THE BOOTLEG SYNDROME

Soviets are notorious for pirating popular movies--and, some claim, it’s often the officials responsible for banning certain films who also do the bootlegging.

“Every time Motion Picture Assn. of America President Jack Valenti goes to the Moscow Film Festival, he’ll take 10 or 15 American movies with him,” said Gary Essert. “Two will be lauded or officially entered in the festival or whatever, and the other 10 or 15 will run in the Soviet Union all over the place for the next eight years.

“He brings in the prints legally and shows them the movies and takes the prints out legally, but staying behind are a lot of bootleg films which are made off of those prints.”

Valenti told Calendar he’s complained to Soviet authorities about the bootlegging: “They play (the bootlegs) for darn near around the clock and you see ticket scalpers getting $10 a ticket for them.” (The average ticket price in Russia is about 50 cents.)

“In the old (pre-Gorbachev) days,” Essert said, “the American films officially represented at the Moscow festival were always something which portrays the capitalist system twisting and mangling the little souls that are developing, usually a Stanley Kramer (“On the Beach”) film showing social injustice, and meanwhile all over Moscow would be running bootlegged prints of ‘Funny Lady’ and the brand-new Redford film, terrible prints, in black-and-white, mangled.”

Director Norman Jewison knows of six or seven Kremlin screenings of his “The Russians are Coming! . . .,” but “I don’t believe it was ever licensed,” he said. Nor have the Soviets licensed his 19th movie, “A Soldier’s Story,” which won the highest honor at the Moscow Film Festival. But at a recent cultural soiree in Moscow attended by 2,500 people, Jewison said with a chuckle, “Everybody I talked to had seen ‘A Soldier’s Story.’ ”

“I’m sure it would be the dream of the hard-liners (in the Soviet Bloc) that only socialist films be shown, but it’s difficult for them to fight for it when nobody wants it,” says Czechoslovakian-born director Milos Forman (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Amadeus”), whose films have been effectively banned in the entire Soviet Bloc since he left Czechoslovakia in 1969.

But the ban is lifting: One of the first actions take by the new Soviet film regime was to acquire “Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus” (though “Cuckoo’s Nest” has not been purchased by Czechoslovakia). According to Jitka Markvartova, a Czech film official involved in the negotiations to buy “Amadeus,” that deal also almost fell through. The Czechs wanted the Oscar-winning “Amadeus” for “two reasons,” she said in a telephone interview from the Czech Film Import office in Prague--”the quality, and because it was made here.”

But Saul Zaentz, the San Francisco-based producer of “Amadeus” and “Cuckoo’s Nest,” opened the negotiations by asking for $35,000, “a very, very high price,” she said.

The country’s total annual budget for all foreign films is only $200,000, she said, and Czechoslovakia is accustomed to paying about $10,000 to $12,000 for an American movie.

A temporary breakdown in negotiations anguished Forman, who said: “Every film maker has two ambitions--to become rich and to become seen. But my interest in Czechoslovakia is not financial. Regardless if they make money, I prefer that my films play there.”

A compromise was reached when the Czechs agreed to pay $35,000 for Amadeus and another movie owned by Zaentz, “Three Warriors.” It was a package deal, meaning “we were obliged to take the other movie,” Markvartova said. Asked if the outcome was acceptable, she replied, “We were practically pushed.”

As a result of the higher than usual fee, however, Czech moviegoers have paid as much as $3 to see “Amadeus”--about 10 times the regular price.