A case of partial tremulous scrivener's palsy
Don't come crying to me about spoilers

If you didn’t check it out in its previous incarnation, revel in its resurrection.

www.pdfscreenplays.net.

On checking my email this morning, I saw a contact of mine had sent me a script. We’ve been swapping back and forth for a few months, and he thought I might like this one.

I already had it, but I opened it anyway, and was very surprised to see how familiar it looked. Why? Because it was a script I had converted to PDF from a shoddy text file, and sent to someone else!

My contact had got it from a friend in LA who had it from a friend, who’d got it from a friend, and so on, all the way back to me.

What goes around, eh?

The Light, It Hurts

27 June, 2005 -

Three years.

WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING WITH MY LIFE?!


Meeting lots of fab people, of course.

Here’s to you guys.

Yesterday was my young stalker friend’s 19th birthday, which meant, as well as getting to feel really old and having to explain who The Velvet Underground were, I actually went to the pub for the first time in months.

I walked in with twenty quid, bought six drinks, and left with two pounds. Lot to pay for a good time.

For five glorious weeks in May and June, Sheridan Cleland ran one of the finest script resources ever hatched by the internet: pdfscreenplays.net.

Hosting only scans or original digital copies of movie and TV scripts, it quickly became an essential daily stop known only to a few, until one particular script turned it into a cause celebre.

If you’ve read the Darabont draft for Indy 4 (Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods) in the last week or so, pdfscreenplays is the site that put it out there. And suffered for it.

Happily flying under the wire, building up an incredible screenplay library, Sheridan’s house was ultimately blown down by a link on AICN. How’s that for a mix of metaphors? Alerted by a huge spike in traffic to the City of the Gods script, within no time at all, his hosting company decided he was violating intellectual copyright and shut the site down.

So, the hosting company has taken the site offline because the Darabont draft of Indy IV "was found to be consuming an inordinate amount of processor time, to the point of degrading overall system performance".

But here's the good news:

"In addition to the technical issues surrounding the site causing high load, there is the legal issues around redistributing other peoples work. Screenplays are a form of expression and protected by copyright law. Fanfiction is a fairly clear area - while it is a copyright violation, most copyright holders do not care to enforce their copyrights regarding fan-fiction. However, for the actual screenplays for major Hollywood movies that have been produced, the story differs considerably. Even without a complaint, we can't allow you to host or link to unauthorized copies of such works.

I'm aware that this information is freely available on the internet, but I can also easily download the movies that these scripts are for from other sites on the internet. This does not affect the legality of the situation.

I'm sorry, but we won't be able to continue hosting the pdfscreenplays.net."

Good thing they shut it down; imagine if copies of the script had broken lose and reproduced themselves all over the internet. Thank heavens they stopped that happening, and made the script impossible to find.

Will these fools never learn?

Anyway, a quick look at the site today no longer reveals the hosting company’s brush-off, but rather something far more interesting:
 

 
 
Great news for script freaks.
 
Finally, old hand at this sort of thing as I am, I can pat myself on the back for having the sense to download the whole site before it went away, including the exclusive, members only, in-production section. Caprica, Nottingham, State of Play, Shutter Island, Burn After Reading, World War Z, The Changeling, Infiltrator, I Want to _ Your Sister, Jennifer’s Body – all great reads. Hancock was shit though, looks like that’s been through a lot of changes.

Friends, send me your want lists and I’ll see what I can do (sorry, Bill, no Green Hornet. John Carter of Mars, though, and At the Mountains of Madness)

It’s only Tuesday, and I’m absolutely shattered. My right hand woman has been away from work for three weeks with huge gallstones, and I’m struggling to manage everything myself. The whole business will go down the toilet next week, because even I won’t be there. I’ll be thirty miles away, in hoity-toity Cheltenham, enjoying the dual pleasures of Travelodge and the Screenwriters’ Festival. And getting absolutely smashed with many fellow bloggers.

This one’s been going around for a while, and at last it’s come to me, all other bloggers having been exhausted. I’m flattered anyone remembered I’m still here! Thoughtful old Good Dog has roused me from my stupor, and instructed me to list 7 songs that have had me foot tapping, eyebrow raising and wig flipping recently. This is harder than it seems, because my iPod is on permanent shuffle and I have no idea what I’m listening to half the time, but I’ll play. 

Arcade Fire - The Well and the Lighthouse
from an album that gets better every time I listen to it.



Flight of the Conchords - Robots
binary solo! Great Flaming Lips pastiche, narrowly out-parodying Inner City Pressure, their fine homage to the seemingly beyond parody Pet Shop Boys.



Diamanda Galas - Autumn Leaves
Sadly untraceable on YouTube.

So listen to it instead

Tegan and Sara - Back in Your Head
one of my most listened to albums from last year, still getting regular play.



Jonathan Coulton - Still Alive
triumphant and legendary victory song from Portal. Visit Coulton’s web site for more free tunes.



Hazmat Modine - Lost Fox Train
hella harp.



World’s End Girlfriend - Birthday Resistance
another from 2007 still on the playlist. Crazy and original Japanese classical techno freakout. Again, too weird for YouTube.

Play it play it