Startefacts
Latest news
Is Disclosure Day based on a book? Where the script came from, and the novel it borrows exactly one word from

Is Disclosure Day based on a book? Where the script came from, and the novel it borrows exactly one word from

written by Hannah Whitlock

September 17, 2026 3:31 pm

✓ Verified by editorial team Add as preferred on Google

Is Disclosure Day based on a book? Where the script came from, and the novel it borrows exactly one word from — Image credit: Legion Media

Every time Hollywood drops a movie that feels grown in a lab from pure premise — aliens are real, the government knew, a Kansas City weather girl finds out live on air — my first instinct is to hunt down the airport paperback it was strip-mined from.

So I went digging on Disclosure Day. And I have news: there is no book. There is, however, a phone.

The script came out of the Notes app (yes, that Notes app)

Disclosure Day is an original story by Steven Spielberg himself — his first story credit since A.I. a quarter century ago. The man did not option a bestseller. He typed a 52-page treatment into his iPhone's Notes app, like a teenager drafting a breakup text, and handed it to David Koepp, the Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds screenwriter, with instructions to turn it into a movie.

Emily Blunt at the weather desk in Disclosure Day. Image credit: Legion Media

Koepp has been very open about how finished that "rough idea" already was. Recalling the treatment, he said:

"Steven knew exactly what he wanted to say."

Which did not stop the two of them from grinding through 42 drafts before cameras rolled. Forty-two. For a story one of them had already written on his phone. Anyway, the math of this movie's origin:

0 novels, comics, or podcasts adapted
52 pages of iPhone treatment
42 drafts of screenplay
1 word on loan from a great American novel

Is The Rivals of Amziah King based on a novel? The screenplay is credited to "James Montague", a name that belongs to nobody

So which novel donated exactly one word?

Here's my favorite part. The very last thing anyone says in Disclosure Day — the word the whole 145-minute machine shuts off on — is "Listen." And that word is a straight lift from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, whose famous second chapter opens on the exact same word before announcing that Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Koepp put it on purpose, and beautifully:

"When you can say everything you mean in one word, you stop talking."

Vonnegut's book also happens to feature aliens who experience all of time at once, so as far as one-word tributes go, this is about as load-bearing as a single word gets. Not based on a book, then. Just quietly holding hands with one.