Since the 1910s, films—particularly U. S. films—have won international fans. Around the world, magazines and newspapers have catered to moviegoers’ fascination with stars and, more recently, celebrity directors. Books and magazines have targeted cults devoted to Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Bruce Lee, and other charismatic figures. Famous Monsters of Filmland, first published in 1958, fed the love of classic horror. The science-fiction and fantasy boom of the 1970s triggered a burst of publishing, with periodicals like Cinefantas-tique, Starlog, Fangoria, and many magazines devoted to Star Wars. With the arrival of videotape and the Internet, fandom changed dramatically. Isolated and diverse fans became a true community, interacting with each other on a worldwide scale.
Video Piracy: An Efficient Distribution System?
By the mid-1980s, about 130 million videocassette recorders were in use around the world. Video became to film what audiotape and CDs were to music: a dramatically new phase in the globalization of entertainment. With video, however, came piracy. Legal tapes were copied and sold at a discount. Recently released films could be available on the street immediately, thanks to cooperative projectionists or laboratory workers, who would smuggle out a print for duplication. Street copies might also be “auditorium versions,” shot furtively during a theater screening.
Piracy was everywhere, spreading out from copying centers in Italy, Turkey, Taiwan, Russia, and New York. One Manhattan gang earned $500,000 a week from counterfeit tapes. Illegal sales constituted one-quarter to one-half of the video revenues in Europe, and up to 90 percent of those in China, India, and South America. Throughout Asia, dupe copies were shown publicly in “video parlors.” In India, pirated films filled cable channels (themselves often outlaw operations). Reflecting on the speed and efficiency of the illegal video trade, a Hong Kong film producer once remarked, “Piracy is the best distribution system.”
The arrival of digital reproduction only exacerbated the problem. In East Asia, the Video CD (VCD), a digital format using low-level compression, began to replace tape in the mid-1990s. Illegal disks were cheaper to make and transport than videotapes. Working from cable broadcasts, legal tapes, or laserdiscs, factories in mainland China stamped out thousands of VCDs a day and shipped them all over Asia, to sell at one to two dollars each. The higher-quality imagery offered by Digital Video Discs (DVDs) proved even more attractive. Although the United States studios coded DVDs by region, the codes were quickly broken, region-free players went on sale, and bootleg discs appeared. The ultimate buccaneering frontier was the Internet, where hundreds of movies were available for free.
Fan Subcultures: Appropriating the Movies
Alongside the legal and illegal circulation of films on video was a gray zone of video exchange, where fans of certain genres were buying and trading copies. Before videotape, fans were forced to hunt down the films they loved in cinemas and late-night television broadcasts. Now, a fan could own copies of beloved titles and, equipped with two VCRs, copy tapes obtained from other fans. A community of fans grew up, dedicated to swapping and discussing their favorites. In some countries, small companies formed to circulate hard-to-find tapes, often in defiance of copyright laws.
As more unusual movies flashed across national borders via cable, satellite, and rental tapes, fans’ tastes diversified. During the 1960s and 1970s, marginal film industries had exported cheap, sometimes wild, genre
28.7 Two of the Empire’s troops reflect on killing Jawas in Kevin Rubio’s Internet movie Troops (1998).
Films—women-in-prison movies from the Philippines, Mexican masked-wrestler dramas, Turkish vampire films, Singapore spy adventures. Discovered on video, these “mondo” movies seemed cool to many young people looking for thrills beyond Hollywood. Kung-fu sagas, Bollywood musicals, and Japanese animation found a niche in mainstream youth culture thanks largely to the fans who tirelessly circulated video copies in the 1980s and 1990s.
Whatever their preferences, fans found their voice in fanzines. These photocopied cut-and-paste magazines were labors of love, distributed through the mail and the increasingly popular fan conventions. Cult films like Blade Runner and Blue Velvet were common ’zine subjects. Some fanzines achieved newsstand distribution, such as Damon Foster’s Oriental Cinema, lovingly devoted to obscure Japanese monster movies. By the mid-1990s, the Internet took the place of fanzines. Now fans could build websites as shrines to their favorites, and chatrooms let fans swap opinions and video copies.
Fan communities have been called “participatory cultures” in that they often rework the media texts they love.10 Offered the chance, fans will spin the original movie or TV show in new directions—clipping out scenes to make best-moments tapes, writing poems and songs about their favorite characters, even circulating new stories about them. The fan frenzy around Star Wars made film companies realize that if they did not form authorized fan clubs and crack down on the dozens of ’zines in circulation, they were forfeiting rights to their intellectual property. The Internet only increased the risk, as fans would not hesitate to recycle anything and even post videos derived from originals (28.7). Music and coming-attractions trailers might
28.8 A New Zealand vista becomes Middle-Earth in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Show up on fan sites before they hit the open market, and images might be reworked, footage recut, sound redubbed. Yet the fans were the most loyal sector of the audience, and the studios could not afford to alienate them entirely. As a result, the Majors constantly oscillated between wooing the fans and threatening them if they were perceived as going too far.
Some studios decided to bring fans into the creative process. New Line’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001; 28.8), designed as a global film, became a fan fetish as soon as it was announced. Chatrooms buzzed about the best casting, aware that director Peter Jackson was monitoring them; the discussions may have shaped the final decision, as fan favorite Cate Blanchett was awarded a crucial role. Many fans believed that protesting against changes to the original novel encouraged Jackson to shoot a more faithful version. One devotee trekked to New Zealand to observe the shooting and post reports; at first the producers saw her as a spy, but then they invited her to visit the set. In the meantime, New Line allowed one actor, Ian McKellen, to leak hints about the production on his website, Www. mckellen. com. Just as cleverly, the first trailer for the film was released online, before it was seen in theaters, and it drew over 1.6 million hits in its first day.
In the case of The Lord of the Rings, fans helped stir up interest in the movie. By contrast, fans helped thwart the release of MGM/UA’s remake of the 1975 film Rollerball. During production, a script leaked out and was reviewed, devastatingly, by net guru Harry Knowles on his aint-it-cool-news. com site. When the film was ready to preview in spring of 2001, director John McTiernan flew to Austin, picked up Knowles and some friends, and took them to New York for a test screening. The exercise in damage control failed. After the preview, Knowles and his pals posted detailed critiques of the film, confessing their admiration for the original and for McTiernan but declaring the movie virtually unreleasable. Other disastrous previews were reported to Knowles’s site. In August, MGM/UA pulled Rollerball from its summer lineup. Although the movie was released in early 2002, its theatrical chances were irreparably damaged, and it failed at the box office. Before the Internet, Rollerball’s poor testing would have been insider knowledge. Now, the once-marginal fan subculture was shaping the opinions of many thousands of viewers.
World History
