Hollywood deals with piracy, a wary eye on CDs

In the last few weeks, David Goldstein has been getting the kind of stares and sidelong looks usually reserved for stars. He’s signed autographs for two wide-eyed women at Dodger Stadium, been recognized seeing a band at the Troubadour and been given celebrity treatment by the owner of a sandwich shop in Palm Desert.

It’s pretty heady stuff for a 49-year-old Hollywood set painter who’s toiled on the back lots for years, working on a host of feature films from “Antwone Fisher” and “Charlie’s Angels” to “The Natural” and “The Big Chill.”

Goldstein (no relation to this columnist) owes his 15 minutes of fame to the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which recently launched a sweeping campaign to build consumer awareness about the threat of digital piracy. The campaign’s most visible component is a series of 60-second public-service trailers now running in 5,000 theaters across the country. The first trailer, which debuted July 25, stars Goldstein, who was interviewed in his paint shop on the lot at 20th Century Fox, the studio that produced the spots.

Goldstein isn’t Hollywood’s new anti-piracy poster boy because of his suave manner or sex appeal. In fact, it’s his very ordinariness that makes him a good spokesman; he’s a blue-collar craftsman, not a celebrity. The movie business doesn’t want to end up like the record industry, which has suffered a dramatic downturn while being portrayed by many fans as a profit-obsessed business with little respect for its customers or its craftsmen.

In the trailer, Goldstein says his livelihood could be ruined by rampant piracy. The piracy issue, he says, “does affect the producers, but it’s minuscule to the way it affects me [or] the guy working on construction, the lighting guy, the sound guy, because we’re not million-dollar employees.... All I want to do is work.” The ad concludes with an on-screen message: “Movies. They’re worth it.”

Goldstein says he’s gotten an overwhelmingly positive response. “I haven’t had one negative comment,” he says. “People realize it was heartfelt. Over and over, they’ve said that seeing the spot made them think twice about piracy.”

Fox left little to chance, testing the spots before a recruited audience in Las Vegas. Goldstein’s spot hit close to home -- his 16-year-old son is a bass player who’d been downloading music from outlaw file-sharing services. “But we had a long talk about it after I did this,” says Goldstein. “And I think he sees things a lot differently now.”

Illegal file-sharing

Goldstein’s son isn’t the only one who may be looking at downloading in a new light these days. The MPAA’s educational offensive comes at a critical time for the movie industry. Although virtually every studio is turning a profit, thanks to an unprecedented boom in the DVD business, they only have to look at their record industry cousins to see how quickly a boom can turn to a bust.

Until recently, the music industry enjoyed a similar bull market in CD sales. But during the last four years, CD sales have recorded catastrophic drops. According to new figures released last week by the Recording Industry Assn. of America, CD shipments suffered a 16% decline in the first six months of 2003. Thousands of record company employees have been fired in the last year, with more layoffs rumored to be on the way. Even skeptics like myself, who have bashed the music business for dragging its feet in making a wide spectrum of music available on a reasonably priced legal downloading service, would acknowledge that most of the lost business is due to illegal file-sharing. Could the movie industry be the next victim, its windfall DVD profits wiped out by a new generation of high-speed downloading technology?

“This is simply the most important issue facing the industry,” says Fox Group chairman Peter Chernin, who spearheaded the new ad campaign, which began July 24 with a simultaneous airing of an anti-piracy TV spot on 35 network and cable outlets. “There’s no such thing as solving piracy. We’re never going to wake up and say, ‘OK, we licked that problem.’ We’re going to be working on it for the rest of our careers.”

In recent months, Chernin and his industry peers have been studying kids the way studio marketers size up awareness numbers on a new teen comedy; a gaggle of top industry executives recently assembled to eyeball a focus group involving 20 college students. “There’s obviously a tremendous antipathy for the record business -- the kids felt very hostile about the music quality and its pricing,” says Chernin. “On the other hand, even if they’re not coming up and hugging me on the street, they seem to have a real affection for the movie business.”

Taking action

Chernin believes the film industry has advantages the record business lacks, in particular a more flexible, reasonably priced business model. Unlike the music business, movies are available in different windows -- in theaters, on DVD, on cable TV and eventually through video-on-demand, though the early assessments of the industry’s MovieLink downloading service have been on a par with the reviews for “Bad Boys 2.”

Chernin says the industry’s education approach must be matched by improvements in downloading technology, a push for copyright-protection legislation and aggressive legal enforcement. The music business has very publicly declared war on outlaw file-sharers, and on Monday the RIAA filed lawsuits against 261 people accused of trading copyrighted songs on the Internet. So far the MPAA has refused to join the legal offensive, calculating that the studios will reap the benefits of the chilling effect associated with high-profile lawsuits without having to take the heat from outraged parents and consumers. Chernin is convinced the music industry’s tough-cop behavior is already having a psychological impact. “At our focus group, the only thing that had any resonance with college kids was enforcement,” he says. “They all said, ‘If I knew someone who’d been arrested, I’d stop downloading immediately.’ ”

What he found most intriguing about the focus group’s reaction was their claims that file-sharing isn’t necessarily a way of life. “They basically said, ‘Hey, we’re college kids. Get off our backs. In a couple of years, we’ll have jobs and families and we’re not going to have time to download music all day long.’ ”

I would put that in that “too good to be true” category: Rampant downloading as a college dorm mass delusion, a brief rebellious phase, like pot smoking or sexual promiscuity, that would dissipate when college kids are transformed into responsible citizens. Internet loyalists would say the real delusionists are the media executives who imagine file-sharing is a temporary fancy, not an integral part of the Internet’s communal spirit.

Let’s face it. College kids show little respect, if not open hostility, for the virtues of intellectual property, whether it’s created by pop musicians or newspaper columnists. The entire mind-set has been the subject of heated debate: Is file-sharing old-fashioned thievery or a new, more passive-aggressive form of ‘60’s-style rebellion, with the record companies serving as the equivalent of a Tricky Dick-style bogeyman? I’m unconvinced by the youthful-insurgency angle. After all, why wouldn’t kids have just as much antipathy for the cynical movie executives who peddle garbage like “Dumb and Dumberer” and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider?”

So far, there’s enough hypocrisy to go around. The music business is quick to preach to kids about doing the right thing. But it’s hard to hold the moral high ground when, as The Times recently revealed, record companies still run scams like having employees croon on pseudo-Christmas carol albums so they can qualify as voters for the much-coveted Grammy Awards.

Hollywood has a few contradictions that it hasn’t entirely faced up to, even in its well-crafted new anti-piracy spots. No one is doing a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign about the evils of runaway production, even though it has eviscerated far more jobs so far than digital piracy for craftsmen like Goldstein. The income gap between studio executives and set painters is also bigger than ever. Goldstein makes an average of $90,000 a year, while Chernin earned $14.6 million in salary and bonuses last year, plus $2.6 million in stock options.

Still, the message of the MPAA ads is worth taking seriously: Downloading movies is a blow to creativity, not just corporate might. If piracy puts a real crimp in News Corp.’s profits, I guarantee the set painters will suffer, not just Rupert Murdoch. As Chernin put it: “Time Warner or Fox isn’t going to collapse, but this is an expensive business. And if you put us in the record industry’s shoes, where we have 15% declines each year, there’ll be less movies being made and less money being spent and among the first to feel the impact will be the creative people.”

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