“NO SCRIPT FOR YOU! Actors Vying For Big Parts Can’t Read Full Screenplays Anymore”

From Deadline, the downside of PDF versions of screenplays:

EXCLUSIVE: The writer/director Wachowski siblings have begun to invite actors to meet on their new film Cobalt Neural 9 about a taboo gay romance between an American and Iraqi soldier. But agents are telling me it has become yet another “top secret” project they and their actors can’t read. That means they can’t advise their clients whether to be in the pic sure to be controversial because of its “Hard R” storyline. But I’ve learned there is an increasing Hollywood obsession with keeping scripts under wraps right now because of the ease with which these copyrighted documents get published on the Internet. So much so that this is changing the way actors audition for hot button or fanboy friendly projects. More and more, reps don’t get to read full scripts. In some cases, on films like Spider-Man or The Avengers, the actors don’t, either. “CN9 is just the latest of a growing list of scripts that are being kept under lock and key,” one frustrated dealmaker tells me. “How do you do your job and advise clients when studios and filmmakers don’t want agents and managers to see scripts? If actors are lucky, they go to an office and read it with somebody watching. This kind of secrecy only used to happen with Woody Allen and maybe Steven Spielberg. But now it is rampant.”

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It’s no mystery why this is happening: security. Producers and studio executives claim that if they email or messenger even one copy to an agency, it goes into that tenpercentery’s library — and then becomes fodder for low-level employees who trade the content of those scripts like currency. Suddenly, that copyrighted document is on the Internet. Disturbing but not illegal is having the script picked apart in a forum, or presented as a blog scoop that gives away story reveals. “I doubt a blogger with 60 readers will ruin a movie even if they publish a script or rip it apart,” said one dealmaker who considers the increased secrecy “ridiculous” but acknowledges the bigger problem. “What is more important is the number of movies that are being leaked onto the internet before they are released.”

Uh, but I thought any press is good press? My feelings are pretty much summed up by this comment on the article:

I can understand secrecy on SOME projects, but come on — trading scripts in the Biz is tradition. And if details leak onto the Net, it won’t make a movie collapse. If anything, it probably helps filmmakers step up their game and actually write QUALITY. The truth is, it’s a very select, mostly curious insider base reading / swapping scripts on the Net — most of America hardly fucking reads, let alone read MOVIE SCRIPTS! This is not a problem.

Besides there’s a cottage industry just waiting to happen: hire out-of-work screenwriters to come up with three different versions of a movie project, then disseminate all of the scripts on the Web to confuse the hell out of people. The public won’t know which end is up by the time the movies comes out. What to call these writers? Well, if we’ve got script readers, why not call them script misleaders? Maybe they get their own screen credit:

Written by Joe Schmoe

Misleading script by Jane Doe

Problem solved! 

Tomorrow I take on the China-Tibet issue.

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