Flash Point

As a member of several Academies and Guilds, I get a lot of invites to screenings, free DVDs and copies of screenplays. All are intended to maybe, someone hopes, cause me to vote for the film or TV show in question in whatever awards competitions I vote in. The DVDs often come packaged in elaborate, attention-getting packages designed by someone who either doesn't know or doesn't care that the main appeal of DVDs is that they fit neatly on your shelves. I get a lot of screenplays, too.

Today, I received a "first." Warner Bros. Pictures sent me — and I guess, most members of the Writers Guild — a USB flash drive containing PDFs of four current movies — The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Brave One, The Bucket List and Michael Clayton. They take up 893,952 bytes on a flash drive that holds 58.8 MB and is imprinted with the names of the four movies on one side and a WB logo on the other.

At first, I was leery of plugging the thing into my computer. After all, I'm on strike against this company. What if it's some instrument of revenge with a lethal virus that will turn my hard disk into guava jelly? Maybe there's a hidden program on there that will, without my knowledge, post a message on my blog that the latest AMPTP offer is a windfall and we'd be lamebrains to not grab it and scurry back to work.

These are both valid worries but I decided to live dangerously. I plugged the thing in and even read one of the scripts on it. I may read the others before I wipe the drive and use it to back up my work.