Small Shiny Objects

When I became a transcriptionist, I quickly learned the ins and outs of the non-disclosure agreement.

The most basic level was the agreement with each transcription house. Even if there wasn’t a detailed, explicit document, transcribers recognize that they will become privy to non-public information through the course of their work, and they’re expected to maintain the confidentiality of that information. For instance, I got to caption much of the first season of Game of Thrones months before it aired on HBO, and I’d regularly get to see episodes of reality TV long before the public would. I’d also get access to the behind-the-scenes production conversations between takes, which became a fascinating look into how these shows came about. (And if, say, a prominent Food Network star had, between setups, let slip that they shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, I couldn’t divulge their name.)

(Don’t ask.)

(No, it’s not Giada.)

(Clearly, I’m joking. But I will say it was neat getting to see what the stars were like while the cameras weren’t rolling. Giada was incredibly genuine and approachable; Robert Irvine was super humble, possibly due to that whole resume-padding incident; Alton Brown was exactly the kind of nerd he comes across as on-camera and it was awesome. And Marc Summers always seemed like he’d just railed a giant-size Pixy Stix right before they called action. My dude had energy.)

The first official NDA I ever had to sign was when one of my clients started doing work for Oprah Winfrey’s network. We got a big pile of boilerplate that held us to secrecy regarding anything we might see or hear, and it probably had some teeth behind it. I remember expecting that I was going to be privy to some crazy stuff, but it was all very mild. I’m guessing it’s just Oprah’s lawyers covering all their bases, just in case.

The really heavy one was when I got tapped to work on the Hobbit movies. Films were always more intense; lots of times the files we get would only have the working title/codename of the movie. (For instance, and you’ll understand where this came from if you actually saw the flick, but the Ezra Miller Flash movie came to us under the working title “Baby Shower.” Which I thought was clever, even though I wasn’t a fan of the finished product.)

Another cool thing was working animated films. Whereas in live-action, the money is spent shooting the actors, the big cost of an animated feature is the actual animation. So what they tend to do is write a huge script with a bunch of stuff they may not need in it, and then have the voice actors read everything and then pick and choose what they want to animate. More than once I saw an animated feature I’d worked on and like half the subplots weren’t even in the finished film. I remember one they probably could have animated an entire additional movie out of, a la Anchorman 2, they’d recorded so much extra dialogue.

But for The Hobbit, it was an extensive project, and they were shooting the special edition content for the Blu-Rays alongside, so we got to see a ton of what was going on. I used to joke with my friends that I was working on a movie where if I so much as told them the title, a Hollywood director whose name they would instantly recognize would get to shoot me in the face with a shotgun. It wasn’t far off, either. It was nice when the films actually came out and I could talk about it, since everything I’d seen was now public knowledge.

The big one, though, was when I got a job doing transcription work for a defense contractor. I’d transcribe meetings and events, and the NDA I had to sign there was terrifying. With good reason; on more than one occasion I was in possession of knowledge that, had I made it public, would’ve gotten me on the news. (Just to be clear, I’m not talking about malfeasance or whistleblower-type stuff, just insider information that might have affected a stock price or two.) To this day, I won’t name the company, lest they swoop in on me out of the past, lock me in a room and throw away the room.

(And no, I didn’t use any of that information myself. My karma’s already questionable as-is.)

You run so fast, you catch on fire; you just gotta burn