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This topic comprises 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
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Topic: Transformers prints delivery info ??
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 07-03-2007 01:10 PM
quote: Brad Allen
NATO isn't worth the paper it's charter is written on. They've proven it time and time again.
So why aren't you guys writing to NATO and expressing your concerns? Posting your thoughts on a message board that nobody from NATO may even know about is one thing -- telling it to them directly might actually get some action. Here you go: natodc@nato.com (This is a public email address and is on the NATO website, so it shouldn't be a problem posting it here.)
quote: Brad Allen
Lets throw Disneys new sliding billing policy out there as another example of NATO setting around and doing nothing.
I don't think NATO ever gets involved in film rental term negotiations. That's up to the individual exhibition companies. Why don't the chains get after the film companies themselves over this? If they don't like it, why put up with it? If they don't like it, don't play the product. NATO doesn't have to get involved. If just a couple of the large chains said, "Sorry, we are not paying over 60% for the opening weekend of any movie and if you don't like that, we won't play any of your movies," the problem would disappear.
quote: Brad Allen
It's rather obvious from going into a chain theatre that most theatre chain suits do not understand that the product they are selling is presentation......not food.
I fully agree with that. But as long as they're making the most money from food, that's where the focus will be.
quote:
All the talk of standing up to the studios would have worked great in 1982 but the reality is that now they could just as easily say f-you to the theaters and start going day and date to dvd or pay per view....(snip)...Unfortunately the theaters need the studios more than vice versa.
They both need each other. Without the theatre business, the studios would just become glorified TV production companies, and neither they nor their overpaid stars and directors want that.
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Dustin Mitchell
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1865
From: Mondovi, WI, USA
Registered: Mar 2000
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posted 07-03-2007 04:15 PM
Scott, I have never worked or attended a festival so forgive me if I'm wrong, but many times these very same festival prints are in less than optimal condition. Even if they were recieved early, though, there wouldn't be much you could do about it as replacement prints aren't exactly easy to come by in that situation. What festival people have to deal with is situational and there's not much that can be done about it. With a major wide release expected to be one of the summer's top grossers there is NO exccuse for anything less than perfect presentation. There is no reason that issues such as lab defects, bad used prints, or even missing/duplicate reels (I'm sure I'm not the only one who's gotten two of the same reel in a can before) should not be taken care of before the first public showing. Even if you had opened the second can at exactly 9am it would have been very difficutl, if not impossible depending on geographic location, to get a replacement reel in time for the 9pm show.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 07-05-2007 07:56 AM
quote: Mike Blakesley
I don't think NATO ever gets involved in film rental term negotiations. That's up to the individual exhibition companies.
Why not? Isn't that what NATO is....the ASSOCIATION of THEATRE OWNERS? Just like the studios are represented by the MPAA.
quote: Anslem Rayburn
Piracy comes from everywhere. You prove that much of it comes from studio insiders. It's simply not true, from what I have seen. It might be easier for you to accept that, but everything I have ever seen that was pirated (save for one movie, some 12 years ago)
The key phrase here being from what you've seen. Trouble is, you don't see where the big-time, significant piracy is happening. It's not the piddly crap that is sold on street corners -- that doesn't even show up on the radar. The REAL piracy is when a perfect DVD copy gets into the hands of the Chinese and or Russian duplicating plants and millions upon millions of them are sold as regular DVDs in those nation's video retail stores.
And on occasion you even hear of video stores right here in the USA who are caught buying illegit but perfect copies and shuffle them in with real product. It's pretty easy to buy one legitimate DVD for every two perfect knockoffs at half price -- they are all sold at list price. This stuff is indistinguishable from the real thing and it certainly doesn't come from cam dupes. THAT's where those billions of dollars the studios claim they are loosing happens, not from street corner peddlers hawking cam copies for $3.
Sure, in your limited experience of what you may have seen on street corners, you are right, that kind of stuff comes from off the screen copies, and even there I can tell you that you are either not checking out enough street vendors to get a good feel, or the ones in your area are just not well connected because here in Brooklyn, right in front of the famous Juniors restaurant, the peddler with all his DVDs layed out on the sidewalk will tell you which ones are "cams" and which ones are "labs" as he calls them. And I can tell you that at least one third of them are lab; he even has price differentials -- cams are $3, labs are $5. AND, when he told me that a title was a cam, he quickly added that I should come back in a few days and he would have a lab copy!
But again, even THAT is not what the studios are afraid of because it doesn't amount to a fraction of a fraction of what they loose in the foreign markets where they have no control. And you can be sure that those markets are no less descrimintate that we are; they are not going to accept cam copies when they pay full price for a store-bought DVD at a retail outlet.
quote: Anslem Rayburn
Just because it makes more sense to dupe a copy from a DVD screener doesn't mean it is the pirate's method of choice
?? Of course it is. He can't mass product DVDs that are going to be passed off to retail outlets as the real thing if they are cam copies.
quote: Anslem Rayburn
but it's just dishonest to blame dvd screeners or insided jobs based on anything I have ever seen.
Well, you haven't seen enough, or listened to the MPAA itself which admitted that screener copies were a huge problem; it was even toying with the idea of stopping the whole screener DVD system because they themselves know how enormous the damage can be when only a single copy gets into the wrong hands.
quote: Anslem Rayburn
But let's not point fingers at another party that doesn't really deserve the blame for piracy
Every time you hear spokespersons from the studio side of the industry giving out press releases or giving interviews, they talk about piracy as if it is ONLY done by theatre personnel directly or at least caused by the negligence of the exhibitor who allow it to be done off their screens. I have never EVER heard anyone from the studios saying, "AND in addition to cam copies, we have the Academy screener copies as a source of piracy being duplicated by the millions in China and Russia and even in places in the US like Blockbuster -- perfect copies (the blessing of digital), indistinguishable from legitimate copies." So excuse me if I point a finger where they always conveniently neglect to point one. That's not dishonest -- it's just shining a little light where they don't.
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John Hawkinson
Film God
Posts: 2273
From: Cambridge, MA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 07-05-2007 10:08 AM
Frank, I asked you about this in a recent thread in Yak or the Ground Level. Can you give supporting evidence that internal studio sources are a more significant source of pirated films than camera captures in theatres? If not, please stop asserting that they are.
It is clear that both kinds of piracy exist and are a problem.
My assessment is that in fact camera captures are more prevalent, based on casual glances at pirate content verification sites (but I don't download this stuff, and I don't do regular surveys, so my results are certainly not definitive). Contrast this with the guys on your streetcorner -- none of these measurements is representative. I think at best we can only assume that both kinds of piracy are out there in roughly equal proportion.
Everyone likes to think they are not the problem. So of course, projectionists and theatre managers like to think that the problem is not in theatres. But there is no evidence to support such claims, and there is evidence to the contrary.
Fundamentally, though, it doesn't really matter which is "more prevalent." The studios need to wage the battles on both fronts.
--jhawk
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Anslem Rayburn
Master Film Handler
Posts: 476
From: Yuma, AZ, USA
Registered: May 2002
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posted 07-05-2007 07:58 PM
quote: Frank Angel
Well, you haven't seen enough, or listened to the MPAA itself which admitted that screener copies were a huge problem
quote: Frank Angel
I have never EVER heard anyone from the studios saying, "AND in addition to cam copies, we have the Academy screener copies as a source of piracy
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
The pirated movies I have seen include a few torrents, a locally purchased DVD (which the police don't seem to care about), and a friends boyfriend who came back from Iraq with a hefty collection of bootlegs. All of them, except for a VHS tape in high school, were taken off screen. I didn't actually watch any of the bootlegs brough back from Iraq, but I am told they were all, and I mean every one of them, taken off screen via camcorder. I understand that screeners get copied, too. I just think that if it were as prevalent as you would have me believe, I would have seen at least one in the last 12 years.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 07-06-2007 12:29 AM
OK John, I guess if you want empirical evidence and exact numbers count, then no, of course I and probably the MPAA itself can't give you that. In that respect you are correct. But it's like the tobacco companies saying unless someone can give empirical proof that cigarette smoking causes cancer, then it doesn't. I am just deducing from my experience and according to the MPAA own claims, they always claim that they loose billions of dollars to piracy. They also say that one of the biggest problems is the foreign market where copies are sold INSTEAD of legit copies in retail outlets.
It also seems obvious to me that there aren't enough street level peddlers across the country selling that many cam copies to rack up that kind of loss, because that would be one army of street peddlers and that would have to be one huge number of street corners all across the country. How many peddlers do you see in your city? Here in Brooklyn, a city of over 3 million, I can count on one hand how many of these guys I can find. I travel quite a bit and in smaller towns (I was just all over Kentucky for two weeks just last month) and I didn't see a one. So it seems unlikely that all this money is being lost to such a limited street operation, and even there, as I point out previously, the peddler I encountered have about 1/3rd lab DVDs.
I contend that it is the mass produced product that is the place where big money is lost. Can some of this be from cam copies, maybe -- I certainly am not privy to the demands of the marketplace in China or Russia, but I can tell you that some of the Russian students that are in the US who I know quite well talk about this all the time and tell me that they can easily get pristine copies in retail stores in their country that are bootlegged. I ask them if these are off-the-screen copies? They laugh. Who would by such junk?, they ask in return. It's a mistake to assume that foreigners are less descriminating or that retailers who want to pass counterfit product will buy obbvious dupes; they are going to want product that is indistinguishable from the real thing that can "pass" and which they can indeed sell as the real thing. Cams copies simply won't cut the mustard.
So it seems pretty logical, at least to me, that screener copies ARE a big problem; there is enough anecdotal evidence for me, the Iraq information not withstanding.
Besides, you seem to be missing my point -- the jist of my post was to point out that the studios are always curiously mum about that inside source of the pirating problem while very vocal about the connection between theatres and projectionists being the source of their billions in loss. They are never vocal about pointing the finger to any of the hundreds of people on the studio side of the fence who handle this material. And quite frankly, that irks me big-time. They seem to have a culture that thrives on making exhibition out to be the bad guy -- every thing from those stupid on-screen anti-piracy spots (and to add insult to injury -- playing them on the exhibitors' own screens and on the exhibitors' own time) to having security guards wand people who come into my theatre (not only the theatres are suspect, but the people who actually came and paid for a ticket are indirectly accused of being potential thieves), to having a guard follow me up to the booth to "watch" the print. And then this last bit of nonsense being a perfect example -- locking the film cans. WTF? Could there BE anything any more stupid and childish?
All I am saying is, if they are going to lament DVD piracy, then admit that there are significant problems in both areas of the isle. The are always quick to make public those FBI stings in which warehouses full of DVD of titles barely opened in the theatres (some not even) are uncovered. How about revealing where the origin of those DVD are tracked back to. If there are cap codes, then that should be as easy as reading an address on an envelope. It there are NO cap codes, then those came from someplace inside the belly of the beast. Let's hear about THAT.
Look, I don't travel in circles where I would have a lot of inside information about who has access to lab material or how it all even works or their security protocols, but even in my small circle of friends who do work in post production, I know they happen to be VERY lax about letting people carry around entire unreleased films on DVDs and on their laptops. At a social gathering one night with techies and friends, one of our friends who had flown in from the West coast let everyone watch a film that was yet to be released which he was working on and which he had on his laptop. It's done all the time and it seems Hollywood doesn't think it's any big deal; at least not until gets into the wrong hands. And believe me, there was no combination master lock on his laptop (and no password, either, I observed.)
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