Leaking words
One of the things I like about Twitter is the diversity of conversations which you end up being witness to—conversations you wouldn’t ordinarily see in most other settings.
Tonight, there was a conversation between Duncan Jones, Graham Linehan and Edgar Wright about the leaking of scripts.
This is an odd one: I think there’s an almost complete disconnect between the public and the writers in terms of the value placed on the written words which make up a film or TV show episode.
To a writer, the script is the product: that’s the fruit of their labours, and it’s not one designed to be aired publicly in that form.
To the public, the script is much like a musical score or the lyrics for a song. It’s a fundamental part of the output, and of great interest to the hardcore fans. In fact, one of my favourite “books” in my younger years was Primordial Soup: a book of six of the “least worst” Red Dwarf scripts. I loved it, but it didn’t replace actually watching the shows for a moment.
On the other hand, there are plenty of things I’ve worked on where there’s a similar kind of “means to an end”: I’ve got Photoshop documents which contain layers upon layers of stuff, and while I’m happy to share the culmination of them, I’d be far less happy about sharing the source of it (and I’d be really quite upset if somebody did it without my say-so).
Edgar pointed out that it’s damaging to the film-makers: that is, it detracts from the experience of seeing the movie. I think perhaps that’s a personal thing, but I see his point (especially where scripts are leaked prior to release, though, again, I can see both sides to it).
I’m wondering if there’s more to it than this—and I’d be very interested to hear from writers here; is it mainly the fact that somebody (even perhaps with the best of misguided intentions) has released something to the world which was never supposed to be public, and upstaged the release of the ultimate fruit of a lot of people’s labours (which, incidentally, I’d be immensely upset about if it happened to me)? Is there more to it, something more damaging in the longer term?
I must confess this has piqued my interest, principally because the world of screenwriting is something I have very little real knowledge of (save for the occasional BBC 4 documentary). The bottom line is: I can see why people might leak, and I can see why the fans might be interested in the leaks and I can see why writers would be upset by it.
