Quentin Tarantino Sues Gawker for Posting Link to ‘Hateful Eight’ Script
Gawker has responded to Quentin Tarantino’s legal complaint on its website. Since writer John Cook invokes the original story by Deadline Hollywood in two places, I’d like to shed a little context to where Cook has gone wrong in a reply that seems to excuse Gawker’s brazen and cavalier behavior by lumping us into the mix. But he’s wrong. Writes Cook: “Last week—before the publication of the script online but after it had begun circulating in Hollywood—Tarantino loudly turned The Hateful Eight leak into a topic of intense news interest by speaking about it at length to Deadline Hollywood, which had itself obtained a copy. Tarantino’s very public complaints about the leak—which named the six parties (of varying degrees of celebrity and potential culpability) that he believes had access to it—were picked up and amplified afterward by dozens of news sites, including Defamer. It was Tarantino himself who turned his script into a news story, one that garnered him a great deal of attention.”
Cook is wrong. I did not obtain and still have not obtained The Hateful Eight. Why would I read a work that made Tarantino, the copyright holder, angry? It was a first draft, and his process is to show that work to select actors, get feedback and dig back in and do a draft that is closer to what he will shoot. The document that Gawker gleefully cites and invites its readers to help themselves to is nothing close to a finished version. In addition, the piece was published because Tarantino wanted the town to know he had changed plans on his next movie, hurt by what he considered a betrayal by a handful of people he gave a first script draft to.
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