Digital actors, online movies, piracy, and encryption: the technologies that could change how Hollywood operates were all given token discussion at the Artists Rights Symposium on Thursday. But for most industry insiders, such discussions are still in the realm of theory. Instead, the emotive topic at the Hollywood conference was the more tangible battle between creativity and profit, as studio execs went head-to-head with filmmakers.
"We are in an unholy marriage of commerce and art," argued Jack Valenti, chairman of the MPAA, during the Cultural Identity panel. "If you're gonna make a movie, it's expensive. This is an economic-artistic endeavor - it's endemic in the system."
In order to profit from their astronomically costly productions, studios and corporations manipulate films for as many markets as possible - editing the length and format to fit TV, airplane, foreign distribution, and now, DVD. The directors of those films are less than pleased about their loss of creative control.
"You own the films, but the moral rights are different," Evita director Alan Parker barked back at Valenti and corporate execs from Sony and Fox. "Let's get to the heart of the matter. The pursuit of money to all ends is the business you're in. And I'm not."
For the past six years, the Artists Rights Foundation (whose founder list reads like a Who's Who of Hollywood) has organized this symposium to discuss how filmmakers and artists can protect the integrity of their work in the face of changing technology, big business, and new distribution systems. Artists' "moral rights" lack strong legal protection in the United States, as the government protects only the rights of copyright holders (the corporations) under the Berne Treaty for international copyright protection.
"This is the 10th year we've been sitting here together, talking the same thing, saying 'yes, we love each other,'" griped Milos Forman, director of The People vs. Larry Flynt and recipient of this year's John Huston award. "But then we're here the next year again. Just the audience is different."
This year, special attention was given to the Internet and online movies - a medium that could potentially reduce both corporate profits and artist control. The concerns of the corporations were online piracy, illicit distribution, and impact on box-office sales; on the part of the filmmakers, worries centered around the quality of transmissions and the ability of the user to make changes to digital copies.
But such questions are abstract until the technology becomes a reality. Although online director Dan Harries of the American Film Institute attested to the popularity of their VDO-based online movie series, the bandwidth and frame rate compromise the film quality.
"There isn't a technological barrier to getting movies in your home over the Internet," explained panelist Nathan Myhrvold, CTO of Microsoft. "It's more of a practical barrier of getting the infrastructure," which is, he added, several years away. A demonstration of the Vosiac online video software proved his point, as the sample trailers lost their audio.
With all this in mind, said Fine Line EVP Elizabeth Manne, the studios are still unimpressed with online video. "We want to be a part of this sophisticated technology, because a sophisticated audience uses it. But this is new, untested, there aren't numbers," she said. "In all the research we've done, the Net isn't really important."
