It seemed like an inevitability that a film about a website famous for leaking documents would end up having its script leaked. Almost like tempting fate. Josh Singer was certainly tempting Julian Assange himself, the real-life protagonist at the centre of his script The Fifth Estate, a non-fiction thriller based on the books Inside WikiLeaks by Daniel Domscheit-Berg and WikiLeaks by David Leigh and Luke Harding. The fact-based movie is part of that slightly weird trend for biopics that get made not long after the events have occurred, and when many of the people involved are still alive, which necessitates at least giving the principal players a look at the script. Assange, who is infamously a tad narcissistic and controlling of his public image, was really not a fan of The Fifth Estate's screenplay when he got a copy sent to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London he's been holed up in since 2012. During a public appearance he stated the the script was a "serious propaganda attack on WikiLeaks and the integrity of its staff", as a "lie built upon a lie", and as "fanning the flames for war on Iran". We think that Rotten Tomatoes would take all of that as a negative review. So of course, when he has copies of the script and he really doesn't like it, Assange chose to leak it to the internet. Rather than secretly handing it over to a movie website or a tabloid, however, he released it through the WikiLeaks website which had primarily been used for top secret government files and cables. The sort of thing that had political power. Not the slightly shoddy script to a movie that, by all accounts, was pretty crummy. It was accompanied by a 4000 word essay pointing out all the factual inaccuracies, specifically noting that "Julian Assange does not dye or bleach his hair white."
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
