VideoPrologue
Back in 1978, at the tender age of 24, I moved to Hollywood. I was an actor, you see, full of youthful bravado and convinced I was on a fast track to stardom. I had just wrapped the movie Meatballs, with Bill Murray, in which I co-starred as Crockett, the summer camp counselor with the big hair and cute girlfriend. The comedy, which wasn't expected to do much business, turned out to be a sensation, raking in some $100 million in box office receipts — on a paltry $2 million in production costs.
Not surprisingly, I was suddenly hot property in Hollywood. My agent flaunted me all over town, billing me as the next big thing. Within weeks, I landed a gig with Norman Lear, then the hottest TV producer in show business, who signed me to star with former Brady Buncher Christopher Knight in a new sitcom, Joe's World. NBC, banking on Lear's magic touch, eagerly snapped up the first 13 episodes. The pilot went over like gangbusters, finishing in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings. By that point, I was convinced it was only a matter of time before I was sticking my shoes in wet cement at Mann's Chinese Theater.
Then, suddenly, inexplicably, my acting career hit a brick wall. In 1980, after weeks of declining ratings, NBC canceled my show. I didn't even get a phone call from the producer telling me the bad news — I read about it in the paper ("I Lost My Job in the L.A. Times"). Soon, my agent was having trouble getting me in to see producers. I couldn't even get an audition for a commercial for a used car lot — and I'd bought my car there. Out of work, I packed my things and moved back to New York. My days as a Hollywood up-and-comer were over-and-out. Like the man says, there are no second acts.
When all this happened, I couldn't really make sense of it. All I knew was that in two short years, I had appeared in a hit movie, starred in a sitcom, and been summarily tossed out on my ear. Years later, it dawned on me just how powerless I was. The harsh truth is Hollywood is its own gravitational field — a glittering galaxy owned, operated, and marketed by the major entertainment studios. Granted, most of the studios are public companies. But in reality, the film industry is more monolith than governance. It's a crank-'em-out celluloid machine — a machine controlled by some extremely powerful people.
To many studio executives and big-name producers, that power will never be threatened, never usurped. To these industry titans, the real business of show business — the marketing and distribution of motion pictures — will never change. In their minds, the movie business is a very private affair, which may explain the huge gates at the entrances to studio lots. The message is clear: Enter at your own risk.
Litigated to Death
Tell it to Travis Kalanick. Kalanick, co-founder and finance head of Scour Inc., can best be described as a new-media revolutionary. In 1997, he and four other UCLA computer science students started Scour, a search engine and file-swapping software that made it ridiculously easy to share movies online — without paying Hollywood a cent.
Alarmed by the exploding popularity of Scour, the entertainment industry marshaled its forces. In 2000, the Motion Picture Association of America (www.mpaa.org) and others filed a $250 billion lawsuit against the company for copyright infringement. Even the reputation of super-agent Michael Ovitz, an investor in Scour, failed to sway the MPAA from its legal course. Unable to fund a defense, the startup teetered, then went bankrupt. In December, management eventually sold its remaining assets to CenterSpan Communications Corp. (www.centerspan.com). Says Kalanick bitterly: "We were litigated to death."
Hollywood's litigiousness is not hard to fathom. Virtual sharing of films — from one personal computer to another — threatens the entire film industry. At the top of the endangered species list: the major studios, which would effectively be cut out of the loop by cyber-swapping of movies. After all, what more perfect distribution medium for a digital product than a digital highway?
Studio heads can already see what unauthorized file-swapping has done to cash flow at music companies. The numbers are staggering. The Recording Industry Association of America (www.riaa.com) reported that shipments of CD singles fell by nearly 40 percent last year. A music industry spokesperson says the drop in singles sales was "principally brought on by new options provided by the Internet."
Further, many people in the film business honestly believe peer-to-peer (P2P) technology is little more than a license to steal. "[These sites] profess to defend technological advancement, but in truth treat copyright with a brazen disdain for laws and rules," says MPAA president and CEO Jack Valenti. "The bottom line is that people are stealing movies on these sites that they do not possess or have not paid for."
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