Boycott Has Top Billing at Moscow Festival : Cinema: With eight U.S. studios protesting a lack of copyright laws, the event opens amid talk of cracking down on Soviet video piracy and setting quotas on American films.

If the American boycott of the Soviet film market has accomplished anything, it has put the issue of video piracy smack in the public eye at the 17th Moscow International Film Festival, which opened Monday.

The boycott, launched last month by the eight largest U.S. film studios to protest widespread Soviet video piracy, has pervaded media coverage of the festival.

At the festival itself, however, the boycott has not seriously disrupted the program. Two U.S. titles, “The Doors” and “Class Action,” are competing with films from 18 other countries, and there are a number of non-competition American films screening during the festival.

Indeed, organizers were preoccupied with events unconnected with the protest. On the eve of the festival, for example, the suitcase containing the print of “The Doors” went missing for three days in Moscow’s notorious Sheremetyevo Two airport. Then, organizers received a Telex from Israel withdrawing the Israeli entry, Eran Riclis’ “Cup Final,” from the festival. The Telex said the film, which is about the friendship that develops between imprisoned Israeli soldiers and their Palestinian captors, cannot be screened for three weeks under an unspecified Israeli law.

Ironically, the boycott has created opportunities for U.S. studios that aren’t participating in the boycott. Carolco, for instance, is screening nine films, including “Total Recall,” “L.A. Story,” “Air America” and “Johnny Handsome,” as well as “The Doors.”

The choice appears to be paying off at the festival box office. The director of the 2,500-seat Oktyabr movie theater, where the Carolco films are being shown, said 40% of the shows were already sold out by noon on the opening day of the festival.

Film festival organizers and industry officials are quick to acknowledge the need for a crackdown on copyright violations in the Soviet Union. They say revenues from video piracy, estimated at 15 billion rubles a year ($8.3 billion at the distorted commercial exchange rate) nationwide, flow mainly into the black economy, depriving the federal government of potential earnings, spoiling the market for legitimate distributors and discouraging foreign investment in the country’s sagging film industry.

In the words of Oleg Rudnev, director general of the Sovexportfilm Assn., piracy is “a cancerous tumor” that is “hardening cultural barbarity in (Soviet) society and threatens to undermine our relations with the world film community.”

But Soviet anxiety over piracy is motivated by another concern that is unlikely to please American trade officials. Soviet lawmakers and film industry officials are dismayed by the large number of B-movies from the United States entering the country, and this has prompted calls for the imposition of a quota on imports of foreign films.

“Some people think quotas will help stem the invasion of B-movies and other trash on our screens,” says Oleg Sulkin, chief editor at Sovexportfilm, adding that he is opposed to the idea of quotas. He cites films such as “Nine Deaths of the Ninja,” “The Beach Girls” and “American Eagle” as examples of the B-movies that have upset some officials.

“These are films that are made in the U.S. and are not even shown there because they’re of such low quality,” says Valerian Nesperov, a festival organizer and the head of external relations at Goskino, the state film committee. “They send them here because they’re cheap, both in terms of cost and artistic qualities.”

One American film distributor agrees that a quota could potentially make it difficult for smaller studios to sell to the Soviet market. “You’d have lesser-known films competing for the same number of slots as the big studios,” says Clayton Simons, general director of Story First Distribution Inc. in Moscow, which represents Vision Films International.

Some Soviet officials complain that the boycott penalizes the wrong people, particularly organizations and companies that purchase and distribute U.S. films legally.

“We’ve always played by the rules,” says Nesperov. “And yet we suffer from the boycott.” He suggests that the American side could take more constructive action, such as providing advice on enforcement and policing of copyright laws, an area in which he says the Soviet authorities are inexperienced.

From the Soviet side, he says Goskino is preparing a draft law for the government that would bring Soviet copyright laws up to international standards. It would also allow the country to join the Berne Convention on Copyright Protection, which the Motion Picture Assn. of America has said is a condition for the lifting of the boycott. The Goskino draft envisions hefty fines for illegal public film screenings--as much as two months’ earnings for a pirate video salon, which Nesperov says would be enough to drive the operation out of business. The Goskino draft also envisions creating a national film and video register, under which only registered titles could be shown legally.

Joining the Berne Convention should be a high priority for the Soviet government, says Sulkin. “It would be our ticket to the civilized world,” he says. “We should buy that ticket, or else they won’t let us in.”

Still, even if copyrights are effectively enforced here, the inconvertibility of the Soviet ruble remains a major obstacle for foreign distributors. And some film industry watchers believe that the proposed new law will be enforced arbitrarily.

One pirate video distributor, Gennady Tityonok, believes his days of selling bootleg videos on Moscow’s Arbat Street are numbered. “The Americans are really serious this time,” he says. “They’re talking about (piracy) all over the press and on television.”