After the dust settled on the last Sundance Film Festival in Park City, which saw its fair share of drama and even a days-long bidding war, one under-the-radar project kept getting brought up to me.
There was the entertainment lawyer who talked about it over coffee, and the handful of reps who mentioned it at a party, and two nearby seatmates who were discussing it on the flight back to Los Angeles. The project generating this much conversation wasn’t a movie but instead a five-part miniseries titled The Screener directed by Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe. And while Hollywood loves its fair share of navel-gazing, it is somewhat surprising that this title made such an impact among the industry set.
In The Screener, which premiered in the festival’s episodic section, Cummings and McCabe zero in on a niche corner of the larger Hollywood ecosystem. The action takes place after a young independent filmmaker’s feature gets uploaded by her agency, without her permission, onto its internal server. For there, the movie, which includes nude scenes with the actor-director, leaks onto the internet. The entire case gets brought up to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, which makes the unusual choice to pursue a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) case against the big, three-letter agency.
Cummings and McCabe are no strangers to satirizing Hollywood. The 2019 WGA packaging dispute with the talent agencies acts as a backdrop for the duo’s feature, The Beta Test. For that movie, Cummings and McCabe talked to agents, former agents and support staff to understand the mood inside the talent firms at that time. It was then that Cummings and McCabe grew increasingly interested in how talent agencies function as a business inside a larger creative industry.
After a rep told an anecdote about seeing the Coen Brothers’ 2007 thriller No Country for Old Men months before it was released in theaters, the duo started to zero in on what they describe as “screener culture.”
Screeners are the pre-release copies of film and TV shows meant for promotional use, festival submission, sales or other business reasons. But screener links can get distributed and shared for reasons outside of these purposes. “Screener culture,” Cummings and McCabe assert, happens when these films act as a type of social currency. “Screeners really are everything when it comes to satisfying a workforce that has a desire to feel important,” says Cummings.
“I’m thinking about it from the independent filmmaker’s perspective,” adds Cummings, whose other credits include the independent features Thunder Road and The Wolf of Snow Hollow. He notes that when indie filmmakers agree to have their projects sent as screeners, it is for a specific viewer. Says Cummings, “I’m thinking it’s a programmer that’s watching this stuff, and instead, it’s some hoo ha cheese dick in Hollywood that’s using my property that I worked really hard on to use for social currency with their friend group.”
While writing, the duo would often cite well-publicized leaks the 2015 leak of Quentin Tarantino’s movie The Hateful Eight, which an FBI probe later said could be traced back to a DVD screener mailed to Alcon Entertainment. A year earlier, a pirated copy of Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty surfaced online with the watermark for then talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.
More recently, DVDs have been phased out as awards season FYC screeners are now distributed via digital portals, and films are submitted to festivals via platforms like FilmFreeway.
Leaks have ended up online after being ripped from film festivals’ online platforms, which debuted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, Jane Campion drama The Power of the Dog and the Antoine Fuqua thriller The Guilty ended up online. Out of last year’s Sundance, sex scenes from the competition title Twinless, featuring Dylan O’Brien and director-actor James Sweeney, were leaked onto the internet.
Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe directed ‘The Screener.’
Cummings became disconcerted by what he sees as a cavalier attitude many in Hollywood take toward the sharing of unreleased films. Screener sharing is so ubiquitous in Hollywood, says the filmmakers, that even seasoned professionals rarely stop to think about the potential consequences to filmmakers should a leak happen. He points to coverage of the recent Sundance leaks that argued they could actually be a net positive for the films. “Leaks can testify to a film’s audience potential,” read one IndieWire story.
“These movies cost millions of dollars, and we’re being told by people who lock their cars at night to be loose about [our] property,” says Cummings. On the criminal implications of intellectual property theft, McCabe adds, “It’s less sexy on paper. It’s not robbers going in and taking a bag of money from a bank. It’s stuff that’s just a couple clicks on the internet.”
In the lead up to writing The Screener, McCabe and Cummings spent time interviewing current and former agents from the big three talent firms — UTA, CAA and WME — along with attorneys, court clerks and a former member of the LA District Attorneys’ office, and filmmakers who have been the victims of leaks. They collected anecdotes about DVD ripping in agency mail rooms from the early aughts and heard stories about current industry vets getting backdoor access to film festival submission platforms so they could screen any film that was submitted.
“I’m interested in how office politics can get in the way of realizing that you’re committing a crime. There’s this illegal marketplace taking place inside of this building,” says Cummings. “I didn’t see that in an episode of Entourage.”
The question for the duo became how to make all of this interesting for general audiences. Ultimately, The Screener splits the difference between a Hollywood satire and a courtroom drama. Cummings is clear that, even with the extra research and legwork, The Screener is “a comedy, not a documentary.”
Even still, Cummings and McCabe made the decision to produce Screener independently, outside of the traditional Hollywood system. McCabe says, “I think the note sessions on a show like this would have been pretty extensive. It would have been in development for years.” Having done nearly a half dozen indie features, they tapped into investors from their last projects, and the budget for Screener was raised in five and a half months.
Alongside Cummings as the show’s resident DA, The Screener stars a mix of newcomers and veterans. There is Shereen Lani Younes as the gay Iranian indie filmmaker whose movie ends up all over the internet, alongside Saturday Night Live alum Jon Rudnitsky as the platonic ideal of an obnoxious agent and Kumail Nanjiani as his ever-suffering boss.
While nowhere near as prolific as the indie film market, the independently produced series space has been growing. Mark Duplass is a particularly big supporter of indie episodic projects, and Mubi acquired the Mark Ruffalo-starring series Hal & Harper last year out of Sundance.
For their part, Cummings and McCabe are talking to traditional distributors but would be happy to take a direct-to-consumer approach to release, having already found success with that strategy on past films. After a buzzy festival premiere, buyers’ screenings are planned in New York and Los Angeles, but have been admittedly slow-going as they are committed to asking buyers to watch The Screener in person. To submit to Sundance, the filmmakers rented a screening room in Eagle Rock’s Vidiots theater for festival programmers, while this reporter watched The Screener’s first three episodes in a private residence.
“I can’t tell you how many people we’ve had just be like, ‘Well, if I don’t get a screener link, I can’t see your thing,’” says Cummings. “It’s like, well, that was not true for 100 years, when people were going to movie theaters.”
‘The Screener’ involves a leaked film that turns into a court case.
