The Film Clippers

It sounds like a story out of the Hollywood of 60 years or so ago: entrepreneurs operating with little more than a few thousand dollars worth of equipment and some space in a garage make fortunes distributing movies all over the world. In the cinema business of 1975, however, the people who fit this description are not producers but pirates, who steal prints of popular films and copy them for illegal sale.

In recent years dozens of bootleggers have been collecting up to $500 million annually that should have gone to major studios in legitimate film rentals. The pirates have also become increasingly brazen. While the $14 million disaster thriller Towering Inferno was still in production last year, a San Diego movie theater was showing a 90-minute pirated version put together from prints of individual scenes (the full movie takes 165 minutes to play). On a recent visit to Tel Aviv, two associates of Sam Arkoff, chairman of American International Pictures, to their amazement spotted his film, The Masque of the Red Death, playing in a downtown cinema. Exclaimed Arkoff: "We have never made a distribution deal in Israel." Some pirates even advertise openly in catalogues such as The Big Reel, published in North Carolina, and The Film Collector, printed in Houston.

Piracy is an amazingly effortless business. Studios never sell prints of their films, and even make their own actors sign strict loan agreements before they are allowed to borrow films for their own collections. Robert Young testified in a recent piracy trial that he got possession of prints of only two of the 125 movies he made during a 40-year career. Nonetheless, the pirates can easily get prints by bribing or stealing from lab technicians, theater projectionists, members of student and religious groups who rent films, truckers who deliver the prints to theaters, and even the people licensed by the studios to destroy worn-out films.

Until now, too, the pirates have had little fear of being caught, or being penalized much if they were. The basic U.S. copyright law was drafted in 1909 to protect the printed word and was seldom enforced against electronic banditry. Federal law makes it only a misdemeanor to sell stolen films unless they are sent across state lines or abroad and the shipment is worth more than $5,000; so pirates found it profitable to keep selling pilfered films and treat as nuisance taxes the small fines that might result.

Suspected Pirates. Currently, however, Chet Brown, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, and the major studios are starting a crackdown. Studios like 20th Century-Fox have assigned attorneys full time to film security, and the Motion Picture Association has hired two ex-FBI agents to staff a round-the-clock security office. Last spring Brown, working with the help of the FBI, which conducted more than 100 searches of suspected pirates for stolen prints, got indictments against 16 of them. Last month a Los Angeles jury convicted Budget Films, Inc. of selling stolen prints, including those of Paper Moon and Portnoy's Complaint, to collectors and theaters in South Africa. Fines against the company and two of its owners could total $46,000, and the two face jail sentences that could add up to 41 years each.

Brown says that the conviction will be a "tremendous deterrent" to future pirates. Studio executives hope he is right but are not too sure. They note apprehensively that new home videotaping equipment that can copy films onto bootleg cassettes could make piracy easier--if a bit less polished--than ever.

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