{"id":344244,"date":"2026-03-23T21:17:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T21:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/344244\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T21:17:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T21:17:10","slug":"behind-the-buzzy-hollywood-satire-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/344244\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the Buzzy Hollywood Satire Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAfter the dust settled on the last Sundance<\/a> Film Festival in Park City, which saw its fair share of drama<\/a> and <\/a>even a days-long bidding war,<\/a> one under-the-radar project kept getting brought up to me.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere was the entertainment lawyer who talked about it over coffee, 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn The Screener, which premiered in the festival\u2019s 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\u2019s feature gets uploaded by her agency, without her permission, onto its internal server. From 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\u2019s office, which makes the unusual choice to pursue a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) case against the big, three-letter agency.<\/p>\n

\n\tCummings and McCabe are no strangers to satirizing Hollywood. The 2019 WGA packaging dispute with the talent agencies acts as a backdrop for the duo\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter a rep told an anecdote about seeing the Coen brothers\u2019 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 \u201cscreener culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tScreeners are the prerelease 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. \u201cScreener culture,\u201d Cummings and McCabe assert, happens when these films act as a type of social currency. \u201cScreeners really are everything when it comes to satisfying a workforce that has a desire to feel important,\u201d says Cummings.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m thinking about it from the independent filmmaker\u2019s perspective,\u201d 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, \u201cI\u2019m thinking it\u2019s a programmer that\u2019s watching this stuff, and instead, it\u2019s some hoo ha cheese dick in Hollywood that\u2019s using my property that I worked really hard on to use for social currency with their friend group.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile writing, the duo would often cite well-publicized leaks the 2015 leak of Quentin Tarantino\u2019s movie The Hateful Eight<\/a>, 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\u2019s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty<\/a> surfaced online with the watermark for then talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.<\/p>\n

\n\tMore 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tLeaks have ended up online after being ripped from film festivals\u2019 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<\/a> ended up online. Out of last year\u2019s Sundance, sex scenes from the competition title Twinless, featuring Dylan O\u2019Brien and director-actor James Sweeney, were leaked onto the internet.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tJim Cummings and PJ McCabe directed \u2018The Screener.\u2019<\/p>\n

\n\tCummings 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. \u201cLeaks can testify to a film\u2019s audience potential,\u201d read one IndieWire story.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThese movies cost millions of dollars, and we\u2019re being told by people who lock their cars at night to be loose about [our] property,\u201d says Cummings. On the criminal implications of intellectual property theft, McCabe adds, \u201cIt\u2019s less sexy on paper. It\u2019s not robbers going in and taking a bag of money from a bank. It\u2019s stuff that\u2019s just a couple clicks on the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the lead-up to writing The Screener, McCabe and Cummings spent time interviewing current and former agents from the big three talent firms \u2014 UTA, CAA and WME \u2014 along with attorneys, court clerks, a former member of the L.A. District Attorney\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m interested in how office politics can get in the way of realizing that you\u2019re committing a crime. There\u2019s this illegal marketplace taking place inside of this building,\u201d says Cummings. \u201cI didn\u2019t see that in an episode of Entourage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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 \u201ca comedy, not a documentary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEven still, Cummings and McCabe made the decision to produce Screener independently, outside of the traditional Hollywood system. McCabe says, \u201cI think the note sessions on a show like this would have been pretty extensive. It would have been in development for years.\u201d Having done nearly half a dozen indie features, they tapped into investors from their last projects, and the budget for Screener was raised in five and a half months.<\/p>\n

\n\tAlongside Cummings as the show\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor 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\u2019 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\u2019s Vidiots theater for festival programmers, while this reporter watched The Screener\u2019s first three episodes in a private residence.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI can\u2019t tell you how many people we\u2019ve had just be like, \u2018Well, if I don\u2019t get a screener link, I can\u2019t see your thing,\u2019\u201d says Cummings. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Well, that was not true for 100 years, when people were going to movie theaters.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Screener involves a leaked film that turns into a court case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After the dust settled on the last Sundance Film Festival in Park City, which saw its fair share…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69,27001,69176],"class_list":["post-344244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sundance","tag-sundance-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}