Oscar-Nominated Working Class Stiffs Join MPAA's Lobbying Effort
The NY Times rounds up the highlights from yesterday's "The Business of Show Business" symposium, for which the MPAA took some of the entertainment industry's brightest little achievers on a field trip to Washington to lobby Congress, hoping sympathetic, star-struck reps will officially declare a global War on Movie Piracy and immediately close down the U.S.-Canadian border to halt the further loss of renegade film shoots to the production-pilfering commie hinterlands to our north. A crucial component of the MPAA's lobbying strategy is to put a human face on the glitzy, hot-tub-pruned, coke-dusted world of Hollywood, stressing that dozens upon dozens of "real," hard-working people make movies, like the gaffers who are forced to relocate to Vancouver to chase work and the underemployed, recently Oscar-nominated directors who are barely making ends meet:
It's not just me and Tom," said [Will] Smith, referring to Tom Cruise, one of his peers who can command $20 million a picture. He said his latest film, "I Am Legend," was employing 1,000 local crew members and actors on location in New York.
The director Paris Barclay told of trying to hire one of his favorite technicians recently, and learning that the man had moved his wife and three children to Vancouver, because that is where the work is.
And Taylor Hackford, the director of "Ray," in establishing his credentials, added: "I'm working class." [...]
The conversation often turned to piracy, the existential issue that dominates the association's agenda. Mr. Hackford, who spent more than a decade developing "Ray," told of finding a bootleg DVD of the movie on the day of its theatrical release, and said 42 million illicit copies were sold within five months.
That meant millions of dollars in lost revenue — "and DVDs is how people get their money back," he said of movie financiers. "If they don't, will I be able to sell a hard-to-sell picture like 'Ray'? No."
The down-on-his-luck helmer then continued, enrapturing his audience, "Because of the millions in lost residuals from the rampant piracy of Ray, I may have to wear a rented tuxedo to the Oscars this year. [pause for audible gasps] I hope that the esteemed members of Congress will think of the worldwide humiliation I'll be subjected to when the camera lingers upon my substandard garment after my wife wins Best Actress and realize that something must be done to protect me and my working class peers from the pirate menace."
