Word: warner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...DIED. RAY STARK, 88, prolific Hollywood producer who gave Barbra Streisand her breakthrough role in the stage musical and 1968 film Funny Girl; in Los Angeles. Stark, who started out in Hollywood writing captions for publicity photos at Warner Bros., made more than 125 films, including Night of the Iguana, The Way We Were, and 11 movies in close collaboration with playwright Neil Simon, among them The Sunshine Boys. Stark considered several actresses such as Mary Martin and Eydie Gorme before choosing the then unknown Streisand to play Funny Girl's Fanny Brice. Her performance in the film...
...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...
Marc Brandon works in a far corner of the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, Calif., not far from where the old western back lot used to be. His office is plain and neat, and there was a time when his job was too--back when, as director of antipiracy Internet operations, his chief responsibility was reminding online T-shirt companies that the studio owns Bugs Bunny. Today, Brandon, 30, in jeans and an oversize T shirt, says the pirates dictate his daily schedule. In 2002 some 41 million illegal copies of movies were seized by law-enforcement authorities around...
...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 move--but far fewer than normal...