isn't the best story.  That last point matters most.

Ivana Lowell had centuries of Guinness history to draw on. What she really had was an idea about what that history could become. She recognized it while watching someone else's family drama on television. She went home and put it on paper. Other writers tried to crack it. Years passed. The project kept moving.

Eventually it reached Steven Knight, who found the story inside the history.

Roughly a decade after Lowell first looked at her family's past and saw a television series, House of Guinness was streaming around the world.

You don't own history simply because you lived it.

But if it's your history, you may hold something no outsider can easily replicate: access, perspective, relationships, materials and an understanding of what really happened.

The opportunity is recognizing the value of those things before someone else recognizes the value of your story. Because there is a big difference between being the subject of someone else's story and having a hand in how your story gets told.

About the Storytelling for ALL® Newsletter

The Storytelling for ALL® LinkedIn Newsletter is a biweekly publication examining how stories are developed and brought to life professionally in today's evolving storytelling economy.

Every other week, I explore the creative, ethical and economic forces shaping film, television and other story-based media through the lens of professional development, rights, collaboration and long-term value.

Written primarily for filmmakers, journalists, writers, producers and media entrepreneurs, the newsletter also serves public figures, rights holders and media investors who want to understand how true stories move from lived experience to finished work.

About Ron Watermon

Ron Watermon is a creator, builder, media entrepreneur, filmmaker and the founder of STORYSMART. He writes about professional storytelling, media entrepreneurship, filmmaking and the business of turning stories into valuable assets.

Ron is the author of STORYSMART Storytelling for ALL and is building STORYSMART STUDIOS, an independent media company dedicated to developing, producing and owning profitable, enduring original media properties.

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