The Screener: Behind the Buzzy Hollywood Satire Series
PJ McCabe and Jim Cummings
Courtesy of subjects
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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.
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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