Wide Area News
Trouble magnet
by Russell Brown
Michael Moore is infuriating the film industry by encouraging downloads of his latest work.
I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 recently. Not at a cinema, but on my computer, to which I had downloaded the rather large video file over the course of a couple of days. I made the decision to do so because I wasn’t going to be able to make the movie’s film festival debut, out of journalistic curiosity, and because discussing a film I hadn’t seen was driving me crazy. And anyway, Michael Moore said it was all right.
Leaving aside a verdict on its contents – properly the job of one of this magazine’s film reviewers – Moore’s latest work has been a setter of several precedents. A screaming first weekend set it on the way to becoming the most successful documentary in US cinematic history (overhauling Bowling for Columbine, as it happens). And, at the same time, it became the wedge in a rapidly developing trend towards the sharing of movies across the Internet. (New reports from the US, Europe and South Korea all suggest that movies now abruptly account for a larger share of illicit online trading than music.)
I wouldn’t recommend you following suit. Although the version I got, captured with a hand-held camera at a cinema, is of reasonable quality, you will enjoy it more at the pictures, where you can see the edges of the frame and won’t have to put up with occasional hissing on the soundtrack. It takes a degree of technical knowledge (and ideally a fast Internet connection) to obtain and play. And, to be frank, there are still some questions over the director’s free pass on copyright laws.
“I don’t agree with copyright laws, and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it … as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labour,” said Moore, comparing file-sharing to a person sharing a purchased DVD with a friend. “I make these movies and books and TV shows because I want things to change, and so the more people who get to see them, the better.”
That he did say this, there is little doubt: the relevant clip from an interview has been circulating the Internet since January. But to whom he said it remains unclear. Ironically, it was a website established to shout him down, MooreWatch.com, that took the clip as a licence to advise its readers that they could see the movie without lining his pockets by downloading it via a relatively new file-sharing network called BitTorrent. The film’s distributor, Lion’s Gate, has reacted angrily to the news and Moore has been uncharacteristically silent on the matter.
Moore is, no doubt, conflicted, because Fahrenheit 9/11 is just the most prominent of a crop of movies whose creators are as interested in getting the message out as in claiming every available consumer dollar. Salon.com characterised it as “the Great Left-Wing Documentary Onslaught of 2004”, noting also The Corporation, Control Room and Outfoxed, an intriguing attack on the journalistic practices of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network.
These films have a number of things in common. They have been made very cheaply, so there is a relatively small investment to recoup. They all, in some way, address the role of the mainstream media, and Outfoxed and Fahrenheit 9/11 derive much of their strength from what the TV networks have left on the cutting-room floor.
Outfoxed has Fox News’ political reporter Carl Cameron chatting happily with candidate Bush about his wife’s sterling work on the Bush campaign – before both men sit up straight and conduct an apparently neutral interview for public consumption. Moore makes withering use of President Bush’s seamless turn from dark pronouncements about terror for the news cameras to his golf game: “Now, watch this drive …” The message: this is what they are not showing us. There is great power in actuality.
Outfoxed goes much further than Moore’s movie in exploring a new reality for political film. Apart from a couple of premiere evenings in New York and San Francisco, it does not have cinematic release, and isn’t likely to for the time being. Instead, its producers sponsored around 2000 “house party” screenings, whose hosts had bought or been given the film on DVD. Afterwards, the gatherings were invited to tap into a live Internet discussion with director Robert Greenwald and liberal scamp Al Franken.
Large chunks of Outfoxed have been made freely available on the Internet, with dozens of clips posted on the film’s website and hosted by friendly Internet companies. These include one-on-one interviews with disaffected former Fox News staff, and clips from Fox broadcasts – including a startling series featuring Fox’s barking-mad talk host Bill O’Reilly.
But – and this is the really interesting part – the producers have also provided their readers with the “Torrent file” for the clips. (BitTorrent users must first locate and open a small file referring to the file they want: thereafter, the big file is downloaded piecemeal from other computers on which it is available. At the same time, the user’s computer is uploading other pieces to the other computers.)
Page 1 2 
