Details emerged last week that the fabled director was postponing his latest project ‘THE HATEFUL EIGHT’ after the first draft of the script was leaked online. There was no known culprit at that time but given that Tarantino knew which actors had copies of the script, he assumed that it was one of their agents who had Bogarted it. At the time he stated that he’d given it to three actors “… Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth. The one I know didn’t do this is Tim Roth. One of the others let their agent read it and that agent has now passed it on to everyone in Hollywood.”

Now, with still no news about which agency, agent or actor is actually responsible for the leak, Tarantino has filed a lawsuit against Gawker Media who posted links to the 146 page script on their website Defamer. Here’s an excerpt from the lawsuit:

“Gawker Media has made a business of predatory journalism, violating  people’s rights to make a buck. This time they went too far. Rather than merely  publishing a news story reporting that Plaintiff’s screenplay may have been  circulating in Hollywood without his permission, Gawker Media crossed the journalistic line by promoting itself to the public as the first source to read the entire Screenplay illegally. Their headline boasts “Here Is the Leaked Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight Script”.

While it’s certainly a plausible case of copyright infringement, provided that the leaked script actually was copyrighted, the details surrounding this still aren’t clear. When the script first leaked, it was mentioned that the scripts Tarantino gave out were not watermarked and this made them impossible to track down. It seems as though the director or the lawyers are lashing out at the only available target which ultimately isn’t responsible for the fiasco. If it wasn’t Gawker it would have been someone else. That’s just the way it works. Journalism for the most part has lost touch with promoting truth or the aspiration to change the status quo. Instead it now pursues views and hits, it seeks to expand its audience  through whatever means work best, which is usually sensationalism. It is by nature “Predatory“, it’s after money, but Hollywood cinema is no different, it too pursues money through sensationalism and one has to ask, what is this lawsuit pursuing? Thats right, the Benjamin’s, serious Benjamin’s. We can certainly understand Tarantino’s frustrations about his work being prematurely exposed, but by attacking Gawker this way, isn’t he just contributing to the sick environment that’s wronged him in the first place?

There’s a good chance this lawsuit will only serve to further hype up the incident and encourage media organisations to do the same thing again and again in the future. Why? Because it’s an f-ing gold mine thats why!

It seems that the qualms of the lawsuit here are with the structure of modern Journalism as a whole and while it may not like it, Hollywood cinema itself is highly dependant on this medium. In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson:

“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits– a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the side walk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo cage. “

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Source: THR