Since I first moved off-campus in August, I have been burglarized several times. They got my laptop, which contained the only drafts of my personal screenplays. Then, they got my Wii and Playstation 2, the latter which contained a DVD of one of my most precious films, PARIS, TEXAS, by German director Wim Wenders. The most recent robbery, they took the dearest possession in the house — my hard drives. Roughly one thousand gigabytes containing all my back ups, every film I’d ever made (starting from grade school), and, worst of all, over two thousand photographs and videos from my time abroad in Rome.
Some of these things had been stored on the internet. Most were not. There was a back up drive, but that’d been stolen too. I lost a few of the most special photographs I’d ever captured, and they’ll never come back.
How someone could just scoop up parts of my identity so mercilessly and without sense (they won’t be able to get more than fifty dollars for such old equipment) is agonizing, and has kept me up nights for the past few weeks. Only a few nights before the final cuts were made, I realized that this agony is where THE LEAK was born.
The film follows Francis, portrayed by SAS Third Year comedian/actor Daniel J. Conroy, as he confronts the loss of something not only significant to his career, but now of dire value to his life. He’s a studio assistant, part of the little-known underground cult of Hollywood grunts, and his job is to bring a screenplay to a potential worker, and watch the person as he reads it, to ensure that he won’t steal it and, you guessed it, leak it to the internet. Alex Ashrafi portrays the villainous Mr. Gittes, a send up to the campy studio figures of the Noir era (think Nicholson, in CHINATOWN).
This is a real-life practice– for example, there are stories of people agreeing to work on Woody Allen films from reading only portions of the type-written early drafts.
If you’re a a frequent surveyor of the online movie community, as I am, you know that nothing is safe, in a time when everything is accessible. I sometimes find mysteriously leaked screenplays, such as the latest Tarantino movie, DJANGO UNCHAINED, which is coming out this Christmas, and was online last year at this time. Or perhaps you’ll remember the pirated WOLVERINE film that hit the web weeks before its release, to Hugh Jackman’s furious disdain.
This very modern, digital phenomenon is explored in THE LEAK, but the film’s roots lie in the Hollywood tradition of the aforementioned Noir era. Masterful films like THE BIG SLEEP, or SUNSET BOULEVARD were always reflecting on screenwriters, actors, and the Hollywood system– so, just as my film deals with the dwindling privacy of the modern day, my efforts were also put forth to remember the post-war cynicism of Film Noir.
The world-shattering sensation of loss is not quite expressible in words or writing. We’ve all lost something in our lives, and, unfortunately, we’ll keep on losing things for the rest of our days. There was a lot of suffering behind the production of THE LEAK, and although the film is in no way optimistic, perhaps we can remember that the best way to reconcile with loss is, of course, by creating something new.
Dominick Nero is an aspiring filmmaker and writer, completing his fourth and final year at Rutgers, majoring in English with a Cinema Studies minor. He works as a videographer at the Rutgers Student Life office, and created the exciting new comedy show, Rutgers Night Live, at Cabaret Theatre. He hopes to continue working on personal films, and hopefully be given a chance on a feature length project, sometime in the near future. Check out his website for more of his work: http://domnero.com
Crissy Milazzo is a contributor for the Rutgers Review.