Secret Is Safe With ‘Seinfeld’

In the last “Seinfeld” episode, Jerry and the gang wind up reunited in Los Angeles, tasting the good life but just as cantankerous as ever.

At least, that’s the scenario in an outline of the final episode that’s intricately detailed, reasonably funny and, by all accounts, a complete hoax.

A portion of the scene-by-scene breakdown--circulating with the warning, “Don’t read if you don’t want to know”--found its way into the New York Daily News last week, demonstrating the increasing problem of disinformation, speculative fiction and authentic leaks that now regularly plague popular television shows and movies thanks to the Internet and other emerging media.

In that respect, “Seinfeld” is hardly alone. One Web site already boasts an alleged script for the top-secret “The X-Files” movie, which will be released this summer, as well as a lengthy account of the next voyage in the continuing “Star Trek” film franchise, which will soon begin production.

“Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David, who has essentially completed a rough first draft for the one-hour finale that will be shot in April and broadcast May 14, said of the bogus outline, “It’s obviously the result of a mental patient with time on his hands.”

Perhaps, but it’s a reasonably talented mental patient. In the outline, Jerry moves to Los Angeles to headline a TV variety show, and Elaine and George come along to help him pick out a house. Elaine promptly falls for the handsome Beverly Hills real-estate broker, and George--thanks to his ties to the Yankees--gets hired as a television critic (“This is it, Jerry! My dream come true!” he says).

Even Kramer shows up at Jerry’s doorstep after an NBC executive--having seen an old clip of him on “Murphy Brown”--offers everyone’s favorite wacky neighbor his own sitcom. “NBC has an opening on Thursday night,” Kramer tells Jerry, “[and] if I’m not ‘Must-See TV,’ no one is!”

“Somebody’s gone to a lot of trouble,” said Castle Rock Television President Glenn Padnick, whose company produces “Seinfeld.” “I prefer not to answer this question, but I do know this is a fraud.”

Padnick--who likened the outline to Clifford Irving’s 1972 hoax autobiography of Howard Hughes--remains bemused by the “Seinfeld”-mania to which journalists have succumbed, desperate for any crumb related to the series. The New York tabloids have been especially rabid, writing about the show on an almost daily basis.

David admitted to breathing a sigh of relief that the outline isn’t accurate and conceded he isn’t aware of any special measures to keep details from leaking out.

“I don’t know what we can do,” he said. “We really haven’t talked about it.” Padnick declined to discuss security plans, and NBC deferred to the producers.

Though most of the audience prefers being surprised by their favorite entertainment, some die-hard fans can’t resist the temptation to be among the first to know--a problem that escalates for programs inspiring the most intense loyalty.

“Most of the perceived methods of security only last so long,” said Rick Berman, producer of the eighth and upcoming ninth “Star Trek” films, who has also steered the franchise’s popular television spinoffs “The Next Generation,” “Voyager” and “Deep Space Nine.”

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The frenzy to disseminate information, in fact, has seemingly become a producer’s best defense: that is, with enough bogus information flooding the marketplace, people may not be able to recognize the real story even when it does escape into the public realm.

“That’s one of the blessings of the Internet,” Berman said, noting that when tabloid newspapers were the only outlet for such gossip, by the time a script or synopsis got printed the facts were usually correct.

“Now that the Internet has become the major source, it’s been sort of beneficial to us, because there’ll be eight bogus scripts for every real one,” Berman said.

In the past, producers have resorted to floating red herrings to mislead those seeking to disclose such secrets. False pages circulated of the 1991 “Dallas” finale, for example, as well as for the “Who Shot J.R.?” episode.

“We shot every cast member shooting J.R. . . . to throw off everyone in production on the show,” said Arthur B. Lewis, a supervising producer on “Dallas” for 11 seasons, who had the script for that 1980 episode--one of the most widely watched in television history--stolen from his office by someone who unsuccessfully attempted to sell its contents to newspapers. “A lot of the supermarket tabloids have someone on the payroll someplace.”

“The X-Files”--a program already awash in colorful conspiracy theories--has gone so far as to concoct multiple story lines and to number every page of scripts to prevent them from being copied, or at least to aid the producers in pinpointing the source of leaks.

A production company’s security efforts can only go so far, however, and even the producers of that show have on a few occasions been stunned to see details of episodes turn up on the Internet while the segment in question was still in production.

Such material remains easier to control so long as it’s confined to a program’s staff, but producers say that once they begin casting the show the challenge of keeping information under wraps increases exponentially.

“No matter what lengths we go to [seeking] to keep the scripts private . . . someone invariably gets ahold of one,” Berman said, adding, “It’s hard to hire actors without letting them read scripts”--a process that makes scripts available to agents, actors and even those who ferry packages between them.

Not that actors always have to be in the loop, of course. With the “Who Shot J.R.?” plot, Lewis recalled that Jim Davis, who played family patriarch Jock Ewing, came into his office one day and said, “ ‘I just got a call from [former President] Jerry Ford. Betty wants to know who shot J.R., and I can’t tell him.’ ”