Innovation to beat the pirates (and the drive)

In the Uma Thurman Suite of the InterContinental Carlton hotel, actor Morgan Freeman and producer Lori McCreary are, strangely enough, not marketing movies. They’re marketing technology.

Here are computer stations in areas decorated to look like a teen’s room, a child’s room and a master bedroom. Here are laptops and hand-held entertainment centers and here is the technology showing anyone who’s interested how consumers can legally download movies in one spot and have them play in all the others. It is a set-up more typically found in a computer store than at the Carlton, more reminiscent of a technology convention than a film festival.

Except that there’s an Oscar-winning actor front and center.

This is the Intel and Revelations Open House, a product of a partnership between Freeman and McCreary’s production company, Revelations Entertainment, and Intel Corp., that has come here to show the industry what it believes is the next step in film distribution-broadband.

Think of it, said Freeman, in a taped presentation shown to hundreds of producers, financiers, actors and directors, as an iPod for movies, making “films easier to buy than to pirate.”

“It’s dog simple,” he said, “[even] I can do it. Don’t need to call my granddaughter in to program the thing. But it takes a whole rethinking of things.”

The Revelations/Intel project was just one more sign of how high tech the digitally sophisticated festival has become. WiFi services are offered at hotels and pavilions all over the city. The WiFi cafe in the Palais des Festivals, for example, is jammed with journalists from morning to night. Patrons at every cafe and restaurant could be seen hunched over BlackBerries and personal organizers.

The seeds for the Revelations/Intel partnership were sown at Cannes six years ago when McCreary, who has a degree in computer science, met up with reps at the American Pavilion to discuss the role of the Internet in the entertainment industry and piracy concerns. If illegal downloading could take the music world by storm, she reasoned, downloading film could not be far behind.

Freeman is concerned with piracy too, but his interest in broadband capabilities is also personal. He lives in Charleston, Miss., pop. 2,100; if he wants to see a first-run movie, he has to drive almost two hours to Memphis.So when McCreary approached him with the possibility of working on a project with Intel, Freeman was all for it.

Currently, only Movielink, CinemaNow, Starz Encore, Ruckus and CDigix offer major Hollywood studios’ films online -- but after movies have already been released in theaters. But just as the music industry moved from pirated single tracks to iTunes and other online -- and legal -- outlets, so can movies, said Kevin Corbett, Vice President and CTO of Intel Corp.

Now that Intel, Microsoft and other high-tech companies have created the technology to make this possible, it’s up to the industry to decide how far it wants to go with giving people the option of seeing a new movie in the theater -- or in the comfort of their own home. (Hollywood has long been reluctant to change its distribution windows. Theater operators, too, fear that a collapsing of these windows will lead to fewer ticket sales.)

McCreary and Corbett have been here since the beginning of the festival (Freeman joined them on Wednesday) having meetings with friends and colleagues. They debuted the Open House at Revelations’ Santa Monica offices in January.

McCreary and Corbett stress that the technology has vast international potential, possibly allowing countries with large rural populations access to the entire firmament of international cinema. Freeman agrees, though he says education about the technology is just as important in the United States.

“The U.S. is a Third World country when it comes to broadband,” he says. “And that’s my role here. I’m the welcome mat.”