Five Other Script Leaks To Make Quentin Tarantino Feel Better
Film headlines have been awash this week with news of Quentin Tarantino’s seemingly canned project, Hateful Eight, due to a script leak. The mercurial director has been candid in his plans to scrap the movie, even naming names in the process.
It would have been almost annoying if a film about a world-famous website involved in leaking thousands of classified files and documents didn’t incur a security breach of its own. And that’s exactly what happened. Bill Condon’s dramatization of Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Daniel Berg’s (Daniel Brühl) rise and fall within the Wikileaks website was victim to a leak.
Not only was the script leaked, but found its way into the hands of Assange, who subsequently denounced the film and everything it stood for. He called it “a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks, the organization (and) the character of my staff.” Of course, the film was still made, and while Cumberbatch’s performance as the controversial Wikileaks founder was praised, the film was received badly by the critics, accumulating a derisory score of 38% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Breaking Bad (spoilers)
Cloaks, daggers and broken car windows surround this supposed leak. The most popular show of the last decade culminated with a thrilling final season towards the end of 2013, taking Walter White with it. A general rule of thumb for BB fans during its run was: if you hadn’t seen it on Sunday night, stay clear of all social media until you had. Spoilers were everywhere.
But this near-leak wasn’t anything to do with the Internet: a man decided to break into Bryan Cranston’s car and steal his iPad – which has two scripts from the hit AMC meth drama on it – and make haste. Cranston, reliant upon the trickery of some tech wizards, was able to delete the scripts remotely, meaning nothing from the show was leaked, and all was well. That didn’t stop people talking about it for months afterwards…
Next page: a modern flop and all-time classic are subject to leaks...
Prometheus
Prometheus represents one of the stranger script leaks, considering the leak actually happened after the film was released, yet still had a profound effect. Let’s start at the beginning. People were excited about Ridley Scott’s latest foray into science fiction, but disappointment soon ensued. The film was riddled with iffy mythology and extensional themes that didn’t quite fit.
There was also a distinct lack of aliens. Sure, the film made money, probably buying Scott enough favour to get funding for The Counsellor – another disappointing effort from the once-legendary director – but sci-fi fanatics weren’t pleased. Then came the leak, which actually frustrated fans further with what seemed like a much better film. It was darker, more simplistic in its methods and came from Jon Spaihts, who was the key writer on the project before Damon Lindelof came on board.
Citizen Kane
William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who provided much of the inspiration for main character Charles Foster Kane, attempted to bury Orsen Welles’s directorial debut before it even left the ground. He managed to get his ink-stained paws on the script early via Welles’s collaborator, Herman J. Mankiewicz.
Apparently, according to an essay written by Pauline Kael, Mankiewicz – fondly known as ‘Mank’ – was so proud of his work, he sent a copy to his friend Charles Lederer, who just so happened to be the nephew of Marion Davies – Hearst’s mistress.
“It was probably as a result of Mankiewicz’s idiotic indiscretion,” Kael writes, “that the various forces were set into motion that resulted in the cancellation of the premiere at the Radio City Music Hall, the commercial failure of Citizen Kane, and the subsequent failure of Orson Welles.”