By Nat Segaloff Everyone knows that a "white elephant" is a useless gift, but its actual meaning and origins are more sinister. In ancient days, when the King of Siam was displeased with a courtier, he presented him with a rare albino pachyderm. Ostensibly a benign bequest, the animal posed such burdensome upkeep that it drove the recipient to ruin. Members of the television and motion picture guilds and academies may feel the same way about the countless free screening DVDs that arrive at the end of each year. Prohibited from selling or giving them away (and, in some cases, even having friends over to watch), they suffer the deluge, as discs mount up pretty fast and quickly overflow from living room to hall closet to garage. It's ironic that producers beg Academy voters to consider their work while, at the same time, they forbid them to chuck it if it's dreck. Strictly speaking, the only proper way to get rid of screeners is to send them back at one's own expense. Fat chance. For years, industry insiders felt entitled to keep and share screeners. In the past, selling unwanted review copies of books and videos was a time-honored way for low-paid critics to survive. Now, thanks to non-Caribbean pirates, DVD recipients are treated like they're waiting to hoist the Jolly Roger. Even Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Dan Glickman, cast aspersions on the people who pay his salary when he announced that, in 2005, "16 out of 32 studio titles that had been sent out as Academy screeners had been pirated," and claimed that had resulted in a loss of $6.1 billion to American film companies (according to Hollywood bookkeeping). Rightly concerned about lost revenue, the MPAA and FBI have been going after those who share the wealth. A number of well-publicized busts, ranging from small-part actors to post-production technicians, have made it clear that "insider trading" in screeners will not be tolerated. The matter was given renewed urgency in June of 2006, when a Boston film critic pleaded guilty to selling review copies of DVDs on eBay to someone who uploaded them to the Web prior to their street date. Each year, members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the Hollywood Foreign Press, critics and review boards, as well as actors, writers, directors and other guild members receive "for your consideration" screeners by hopeful producers, with wistful instructions to be discrete. Is discretion too difficult a request when this year's blockbuster magically drops through a mail slot in time for Thanksgiving? To curb temptation, producers and distributors enlist several safeguards. The most popular is Macrovision®, a patented encryption signal that renders a DVD uncopyable (that is, unless the recipient downloads any of the 2,430,000 code-breaking links searchable on Google®). Then there's Cinea®, a copy-protect favored by Disney, which necessitates a special DVD machine (provided by the Academy) to play Cinea's proprietary discs. The middle ground is held by digital watermarks that encode each DVD with the ID of its recipient. But "it's very expensive, and they would cost more as far as the shipping and handling," cautions Sheri Ebner, manager of Primetime Emmy Awards at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. "Instead of just throwing a DVD in a Jiffy bag and putting a label on it, you now have to match DVD number five with John Smith; that kind of thing." Nevertheless, Ebner warns, "If somebody sees one of their screeners on eBay and they want to find out who it was that had it up there, they could contact us and we would let them know if [the seller was] a member. And we could give them their contact information if they wanted to pursue legal action. "At the same time," she avers, "you can't be sure that that member didn't just hand it to somebody, or they just threw it out and somebody went through their trash can and took it. It's one of those grey areas." The most extreme solution, of course, is not to send out screeners at all. That's what AMPAS, acting on the wishes of its member film companies, tried and failed to initiate in 2003, recalls the Academy's director of communications, John Pavlik. The screams of Oscar® voters were heard all the way to Washington, where Jack Valenti, winding down as head of the MPAA, rushed into conference with then-Academy President Frank Pierson to hammer out a deal that would offer screeners again -- but only to voters who signed a security agreement. "But," adds Pavlik, "that was the only year." Admittedly, there's a certain irony here. Why, for example, can a member of the public sell or give away a commercial DVD without risk, whereas someone who dares to dispose of a screener of the same title courts prosecution? It's because screeners remain the property of the company, explains a source at Home Box Office, whose titles are among the most coveted; not to mention the fact that they have "For Screening Use Only" or "For Award Consideration Only" superimposed across the picture. "Besides," joked the source (who declined to be named), "why would anybody ever want to get rid of an HBO production?" The bottom line is that, unless a company says otherwise, this may be all you can do with old screeners: 1. Destroy them and then throw them away; 2. Send them back to the company that sent them; 3. Send old TV screeners to ATAS, which donates them to Hollywood Cares, a charity that forwards them to service men and women and their families (who, presumably, are relieved of the blood oath); or 4. Start building an annex. Photo by Melissa Jenkins |
