I ran into a friend the other day. He's a novelist.
“Hey,” I said. “I read your new novel.”
He looked at me sharply: “You read it? Does that mean you bought it?”
Authors, generally speaking, don’t care if you read their books. What they care about, mostly, is that you buy the book. Authors, perhaps because of the truly terrible economics of the publishing industry, spend most of their time worrying about sales. If you’re like me and you inevitably end up buying a lot of books you never quite get around to reading, whatever guilt you may feel about your book-cluttered night table can be assuaged by remembering that as far as all of those authors are concerned, you’ve already done your duty.
Filmmakers, unfortunately, insist that you watch their movies all the way through, which is becoming an increasingly difficult thing to do. This year's critical (and audience) favourites Spotlight and The Revenant both clock in at considerably longer than two hours. My personal feeling is that no one should be asked to watch Leonardo DiCaprio marching around in the snow for more than 90 minutes, which means that had I watched The Revenant in the cinema, I'd have been itchy and fidgety for over an hour, from the 91st minute to the closing credits, at roughly the 156th minute.
Lucky for me, I didn't have to watch The Revenant – or any of this season's Oscar-nominated pictures – at the grubby old cinema with the regular people.
Starting in November, Hollywood “insiders” start receiving DVD copies of the year’s most award-worthy films. Since I’m a member of three entertainment industry trade unions – the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild and (surprise!) the Screen Actors Guild – my daily mail delivery for the past 90 days has almost always included a copy of some recent release.
The local term for these DVDs is "screeners", as in: "Can I borrow your screener of The Revenant? I'll lend you my screener for The Big Short."
You’re not supposed to lend, or borrow, any screeners at all. Piracy, always a major concern in Hollywood, is an even bigger concern with screeners, because many of the pictures are still in wide release and producers are hopeful that any awards that come their way, especially the Oscars, will mean a noticeable uptick in box-office revenue. So if you lend out your screeners – or, worse, give them away to your housekeeper, which a very prominent member of the Motion Picture Academy did a few years ago, only to discover that the housekeeper sent them all back to her family in South East Asia, who copied them assiduously and uploaded them to a file-sharing service – well, you get into some big trouble.
Each DVD is “watermarked” in some way – or so the Motion Picture Academy promises – and pirates will be traced back to their source, even if that source is a clueless 1950s-era movie star with a clever housekeeper.
Piracy or no piracy, mailing out DVDs of serious, high-minded and artsy pictures of all kinds is common practice in Hollywood. The idea is that, rather than force lazy procrastinators like me – and, to be honest, those words describe most of the citizens of the entertainment industry – to check the show times, get in the car, head to the local cinema, pay for a ticket and sit through a movie, the producers will just send over a copy on an easy-to-use DVD.
This system also appeals to the producers of a lot of not-so-high-minded fare, on the theory that if they can just get the awards voters to pop in the DVD of their picture, who knows what might happen?
This must be the reason that I received a copy of this summer's blockbuster action picture, Furious 7, which was a very fun and very loud car chase movie but – and I hope I'm not offending any of its fans – unlikely to win any fancy movie awards. Still, on the theory that "you never know", the producers of Furious 7 made certain that their movie was in a DVD stack along with The Revenant and Spotlight.
What industry insiders end up with, eventually, is a lot of movies to watch. Keeping up with all of the screeners is a tall order, and I have to confess that in a few instances – I’m thinking of some of the longer movies this year – I may have cheated just a bit and fast-forwarded through some of the slower bits.
I make my peace with this little bit of cheating by reminding myself that, in the first place, I'm not a member of the Motion Picture Academy, so it’s not like I'm going to be voting for anything important like the Oscars, and in the second place that everybody else does it too.
On the other hand, it may explain why often the most award-winning movies are the longest and the dullest. The voters, you see, don’t watch the dull parts. They just zip though them from the comfort of their sofas, which is something no cinema-goer has the ability to do.
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
