Hollywood Robbery

摘要

Studio executives, no strangers to melodrama, have begun to talk about movie piracy the way FBI agents talk about terrorism: they watch the Web for "chatter," they embed films with hidden "fingerprints," and they speak without irony about "changing hearts and minds." They even use night-vision goggles. It's not going too far to say they are completely paranoid, which doesn't mean they are wrong. On the night of Nov. 29, Warner Bros, transformed more than 500 American theaters into secure compounds for a sneak preview of The Last Samurai. The $140 million Tom Cruise vehicle, designed to transport the star from the screen to the Oscar podium, was filmed on location in New Zealand and Japan with a cast of 750. All the hype, along with the adolescent story line-samurai fight against the Japanese army!-guaranteed the film to be of interest to pirates. And in the age of faster Internet connections, protecting a movie has become like guarding very expensive air. So to prevent an early bootleg from squashing ticket sales, more than 1,000 security guards hand delivered prints of the film to projection rooms. They searched each facility for recording devices. In lobbies, moviegoers were siphoned through metal detectors. Camera phones were confiscated. As the lights went down and Cruise and his movie star- teeth flickered onto the screen, men and women in dark blazers walked solemnly down the aisles, searching for the pale glow of camcorders through their night-vision goggles. Maybe because this was Los Angeles, the moviegoers didn't seem to notice the paramilitary scene unfolding beside their military fiction.