Screeners: Behind the ban

JACK VALENTI is no stranger to the exercise of raw political power. After all, the Motion Picture Assn. of America chief began in Washington as an aide to President Lyndon Johnson. And power, as in big-time studio clout, is what’s really behind last week’s hotly debated decision to ban the widespread dissemination of Oscar screeners as a way to stem the tide of digital piracy.

The MPAA has served as a whipping boy for the unpopular edict, which independent filmmakers say will undermine the Oscar chances of edgier art films. As Valenti told one reporter last week, “If there’s a villain in the piece, it’s me.” But trust me, when a shrewd operator like Jack Valenti goes out of his way to take the blame for something, the one thing you can be sure of is that he’s covering for someone else. When you make $1 million a year, you get paid to take the heat.

It’s an open secret in Hollywood that the Oscar screener ban was instigated by Warner Bros. Chief Executive Barry Meyer, a man of many talents but not someone you’d bet the house on if he were on “Jeopardy” trying to answer the question: “Name any two movies Ang Lee made before ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.’ ” Put simply: Time Warner has money on its mind, not Oscars. As Meyer said last year, the conglomerate is “looking to extend our properties over multiple platforms,” not exactly a rallying cry for artistic quality. (How many Oscar nominations did Warner have last year? Hint: It starts with a zero.)

Time Warner’s likely Oscar contenders -- “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” “The Matrix Revolutions” and “The Last Samurai” -- are costly blockbusters, prime targets for bootleggers. Piracy is certainly the key reason the company spearheaded the ban on the distribution of videocassette and DVD screeners of movies for award consideration. It’s also why Warner and 20th Century Fox, the industry’s other leading anti-piracy advocate, were happy to let Valenti endure a week of bad publicity for throwing a monkey wrench into the Oscar race.

The decision was rushed through with such haste and stealth that two studio chairmen I spoke to last week acknowledged that they hadn’t been informed of the edict until the deal was virtually done. Valenti simply did the arm-twisting, though some top executives, in particular Sony’s Howard Stringer, were vehemently opposed to the idea. If Meyer has other motives, he’s keeping them to himself; rather than take my calls, he issued a bland statement, saying, “piracy is a life and death issue for the movie business.”

Despite the weeping and moaning of indie filmmakers, the edict is not entirely about big-studio Oscar envy, though surely the big studio films will benefit most from the screener ban. The edict is about DVD profits. If a classic division’s movie wins a major Oscar, it could be worth $10 million or $15 million in extra income. But if piracy puts a big dent in the DVD business, the engine that currently drives the movie business, the studios would lose untold hundreds of millions of dollars, leaving them in roughly the same shape as today’s record companies -- up the creek without a paddle.

Executives muzzled

The Oscar screener edict is simply the latest salvo in the epic battle between media conglomerates, who’ve been lobbying Washington for more copyright and piracy protection, and tech companies, who’ve been fighting fiercely to protect consumers’ private free use of music and movies. Only this time the war is squarely within the same family, with the studio chief executives opting for piracy protection while their classics divisions lobby for as much open access to their movies as possible. In a year in which DVD sales and rentals jumped a staggering 62%, guess which side carries the biggest stick?

Money talks, which is why the studios have taken extraordinary steps to silence the chief executives of their classics divisions. Though the executives are incensed by the edict, they’ve been so thoroughly muzzled that even after they met last week for an urgent parley, it would’ve been easier to find an Iraqi weapon of mass destruction than get one of them on the phone for a quote. (It speaks volumes that every classics division was represented except for Fox Searchlight and Warner’s Independent Pictures, subsidiaries of the two most vociferous anti-piracy studios.)

Imagine how dire the consequences must be if even Miramax’s voluble Harvey Weinstein, who normally would leap out of a 40-story building if Michael Eisner told him not to, and considers it sport to thumb his nose at Disney directives, hasn’t uttered a peep of public protest.

The studio art-house honchos have good reason to be humiliated. The Oscar screener ban clearly damages the very movies the classics divisions were created to acquire and market. Even worse, it rips away the last remaining fig leaf distinguishing the so-called independent film divisions from their studio conglomerate parents. For years, the press, myself included, has been a willing partner in promoting the fiction that studio-owned companies such as United Artists or Paramount Classics are independents, when in fact they often have little autonomy from their studio masters.

When Disney-owned Miramax has a controversial movie to distribute these days, it hands it off to Lions Gate, one of the few remaining real indie companies. Powerless to combat the Oscar screener edict, it appears about as “independent” as Plank Road Brewery is from Miller Beer. When the Independent Feature Project gives out the Spirit Awards this year, it should check IDs at the door -- no studio-sponsored lap dogs allowed.

Buzz and advertising

Someone else has been suspiciously silent during this Oscar screener imbroglio -- the esteemed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The academy’s top dogs aren’t talking, saying they haven’t taken a position on the issue. Privately, they’re fuming.

Not that Valenti cares; he actually dismissed academy voters as “lazy” for not making the effort to see Oscar movies in theaters. The screener ban will do more than penalize edgy movies. In a year when the academy had put some teeth into its prohibitions involving Oscar campaign abuses, - the screener ban will most assuredly unleash a tidal wave of Oscar advertising and negative campaigning.

Why are our political campaigns drenched in the inky sludge of TV attack ads? Because most voters make their decisions on image-based ads, not on serious study of the candidate’s stands on specific issues. The same for the Oscars.

In 1989, just before the arrival of screeners, 37 films were released during the November-December Oscar season. Last year, 82 films were released during the same two months. Even if only half of those movies are legitimate Oscar contenders, who possibly has the time to get out to see them all? With the absence of screeners -- and with a shorter window of time between the release of Oscar contenders and the deadline for returning academy ballots, fewer people than ever will see the majority of contending movies. So what will they base their vote on? Buzz and advertising.

Studios such as Miramax and DreamWorks spend millions hyping their Oscar slate. Expect that to escalate to unheard-of heights this year. “The advertising departments must be popping champagne corks at the trades and at the L.A. Times,” says DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press, who helped mastermind the studio’s Oscar wins for “Gladiator” and “American Beauty.” “The one thing this ban will do is cause a huge upsurge in Oscar campaigning. If you can’t send out the movie, you’re going to have to take out more Oscar ads.”

Last year, the movie that moved me the most, “The Pianist,” was the movie I was most resistant to seeing. Finally, after I’d caught up with all of the less daunting films, I watched it on tape at home. Once I’d made the plunge, I couldn’t stop thinking about it -- or talking about it.

“It’s movies like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ or ‘In the Bedroom,’ the ones that are the hardest to get people out of the house to see, that will be hurt the worst,” says Endeavor’s John Lesher, who represents directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese. “It can’t be a good thing for people to be voting based on ads and marketing, not on what they’ve actually seen.”

So let’s call the Oscar screener ban Valenti’s Folly -- yet another triumph for his corporate lobbying skills, another step back for the Oscars’ quest for artistic credibility. It’s good news for media conglomerates. When Valenti goes before Congress to drum up support for more anti-piracy legislation, he won’t have to dance around embarrassing queries about why the industry hasn’t cleaned up its own house. But it’s bad news for people who love movies. If the Oscars fall victim to an all-out advertising blitz, who knows what might happen. Maybe this will be the year a certain someone running for governor wins an Oscar for best actor too!

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.