Word: samurais
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...night of Nov. 29, Warner Bros. transformed more than 500 American theaters into secure compounds for a sneak preview of The Last Samurai. The $140 million Tom Cruise vehicle, designed to transport the star from the screen to the Oscar podium, was filmed on location in New Zealand and Japan with a cast of 750. All the hype, along with the adolescent story line--samurai fight against the Japanese army!--guaranteed the film to be of interest to pirates. And in the age of faster Internet connections, protecting a movie has become like guarding very expensive air. So to prevent...
...studios will now go to hold back this threat. To tell the tale of how films get to black-market stores and shacks across every continent, from Beijing to New York City and to computer hard drives everywhere, TIME tracked the winding journey of The Last Samurai (full disclosure: Warner Bros. and TIME share the same parent company). And the trajectory confirms that movie executives are right to be alarmed. But it also shows that most of their protective acrobatics are, at best, just buying time. The harder it is to get a movie, the more pirates want...
...Samurai, evasive maneuvers began before the film was finished being shot. Every work print of the movie was encoded with a hidden marker so that it could be identified if it was leaked. Even the scripts had codes stamped across every page, each corresponding to the owner's name. Before sending Samurai to dubbing houses, Warner Bros. rendered the copies less piratable by going through every scene and editing out characters not relevant to the particular dubbing job--an exercise that took about three days per cassette. The studio did send out "screener" copies to Oscar voters--a high-risk...
...weekend of the sneak preview, Brandon got hourly updates from the studio's Internet-monitoring firm, hoping not to hear that Samurai had been scattered across the globe. The off-site security firm (which requested that it not be named) scanned file-trading networks 24 hours a day. It can fire off letters warning Internet service providers about misbehaving users, but its main weapon is the decoy file, which it dispatched by the tens of thousands. Downloaders spent hours pulling down the bait, only to find a mess of ones and zeros. Bored wannabe pirates added to the mass distraction...
Regrettably, taking any of this into account would require an understanding that morality and politics can be complicated, that history is not simply a tale of good (“the West”) versus evil (the tragic samurai, too honorable for their own good). The Last Samurai rejects the obvious third path—the idea that Japanese society could have absorbed the positive elements of Western technology without rejecting its own unique past...