As a followup to my previous post on BAFTA voting, I wanted to write a bit about the techniques that the studios have been using to make sure the screener DVDs they’re sending out to awards-show voters don’t fall into the hands of pirates. Along the way, you’ll learn why House of Flying Daggers got 9 BAFTA nominations while neither Million Dollar Baby nor Hero got any, and why Wes Anderson should be absolutely furious at Buena Vista pictures. But first, I’m going to tell you a joke.

Late one night, a drunk guy is crawling around under a lamppost. A cop comes up and asks him what he’s doing.
“I’m looking for my keys,” the drunk says. “I lost them about three blocks away.”
“So why aren’t you looking for them where you dropped them?” the cop asks.
The drunk looks at the cop, amazed that he’d ask so obvious a question. “Because the light is better here.”
Keep that joke in the back of your mind, while I take a little tour of the piracy issue.
Let me start by asserting something that seems like common sense to me, but is apparently controversial amongst my fellow geeky under-35s: piracy is bad. Thanks to the heavy-handed tactics of the entertainment industry, when you think of digital piracy, you might imagine some 14-year-old girl who is getting sued for downloading a few songs, or some Babylon 5 completist using BitTorrent to track down the one episode he doesn’t already have on tape. But to me, the real faces of piracy belong to those guys you see selling bootleg DVDs on street corners. They’re screwing the people who buy movies, by sticking them with inferior and often unwatchable product, and they’re screwing the people who make movies, by stealing their paychecks. (And, yes, we do need those paychecks. The handful of ultra-rich celebrities you see on E! are an exception; the average income of a professional film and TV actor is less than $30,000 a year, and the average income of a screenwriter is roughly $46,000 a year.)
So piracy is a problem–but I doubt it’s a problem whose root causes include awards show voters. After all, the people who vote for the Oscars and the BAFTAs and the Screen Actors’ Guild awards generally make our livings from the entertainment industry, and we all have a vested interest in its continuing profitability. On top of that, the set of “films that the studios choose to run awards campaigns for” tends not to overlap too heavily with the set of “films that pirates are salivating over.” I’m just guessing, but I’m willing to bet that there is not a pirate DVD factory in the world dedicated to churning out copies of Closer
Still, awards show campaigns can involve printing up thousands of DVD copies of a film that’s still in the theaters, and then mailing them out to complete strangers. I can’t blame the studios for taking a few reasonable precautions. But when those precautions begin to make it hard for an awards show voter to view and appreciate the film–which is, after all, the point of sending out those DVDs in the first place–I begin to doubt the intelligence of the people choosing those precautions. And because those people are charged with preserving my livelihood against pirates, doubting their intelligence makes me very, very nervous.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I do anything else, I need to underline just how vital these DVD mailing campaigns are to studios who hope to snag award nominations. As I mentioned in a previous post, the studios host free screenings through London, but here are some 4000 voting BAFTA members, and your average London screening room holds maybe 100 people, tops. Add to that the fact that any screening invariably conflicts with several other screenings, and it becomes clear that letting a voter watch a film at home, on his own time, is vital to getting your film widely seen.
Just how vital? Let’s take a look at the strange case of Hero versus House of Flying Daggers. The films were made several years apart, but thanks to their British release schedules, they were both eligible for this year’s BAFTAs. Both films were fantastic, but I think most people would agree with me that Hero was the better of the two. Yet after the first round of voting, House of Flying Daggers ended up shortlisted in 13 categories, including Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actress–all categories that Hero was left out of. In fact, Hero was shortlisted in only 6 categories. And after the second round of voting, House of Flying Daggers ended up with 9 nominations, and Hero was left without any. Meanwhile, Million Dollar Baby–one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the year–was shortlisted in only two categories, and ended up without a single BAFTA nomination.
How do I explain this mystery? By pointing out that BAFTA members received screener DVDs of House of Flying Daggers, and not of Hero or Million Dollar Baby. If people don’t see your film, they can’t vote for it; it’s as simple as that. Now, I cannot and do not speak for BAFTA, and maybe my fellow voting members consider House of Flying Daggers to be a better written, directed, acted, edited, shot, scored, costumed, and set-designed film than the other two. But I don’t think so.
So watching screener copies is a central part of the judging process. Back when screener copies of films were sent out on VHS, there was really only one anti-piracy technique. A couple of times during the film, the words “For Your Consideration” would pop up somewhere on the screen. The idea, apparently, was to let anybody who was watching the film know it was a screener copy, thereby preventing unscrupulous types from selling the tape.
The studios have kept this trick with screener DVDs. It takes me out of the film– the sudden appearance of the phrase “For Your Consideration” along the bottom of Jamie Foxx’s face is enough to remind me that he isn’t Ray Charles after all–but when the film is good enough, I get sucked back in as soon as the words disappear. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t stop me from fairly judging the merits of a film.
The studios have also used the digital nature of DVDs to add in a new anti-piracy trick. They now encode each screener with an individual code; if I do find a particularly artsy Chinese mafia Triad that’s willing to buy my copy of Closer, the MPAA will be able to trace the ensuing flood of bootleg copies right back to my doorstep. This makes me so paranoid that I am reluctant to even lend my screener copies to close friends, lest they misplace one of them and set off a chain of events that ends with me rotting in a Shanghai prison. It’s too bad, but since I got the DVDs for free in the first place, I can’t complain. In any case, it has absolutely no effect on my ability to judge a film fairly. It’s entirely invisible and non-obtrusive…
…at least, it’s usually non-obtrusive. The exception this year was Columbia Tri-Star, which sent BAFTA members an e-mail telling us we would shortly be receiving a letter, via postal courier, and that by signing for receipt of the letter, we would be agreeing to be held responsible if any DVD they sent us ended up being pirated. Then they sent a second e-mail, asking me to click on a link to indicate receipt of the e-mail that asked me to sign for receipt of the letter they were going to send. Then I got a third e-mail saying the courier company was running late and the letter would be delayed but it would be arriving soon and I should make sure to sign for it. Then I got a fourth e-mail which was a duplicate of the third. Then the long-awaited paper letter arrived, but the courier just dropped it through my mail slot and left, so I couldn’t sign for it, but that didn’t matter, since the letter said I would be held liable for any DVDs that were sent to me unless I specifically contact Columbia Tri-Star by close of business that day and disavowed any liability. Then I got ANOTHER e-mail from Columbia Tri-Star saying that their courier company had failed to gain proof of receipt, and that I therefore needed to click on another link to indicate that I had gotten the letter.
Despite all this, I was willing to agree to Columbia Tri-Stars terms, because I wanted to be able to consider their films in my voting. Then I took another look at the letter, and realized that it didn’t just hold me liable for any DVD I received. It held me liable for any DVD Columbia Tri-Star sent to me, no matter who signed for it. Given the competence the courier company had already displayed, I was not thrilled about the notion of trusting them to keep me out of Shanghai Prison, Cell Block 4. So I sent Columbia an e-mail with my own revised terms, telling them that sending me any screeners would indicate their acceptance of my terms. I got the DVDs a few days later.
The whole experience left me worried that the film industry is on its way to aping the music industry in its belief that anybody who is interested in experiencing your work is a potential criminal and ought to be treated like one. If this attitude works as well for the film industry as it has for the music industry, it will be no time at all before I need to start looking for another line of work. For now, at least, it only seems to be Columbia Tri-Star UK who are suffering from such a severe form of this particular mania. In this case, at any rate, it didn’t do any harm to the filmmakers; the fact that their film’s distributor acted like an ass didn’t stop Natelia Portman, Clive Owen, and writer Patrick Marber from from getting BAFTA nominations for Closer.
Sadly, Wes Anderson was not so lucky: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou did not get a single BAFTA nod. I admit that I was a little disappointed in the film–I liked it more than Royal Tanenbaums but significantly less than Rushmore–but I’m surprised that it didn’t get a single nomination.
Or, at least, I would be, if I hadn’t tried to watch the screener copy that Buena Vista Pictures Marketing sent out. Here’s a sample frame from it:

Take a look at the top and bottom of the screen. Notice the words “Property of BVPM” at the top, and “Do Not Duplicate” at the bottom? They’re on every single frame of the film.



Occasionally, this is amusing–in the last of those images, you’ll notice that the back of Cate Blanchet’s shirt seems to be advertising her new biography, “I, Cate”–but most of the time, it’s even more incredibly distracting than you’d imagine from looking at the still images above. In every one of Wes Anderson’s carefully planned tracking shots, the most noticeable element becomes those big, unmoving letters at the top and bottom of the screen. Every one of his carefully composed static shots is thrown out of balance by their presence. It becomes difficult to notice Bill Murray’s wonderfully subtle performance, or Owen Wilson’s understated humor, because your eye keeps being drawn to the giant words hovering in front of them. Fortunately, I had the chance to see the film in a proper screening, so I was able to appreciate its charms; but when I tried to watch the screening copy at home with my wife (who hadn’t yet seen the film), we got about 45 minutes into it before giving up. This is a film of delicate charms to begin with, and having to watch it behind the screen of an anti-piracy billboard squashes it dead. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the decision to send out these deliberately crippled screening copies was a major factor in killing the film’s BAFTA hopes. If I were Wes Anderson, I would be livid.
So why do the studios do it? Why do they hassle voters, piss off filmmakers, and risk losing awards (and the financial rewards thereof), just to prevent piracy in a group that isn’t likely to pirate in the first place? It’s because breaking international piracy rings is hard, and stopping individuals from swapping MPEG files on the Internet is impossible. But hassling people who love movies–be we awards show voters or just ordinary moviegoers–is easy, because they know where to find us. In short, the studios are looking for their keys where the light is best, even if it’s miles away from where they dropped them.