If you follow the salary growth of Joe Eszterhas throughout his screenwriting career, then Basic Instinct had been coming. He got $275,000 to pen the original Flashdance. Jagged Edge? He banked $500,000. Basic Instinct, though, blew the ceiling off what writers could legitimately hope for with a spec script.
Basic Instinct Script Pdf
Alan Gasmer, a William Morris agent during that time, started the trend of putting such scripts on the market for only a limited amount of time with the auction block opening on Monday and closing at the end of that Friday. The result led to a competitive streak among the studios, leading to a ridiculous amount of big sales that we haven't seen since. In 1990 alone, 14 scripts were sold for $1 million or more.
After being sold, it got caught in development hell after Willis left. There were rewrites for different stars; then the stars wouldn't commit. Eventually, the momentum the script had faded into oblivion and was never produced.
Another $1 million sale picked up by Disney. The script was written by Rick Jaffa (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Jurassic World) and Doug Richardson (Die Hard 2, Bad Boys).
Then Disney studio head, Jeffrey Katzenberg, wasn't a fan of the script, despite the head of Disney's Hollywood Pictures loving it. It was later mired in studio notes, which shifted the focus of the story. Disney still owns it.
In 1990, this romantic comedy was the first script written by a woman to sell for $1 million. It was Kathy McWorter's first sale. Earlier that year, she had reached the Academy's Nicholl Fellowship quarterfinals with a different screenplay.
The script led to a massive bidding war with Paramount nabbing it for producer Scott Rudin. One industry insider stated: "It sold for $1 million because [Paramount in 1990] wanted to make a statement to the town: 'We're buying scripts. And we'll go toe to toe with any other studio.'"
New Line purchased this script in the mid-nineties for a rumored million. It was written by Miles Millar, a Cambridge graduate who had moved to Los Angeles, wrote the script and then sold it for $1 million. Warren Zide, who would later become a prominent producer of the American Pie and Final Destination franchises, was the manager that took it out.
The spec script was said to be a female The Road Warrior. It has been reported that the script sold from $500,000 to $1 million, shortly after the 1988 strike. Columbia purchased it, hoping to sign Cher, but nothing ever came of it. Sharon Stone was also attached at one time. Written by John Raffo, Carlos Carlei and Peter Rader. John Raffo was later credited with writing Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and The Relic. Carlei went on to write some smaller films, including a 2013 update of Romeo and Juliet. Rader eventually wrote Waterworld.
This spec, written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Spider-Man, Panic Room) and John Kamps (Zathura, Ghost Town, Premium Rush) was written and sold back in 2001. Koepp alone made $2.5 million dollars off the deal that also included future script commitments and a possible directing gig. The deal came less than a year after Koepp's thriller spec Panic Room sold during a major bidding war to Columbia Pictures for $2 million plus another $1 million in producing fees and $1 million deferred. Barry Sonnenfeld and Gavin Polone were attached to produce, but the film was never made.
From the Stalker: A Love Story scripting team (see above) of Michael Carnes and Josh Gilber, Paramount bought the project on pitch for $1 million against $2 million in 2005. The script hasn't seen the light of day.
Written by Rob Liefeld (Deadpool), the script was purchased for a reported $2 million in 1996 and once had Tom Cruise attached with the now-defunct Cruise/Wagner Productions. Will Smith was then attached as well for a number of years at Universal. Glen Morgan and James Wong were hired to rewrite it at one time.
Paramount Pictures purchased the spec from David Benioff (Game of Thrones) for a reported $2 million. The script is well known but has been in development for years and hasn't managed to get the green light. Back in 2013, Martin Campbell (The Mask of Zorro, GoldenEye, Casino Royale) was in talks to helm the project.
Paul Verhoeven's 1992 thriller Basic Instinct - starring Michael Douglas as a police detective and Sharon Stone as the femme fatale Catherine Tramell - was one of the first mainstream 'erotic thrillers', a film which shifted the boundaries for graphic representations of sex in Hollywood cinema. It remains a significant milestone in film censorship and controversy. In his fascinating study, the first in-depth account of the film, Stevie Simkin explores the unrest and protest that Basic Instinct sparked in the gay, lesbian and feminist communities in the US, incensed by what they saw as the script's homophobia and misogyny. Simkin considers the social and cultural context in which Basic Instinct was made, examining the film's troubled production history, the battles with censors, and its reception. He offers a number of readings of the movie, looking at its representation of bisexuality and the depiction of a 'transgressive' female protagonist. He also focuses on key sequences, including the infamous interrogation scene, and details the cuts demanded by the censors, resulting in different UK and US versions. In conclusion, Simkin considers the legacy of Basic Instinct, and its enduring effect on media representations of the violent woman. STEVIE SIMKIN is Reader in Drama and Film at the University of Winchester, UK. His publications include work on cult television, popular music, and Renaissance drama. He is the author of, amongst other works, A Preface to Marlowe (1999), Revenge Tragedy: A New Casebook (2001), Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence (2005), and, also in the Controversies series, a book on the Peckinpah film, Straw Dogs.
As can be seen above, the attackers make no attempt to hide their intentions, and use no obfuscation or evasion techniques. In addition, all the output file names and credentials used by the attackers are hard-coded in the scripts.
Attackers will use scripts directly on the machine or embed them in Office documents and PDFs sent to the victim as email attachments. This article provides an overview of the current script threat landscape as well as the most common script attacks and methods.
Script-based cyber-attacks gained popularity in 2017 and their prevalence has grown by over 100%. Nation-state and cybercrime groups adopted the use of scripts and fileless malware in this same timeframe. Today, script-based attacks account for 40% of all cyberattacks, according to the 2020 endpoint security report from Ponemon Institute.
Payload delivery and lateral movement follow a successful script-initiated infection. The payload performs actions desired by the attacker, such as information collection, file encryption, or backdoor communication. At the same time, lateral movement leads to infection of additional computers within the network.
Script-based attacks run on virtually all Windows systems, increasing the potential attack surface and the chance of infection. One major drawback of script-based attacks is that, unless deployed via an exploit, user interaction is required for the script to run. For example, in most cases, the script is contained either as a script file within an email requiring user action or as a VBA macro in a document that requires the user to enable macros.
Many types of malware use scripts. For instance, a script that downloads a PE file can either save it to disk or run it from memory, depending on its level of sophistication. The script can also perform additional malicious actions, such as collecting information about the victim, from the computer name to saved passwords.
For example, the Helminth Trojan, used by the Iran-based OilRig group, uses scripts for its malicious logic. In the attack, a Microsoft Word document file exploiting CVE-2017-0199 delivers an HTA script executed by the Windows process, which runs the HTML executable mshta.exe. Once executed, the script initiates the attack, delivering the Helminth Trojan as PowerShell and VBS files.
PowerShell is a framework used for configuration management and task automation, with a command-line shell and scripting language. PowerShell provides access to Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and Component Object Model (COM), which makes it a useful and versatile tool for system administrators automating IT management processes, but also for attackers seeking a foothold in the system.
In some cases, the scripts act as downloaders, either downloading a PE file to disk before removing it, injecting a PE file into another process, or downloading another script to carry out the next stage of the attack. In rare cases, the script contains the entire malicious logic. In other cases, the attacker exploits the vulnerabilities in the document reader, for example, Adobe Acrobat, to drop the next phase of the attack. The use of droppers is widespread not only in script-based malware but also in file-based malware attacks, including well-known ransomware and financial malware campaigns.
Malicious HTA files allow scripts to run the machine with local user privileges to download and run executables or additional scripts. Though considered an old attack vector, many script-based attacks continue to use HTA files. These files can be sent as attachments, downloaded by another script, or redirects from malicious websites.
With these foundational rules in place, organizations should seek out security solutions with specific capabilities that balance the ability to detect script-based attacks while allowing users who need to use scripts for their job function to do so without interruption. 2ff7e9595c
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