Monthly Archives: December 2009

Jerry Carr writes to ask…

Thanks for the informative and funny article about screeners. Now, since you get these things, can you tell us who the nominees will be for Best Picture?

Certainly. As you may have heard, there will be ten nominees this year in this category. The ten nominees will be, in alphabetical order: Avatar, An Education, Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Invictus, Nine, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, and Up in the Air. And by the way, we're probably lucky that Billy Crystal isn't hosting the ceremony. He and Marc Shaiman would probably get hernias trying to whip up song parodies about all of those.

This is one of the times o' year when I get a lot of "screeners," that being a Hollywood term for a DVD of a recent film or TV show. Back in the Byzantine Era, it used to apply to something called a VHS tape. If you don't know what that is, here's a link to the Wikipedia listing.

It's primal human nature that we all like to do something that sounds a little special, a little more like a privilege not afforded to all. Therefore, if you ask some folks if they want to go to a "movie," they'll say no but if you suggest going to a "screening," well, that's a whole 'nother thing. And viewing a screener is ever so much more enticing than watching a DVD. Anybody can watch a DVD.

I get screeners because I'm in the Writers Guild and I'm in the TV Academy and I'm on a lot of press lists. In some cases, a screener is sent because someone thinks it will do the movie or show a world of good to generate good press or just "buzz." In most instances, it's sent because they're hoping it will yield votes for some upcoming award. There's no evidence that it does. In fact, there's anecdotal evidence that the louder the campaign, the less likely a movie is to cop an Oscar. Still, the studios mount these campaigns and it's sometimes contractual. There are movie stars and directors who have it in their contract that the studio must spend X dollars trying to get them an Academy Award…and "X" is often a rather high number. So they have to spend it on something.

Screeners seem to be changing lately. Most used to come in much more elaborate packaging — fancy, obviously expensive cases, sometimes enormously cumbersome things. There was one — a documentary of some kind — that arrived inside a world globe at least a foot in diameter. You flipped open Portugal and there was the DVD. There was some biblical film that arrived inside an alleged replica of the Ten Commandments. You opened up a little plastic slab labelled "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" and there was your DVD. The fact that I don't remember the movies in question should tell you something about how effective this kind of thing can be.

Recently, I think the publicists figured out that the stunt wrappings were more annoying than promotional. There was no easy way to store some of their offerings…or even to have them around your house until you found time to watch the DVD within. To the environmentally-conscious, the extraneous debris seemed anti-green and wasteful, plus it all smelled of desperation; like the folks sending them out were admitting the film or TV show didn't merit attention without a lush gimmick. Way too many of the screeners that arrived inside Rose Parade floats never got a nomination for anything. In any case, most of 'em now show up in pretty basic casings, some in just cardboard sleeves. The ones lobbying me to vote for something in the Writers Guild awards often include a copy of the script, as well.

A friend who also gets them suggested to me that the simpler packaging was because of the bad economy. I don't think so. I think it's because of the reasons I just gave. They're still spending unnecessary bucks on screener dissemination, lately by sending most of them FedEx overnight, signature required. This calls attention to the DVD and makes you feel special — like they really wanted to make sure you received yours — even if it is a bit annoying to keep answering the door and signing for a copy of Alec Baldwin's lastest performance. (One arrives about every other day. I think that's about how fast he makes them.)

I suspect they're not trying to stroke us with all this FedExing so much as get written proof that we received the DVD. Lately, most of them come with this lawyer-written warning that I should watch the DVD…and then I'm on my honor to break it in half or otherwise destroy it, lest it fall into unauthorized hands. My copy has been secretly encoded with my DNA or something that will enable them to trace it and arrest me if anyone but me ever has possession of it. Should that someone mass-duplicate it, I would, of course, receive the death penalty. Never mind that I didn't ask for these DVDs in the first place. It's like a total stranger sent you a gift out of the blue…and threatened you with prison time if you didn't take proper care of it.

The threats are especially odd now that movies are turning up on commercial DVDs about eight minutes after they play the Cineplex at the mall. Some of the DVDs sent me this season are special pressings but some are mass-market releases you can buy on Amazon or rent from Netflix. Still, they come with these threatening letters from folks who are trying to woo me into voting for their products.

Odd? Yeah, but not as odd as this: If I send a screenplay to most of these studios, they'll return it unread with a stern letter — probably written by the guy who writes the threats in the screeners — that they don't accept unsolicited material. And then they send me unsolicited material…including copies of their screenplays.