Can Studios Tame the Net?

More than money, more than fame, the key to having juice in Hollywood has always been control. Directors want final cut. Actors want script approval. And studio executives want to unveil their pictures and garner publicity according to their own carefully orchestrated schedules.

No wonder the Internet is making Hollywood sweat.

Just as videocassette recorders in the 1970s first alarmed and later revolutionized the film industry, the information superhighway is throwing Hollywood for a loop. Unregulated, immediate and relentlessly democratic, the Internet can be harnessed, of course, to promote movies--all the major studios (and most of the minor ones) have Web sites. But movie fans are exchanging more than just information about upcoming films. More and more they’re trading pirated copies of them, forcing the industry to rethink how it does business.

Piracy is a growing problem. Officials at the Motion Picture Assn. of America say that stolen copies of recent movies such as “The Matrix,” “8mm” and “Shakespeare in Love” already have been discovered online. Meanwhile, the creators of “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace,” which has been the focus of frenzied Internet activity leading up to its Wednesday release, are bracing for their film to be illegally posted on the Web.

The scenario goes like this: “Star Wars” fans, armed with hand-held digital cameras, descend upon theaters on opening day. Suddenly, without permission, the film appears on the Internet. It may take an eternity to download, and it will assuredly be of poor quality, but--if suspicions prove true--it will be there.

“Publishing was the first [business to fall victim to Internet piracy]. Then music. Now here comes the beast creeping toward us,” said MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor, marveling at why anyone would spend time accessing a herky-jerky, small-format copy of a movie that was still playing in crisp 70 millimeter at their local theater. “I think a lot of it is like 21st century baseball card trading--’Look, I got “Matrix”! What do you have?’ It’s not so much that you watch it, but that you’ve got it.”

Theft, however, is just one example of how the proprietary culture of Hollywood is chafing against the technology-for-the-people realm of the World Wide Web. Now, for example, it has become impossible to hold test screenings without reading about it the next day on a variety of fan Web sites. The result, said producer Jerry Bruckheimer: Some filmmakers are “[reluctant] to show their movies too early because they know they’ll be reviewed.”

And yet, if an early online review is positive, others say, fan sites such as https://www.aint-it-cool-news.com (the creation of a 27-year-old Austin, Texas, native named Harry Knowles) can influence studio executives’ decisions about advertising budgets, release schedules and even the editing of the film.

“Let’s say you don’t want a lot of competition around your movie. If somebody starts raving on the Internet, other movies will move away [from your release date]. And I know of many examples where someone wants to get a good ad budget for their movie and uses the Internet buzz to do it,” said one writer-director who asked not to be named because he--like many filmmakers--wants to cultivate a relationship with Knowles.

“I know how powerful he is,” this Oscar nominee said bluntly. “You’re in a big perception war all the way up to opening. A perception that your movie is loved is buoying to a marketing department. And this is one thing that contributes to the perception.”

With such high stakes, the movie industry has begun trying to manipulate that which it cannot tame. Everyone in Hollywood believes--and sources at more than one studio confirm--that popular fan sites like Knowles’ and the Australia-based https://www.darkhorizons.com have at times unwittingly posted reports from “real” people who are studio employees.

“I read on ‘Ain’t It Cool News’ for months that ‘BASEketball’ was a brilliant film,” said Chris Gore, whose irreverent e-zine FilmThreat (https://www.filmthreat.com) is sent via the Internet to nearly 100,000 subscribers each week. “I think even Universal [Pictures, which released the film last year] would say, ‘Yes, we know that movie is abysmal.’ Clearly, that was someone infiltrating the site.”

Many studio execs say movie fan sites are valuable in that they encourage people--particularly young people, who tend to go to the movies on opening weekend--to talk about and pay to see movies. According to Bob Friedman, co-chairman of worldwide marketing for New Line Cinema, “word of mouth is very important” for these so-called early attenders. “And the online world is the ultimate word of mouth.”

But as the studios know, that can be a double-edged sword.

“With this new media, people know a movie is bad immediately, a day or two [after it opens],” Friedman said. “That doesn’t mean a movie necessarily must be stellar to do well. But it means you have to create appropriate expectations.”

According to Michael Latham, director of production for entertainment and media at the Internet search engine Yahoo, all this marks an important change not only in the way the movie industry uses the Internet, but also in the way the public relates to entertainment.

“This is a new style of communication, and ultimately, the movie studios have to embrace it because if they don’t, people will turn to other forms,” he said, adding that movie-related Internet chat “puts more pressure on to do a better product. It’s the ultimate focus group to get the early ideas and hear what people want. [But] once you give people a voice, to not listen to them is extremely dangerous.”

“The evolving nature of entertainment,” Latham continued, “is for the audience to become a ‘by-choice participant.’ You want to remain in the audience, but you want the choice to participate at any time, whether that means voting in a poll, writing a review or rewriting a favorite scene. Over time, the smart mediums will continue to offer all alternatives or will risk [having moviegoers ask themselves], ‘Why continue spending your time being part of a community that doesn’t at least answer you?’ ”

The availability of pirated feature films online first came to the MPAA’s attention about a year ago when the organization hired a full-time investigative research specialist to supervise the monitoring of Internet activity around the world. The specialist was immediately struck not only by how many films were available, but also by most pirates’ assertion that they were not doing anything wrong.

“Sure, some pirates post warnings: ‘In order to come in to my Web page, you must swear you’re not an MPAA or law enforcement officer.’ But mostly when we bust people they tell us they genuinely had no idea it was illegal,” said the investigator, who asked not to be identified. “They say, ‘I was just giving it to a friend.’ Or, ‘I was helping people out.’ ”

Last August, for example, MPAA investigators discovered a site that offered “Armageddon,” “The Fifth Element,” “Godzilla,” “Reservoir Dogs” and “Spaceballs” for downloading. The culprit turned out to be a 16-year-old high school student who was using the server at his elite prep school to make the movies available. Investigators contacted the school and the boy’s parents. His Web site, on which he had also offered to dub the movies on videocassette for a fee, was shut down.

A student at Cornell University, meanwhile, was offering “Bladerunner,” “Payback,” “Ronin” and “The Thin Red Line” on his site. But he knew he was up to no good: He limited the hours he would open his directory, he explained to those who visited his site, because the university had begun expelling students for similar abuses to the school’s computer system. Limited hours, he thought, would attract less attention.

Internet movie piracy today is still largely a sport of hackers, eager to show their technological prowess. But the MPAA is bracing for that to change as computers get faster and more sophisticated.

“When broadband becomes available in millions of homes in this country, I want us to have in place a technological armor plate that guards our movies from being hauled down in a profligate manner by everybody with a computer,” said Jack Valenti, the MPAA’s president, who called the Internet a “revolutionary medium” that is sure to reform how movies are delivered to the consumer.

“I’m not unhappy with it as a delivery system any more than I’m unhappy with flatbed trucks. I just want to protect my merchandise,” said Valenti, who called the issue his highest priority. “Because there’s a mountain of difference between analog, which is video, and digital, the Internet form. [With] digital, the thousandth copy is as clean as the original. You let some pirates get hold of that and we’re dead.”

Taylor, the MPAA spokesman, said the goal is to educate the public before piracy becomes more widespread. “We’re trying to make people understand now that it’s not OK to copy movies on the Internet, so that when it gets easier--when you’re a mouse click and 10 seconds away from downloading the latest Tom Cruise movie--they’ll think twice.”

Art Murphy, a longtime film industry analyst, says this campaign is much like the one the MPAA launched in response to the videocassette in the 1970s--but with one key difference. While it was relatively easy for Americans to grasp that dubbing a tape was a violation of copyright, no such understanding exists about the Internet. In fact, the very culture of the Web runs counter to the idea.

“So much of the hype of the Internet is based on the naive assumption that knowledge is free and should be to everybody,” Murphy said. “Of course, the pauper will agree with you. But what about the person who created it? The attitude is, ‘They make so much money anyway, they’ll never miss it.’ ”

Latham, of Yahoo, agreed.

“The Internet is about empowerment and freedom and equality, really, and freeing yourself from traditional senses of boundaries. While the movie industry understandably wants to remind people that legal boundaries exist, he cautioned, it would also do well to try to use the Internet to make itself more responsive to its audience.

More and more, he noted, average folks are writing “fan fiction,” their own homespun episodes and sequels to movies and TV shows ranging from “Star Trek” to “Days of Our Lives.” To wit, on the Special Thoughts for Mark Hamill Web page, (https://www.yggdrasill.demon.nl/), Web master Sylvia Christina posts her own “Star Wars” sequel, entitled: “A Jedi’s Fight.” It begins: “Yeuram, the sixth moon in the Nargon system, had become the new home world for the New Republics’ government.”

Similarly, there is a sudden proliferation of self-appointed film critics posting their own reviews. “Now, you can have someone critique movies without those snooty, 10-dollar words describing every form of cinematography,” John “Highway” Yu wrote in an introduction to his Highways Movie Goer’s Review Page (https://www.vni.net/~highway/reviews/). “A simple plot, with a simple ‘I like it’ or ‘Don’t see it’ is all you need, right?”

Meanwhile, Jeb’s Film Reviews (https://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Campus/2363/film--reviews.htm) has its own ranking method. “Dissatisfied with the thumbs and the stars, I decided to make my own system based upon something I know a bit about: beer,” explained James Foreman, the site creator. “Basically, I rate movies based upon how many beers one must drink to enjoy the film. The more beers, the worse the movie.”

And ever-improving technology even allows fledgling filmmakers to engage in what some call “genre-splicing”--the reediting of existing films to create new ones. Whether you deem it democracy at work or the triumph of mediocrity, the phenomenon is undeniably fascinating.

“It’s ‘Let’s [cross] “Star Wars” with “Cops,” let’s mix it with “South Park” or “Clerks.” ’ And I think that’s neat,” said Clive Young, 29, who runs Mos Eisley Multiplex, a movie fan Web site (https://members.aol.com/moseisleym/sw-main.html). He believes the Internet affords everyone the ability to be creative with film. “If people jump from doing that to making their own movie, even if it’s about a paper route they had when they were a kid, that’s a really cool thing.”

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Times staff writer Michele Botwin contributed to this report.