LOS ANGELES -- Every 10 feet or so in Santee Alley, there's someone standing behind a cardboard box full of discs. Each mumbles the same mantra: "DVD, DVD, DVD, DVD, Estar Guars" -- Spanglish for Star Wars.
They're DVD bootleggers, and they're the target of a new system of surveillance cameras recently installed by the Los Angeles Police Department with money from the Motion Picture Association of America.
The MPAA, which represents major movie studios, contributed $186,000 toward the cost of the cameras and a software monitoring system that detects human movement.
The devices beam video to the LAPD's Central Area station, where the software alerts officers to activity. If there's rampant selling of bootleg DVDs, undercover police are dispatched to the site.
At a press conference announcing the project last Tuesday, LAPD chief William Bratton reported that four cameras are already operating, and there are plans to install six more in coming weeks throughout the area.
"These cameras ... will help (the LAPD) to lift a rock and shine a light on rampant counterfeiting of DVDs, which used to take place in the dark shadows," MPAA worldwide anti-piracy chief John Malcolm told Variety last week.
At the press conference, Bratton said news of the system was spreading quickly among bootleggers, and that a chilling effect on sales had already begun.
Santee Alley was reportedly selected because the area is frequented by naive tourists who are easy targets for pirates, Bratton said. The MPAA claims DVD piracy costs Hollywood billions of dollars each year in lost revenue.
But a visit to Santee Alley suggests that the trade in bootleg DVDs is no more of a threat to the movie industry's theatrical sales or DVD revenue than the $20 "PREADA" handbags or $9 "Ray-buns" sunglasses are to their high-priced, authentic cousins on Rodeo Drive.
With the new MPAA/LAPD surveillance system, another small chunk of everyday privacy has been jettisoned in the name of protecting movie industry profits.
The LAPD refuses to say where the cameras are installed. When asked, officer Grace Brady said the department will not disclose their whereabouts. So I visited the area on foot to try to find the cameras.
On this shadow-free, sunny Saturday, movie vendors are clustered as close as 5 feet apart in some spots. During this and many prior visits to the area, I've encountered few tourists. Spanish-speaking residents from the neighborhood are in the majority.
The first DVD vendor drags a garbage bag full of Spanish pop-concert videos and bad-quality copies of American blockbusters including Revenge of the Sith. The box art is poorly photocopied. Typos and mismatched credits abound. The Star Wars box bears the credits from Armageddon, and a box promising the as-yet-unreleased Fantastic Four (due in theaters July 8) lists details from Bulletproof Monk.
I ask the seller if he knows about the surveillance cams. He frowns, ignores me and turns toward an approaching stream of potential customers.
A few paces away, I meet a second vendor selling similar fare. I purchase two DVDs, and ask him about the cameras. He stares. I tell him I'm a journalist and not a police officer, and after some silence, he points to the tall sign on the Bendix building. "Under the letter 'B,'" he says in Spanish.
Twenty feet away, a third seller totes movies in a torn cardboard box.
I ask the vendor about the surveillance cameras. Her smile turns flat. She gets a call on her cell phone, then -- in an instant -- she's gone, and so are the other DVD sellers.
Some other vendors tell me where to find the spy cams. One device is planted on an upper floor of the building housing the Nobell dress shop on the corner of Olympic and Maple.
Another is at the opposite mouth of Santee Alley, near the intersection of 12th and Maple streets. It's on the southwest corner of the Bendix building, on the 10th floor.
The cameras are easy to miss. They're inconspicuous and resemble light fixtures. On closer inspection through a camera zoom lens, the upside-down bowl housing appears to contain a swivel camera, presumably with the ability to zoom and pan left and right, up and down.
Later, I watch the two DVD purchases. The Star Wars disc is awful -- it's unwatchable. It's a copy of the infamous internet work print widely available on BitTorrent. A pair of time codes stretches along the upper frame. Battle scenes and explosions that looked dizzyingly lifelike in the movie theater are cruddy and distorted.
The DVD promising to be a leaked copy of the unreleased Fantastic Four movie is actually an unmarked DVD-R that instead contains the 1994 Roger Corman version, a turkey known as one of the ultimate awful movies of all time. And this copy is of equally horrendous quality.
At $5 each, my pirated purchases are no bargain. When the real movies come out on DVD, I'll be able to buy them for about $14, and they will look great.
Even if price were the only object, I would never return to Santee Alley to shop for movies. It's hard to believe the argument that untold scores of other sales disappear there, too.
