If you’re Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay for David Fincher’s upcoming “The Social Network,” or Diablo Cody, who wrote Jason Reitman’s next movie, “Young Adult,” you can’t be very happy with the internet lately.
“Social Network” and “Young Adult” are only two of the upcoming scripts that have been leaked recenlty and can be found on the web – where snap judgments can be rendered, surprises spoiled and secrets revealed.
The problem, of course, has existed for years; what’s new is how the internet has accelerated the spread of leaked material.
What’s also new is how high-tech solutions are becoming available to keep the work under wraps.
One security process that used to take days, in fact, now can be done in hours. The question is whether studios will be willing to adopt it.
“It’s become a huge concern, especially among the big shows,” says Carol Kravetz, the production coordinator of the AMC series “Breaking Bad,” of script security.
Twists in that show’s second-season finale almost leaked. But not so lucky in the past year were:
-- “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” which stirred up enormous fun among the series’ rabid fans when it hit the web;
-- Steven Zaillian’s initial screenplay for “Moneyball,” which leaked around the same time that Sony was opting not to go ahead with Steven Soderbergh’s proposed film, commissioning a new script instead;
-- The pilot for HBO’s fantasy series “A Game of Thrones,” which isn’t set to premiere until next spring.
To prevent leaks like those, the first line of defense is simply to limit the number of eyes that can see a screenplay – in the process, often as not, ruffling the feathers of those who feel it’s their right to have a stack of scripts on their desks.
Last week, anonymous agents complained to Deadline.com about not being able to do their jobs if scripts were being kept under wraps. But what they were griping about has been business-as-usual for Woody Allen for most of his career (lead actors get two hours to read the script, supporting actors only get the pages on which their characters appear), just as it was for Stanley Kubrick (who wrote in the contract for one writer that she couldn’t even discuss the film with anybody but him).
And it's the same way today for Christopher Nolan, who let an insistent Heath Ledger read the “Dark Knight” script only once before Ledger took the role of Joker.
Some lower-profile filmmakers have gone down a similar road: Rod Lurie, writer-director of “The Contender” and creator of the TV series “Commander in Chief,” told TheWrap that in the past he would “audition the masses with scenes from other films, so my scenes would not start floating around town.”
Only in the final callbacks, he said, would he use scenes from the project he was actually casting.
