Sunday Story Break — Thiel vs Gawker

JUNE 5TH, 2016 — POST 153

This is the fourteenth in a series where I take a piece of news, pop culture, or well-worn trope and see if it can be mined for its story potential as a movie. You can read last week’s, about content pirates in Cuba, here.

For those that follow tech and media news, there is one story that has only recently come to light which is already being predicted to have far-reaching ramifications in both sectors which have increasingly become intertwined. To quickly outlay the facts, the lawsuit between Terry Gene Bollea (Hulk Hogan to us normals) and media company Gawker over their publishing of the wrestler’s sex tape (which has initially resulted in a verdict ordering Gawker to compensate Bollea for damanges to tune of $140mil) actually had a very rich and very interested interested party. Bollea’s legal fees, which are believed to be in the order of $10mil, were covered by PayPal cofounder and high-profile Facebook investor Peter Thiel.

In 2007, Thiel was pubically outed by a piece Gawker ran in Valleyway, a blog devoted to Silicon Valley gossip, that ran with the headline “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people”. Thiel, speaking with the New York Times upon information of his involvement coming to light, defended his decision as “less about revenge and more about specific deterrence”. The initial result of Bollea vs Gawker (it is still yet to be run through what is expected to be a lengthy appeals process), one which is unlikely to have been so severe without Thiel’s involvement, has the potential to completely wipe Gawker from the media landscape. If ever there was a story that almost certainly will be made into a movie at some point, this is it.

And a lot of the hard work has already been done. Ben Thompson of Stratechery digested the whole situation through his “Peter Thiel, Comic Book Hero” article earlier this week. From Thompson’s perspective, in so aggressively going after a media company, Thiel, a tech man, is attacking a monster he helped to create, just like the Avengers had to do when taking down Ultron (I think this is how the movie went, I never saw it). Thompson echoes the general concesus that Thiel’s reaction is somewhat tantamount to launching a nuke at someone who shot you with a spitball: tech needn’t defend its castle because what a big fucking castle it is. There is one sticking point in any potential movie adaptation, however. As Thompson points out, “if ever there were a case with no one to cheer for, this is it”.

The lack of anything approaching a protagonist in this story is what makes it both exciting and difficult to beat it out as a movie. It’s generally agreed that whilst Thiel’s reflex was obtuse, brought out of almost a decade of stewing at the initial Valleyway piece, Gawker do publish a lot of stupid stuff. Thiel is just one high-profile personality to be outed by Gawker, more recently CFO of Condé Nast was too exposed as having set up to meet with a gay pornstar during a business trip. The publishing of Hulk Hogan’s sex tape was too a question of “is this really in the public interest?”. It would then seem too partisan to place either Thiel or Gawker CEO Nick Denton as this movie’s protagonist. Luckily we have a fascinating third party.

Goliath follows a well-past-his-prime-but-still-kicking Hulk Hogan, living only as Hulk Hogan could. When his sex tape is leaked online, and sleazy journalists pick it up for publication, Hogan sees an opportunity to make the kind of money he used to when he was at WCW: through litigation. He and Gawker lawyer up for a civil suit. But just as it’s dawning on Hogan that perhaps his litigious might is as flabby as his bicep, an ally arrives. Taking him out for lunch in San Francisco, Peter Thiel outlines his own interest in the case and proposes turning himself from a mere stakeholder into a shareholder. Hogan is game, so long as they keep it secret (he’s a real “big man” after all). When the case is swiftly decided in favour of Hogan, Nick Denton suspects something is up. He goes hunting the only way he knows how, pushing his network of journalists to discover the truth. But he’s not going to like who’s sitting behind it all.

Even in writing this, I had the sense that this story might be better told as a not-about-the-event-but-totally-about-the-event like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master about scientology. Not only would this circumvent defamation suits on the part of whatever studio puts it up (one of the consequences of the flexing of tech’s muscle is Peter Thiel et al. are going to be even scarier to approach), but would allow a more efficient means of telling the story. The whole “network of journalists” thing is a stretch of the truth but feels natural given the kind of character Denton could be on screen. In any case, we probably won’t have to wait too long to see this play out on the big screen.

Let me know if you want to get a jump on the competition.