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Fan Fare

Amateur filmmakers say their work is the sincerest form of flattery, but Hollywood studios call it copyright infringement.

One night in 1977, during a giggly late-night dinner at a San Francisco Chinese restaurant, a pair of Star Wars fans reenacted the climactic battle scene using bottles of soy sauce as spaceships. Convinced they were on to something, they got to work on “Hardware Wars,” an $8,000 epic that featured flying toasters and killer waffle irons. Fan filmmaking was born.

Fast forward 20 years to the re-release of the original Star Wars and the appearance of yet another fan film. Shot in the desert outside Los Angeles by a group of movie industry worker bees ("All of us are below-the-line schmos,” says director Kevin Rubio), the short film “Troops” borrowed the format of the TV show “Cops” to follow the workaday hassles of Storm Troopers patrolling the planet Tatooine. Again, a clever knockoff caught the backdraft of Lucas’ juggernaut and became a cult hit, but this time with a convergence twist. Mass distribution of “Troops” on bootleg videotapes and on Star Wars Web sites inspired a new generation of fans to get busy poaching their favorite content with new digital video gear and off-the-shelf editing software.

Look around the Web today and you’ll find hundreds of amateur movies based not only on “Star Wars,” but virtually every major Hollywood franchise. They include dozens of phony trailers for the upcoming “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, an animated battle between heroes of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” an episode of X-Files in which a pudgy Mulder investigates Elvis sightings, a slapdash clip reel of action director Wong Kar-Wai and a few full-length features about comic book superheroes.

“I stole every second of footage in my film,” says a Los Angeles video editor whose bogus trailer for the next Star Wars installment has so far attracted more than 3 million downloads. “The Internet is new and rules and regulations are iffy, so I put it out there and figured I could get away with it.”

These amateurs have discovered that there’s nothing quite like aping an established franchise to attract eyeballs. For a few weeks, the fan film “George Lucas in Love” was outselling “The Phantom Menace” among video customers on Amazon.com. Meanwhile an hour-long Spiderman feature, in which a mail clerk at the Baltimore aquarium dons a red bodysuit and swings from a six-story building, has been downloaded some 200,000 times from the site localorigination.com. And a digitally-goosed Super-8 movie made by a Superman fan in Goffstown, New Hampshire was racking up 3,500 hits a day when lawyers for DC Comics dashed off a nasty takedown order.

“I immediately shut it down,” says “Superman: The Super 8 Movie” director Mark Kimball. “I’m one guy against a wall of cash. If they wanted, I’m sure they could have done a lot of damage to me.”

Not all fan films look like B-roll from the Ed Wood archive. Recently fan filmmakers have begun releasing shorts that mimic the special effects and marketing strategies employed by major studios. Accompanied by teaser trailers, promotional posters and even fan sites, these home movies disguised as blockbusters have slipped undetected into territory Hollywood studios claim as their own.

A 30-minute feature called “The Dark Redemption” was the first sign of things to come. Shot on a Sydney soundstage with a budget of $30,000 and cast of local TV stars including an actor who had a minor part in the original “Star Wars,” the movie looks more like a cut-rate cable show than a Lucas production, but it signaled a major escalation in a genre more commonly associated with kids playing with plastic lightsabers. By comparison, the fan film community was abuzz a few months earlier over “Kid Wars,” a short directed by a 14-year-old boy who recreates scenes from the original with a cast of tots wielding Nerf weapons and squirt guns.

The ante was upped again this past January, when the Star Wars fan site theforce.net posted a preview for a film called “Duality” featuring a tantalizing glimpse of a gleaming silver temple hovering over a sub-burnt alien landscape. When the movie was released a few weeks later, the same die-hard Star Wars fans let down by last summer’s “Phantom Menace” were left feeling the force once again --- thanks to a stunning six minutes of artful effects and swordplay that looks for all the world like something cooked up on a good day at Industrial Light and Magic. Says Jeff Yankey, who manages the fan film section of the Web site theforce.net: “It just smokes everything that came before it.”

As quality improves and audiences enlarge, the guardians of intellectual property are being forced to confront yet another digital mutant swarming at the gates. There are few guideposts for negotiating this unfamiliar territory. One is section 107 of the federal copyright act, which protects the “fair use” of copyrighted materials. Additionally, courts will traditionally allow parodies, satires and documentaries about established works. But there appears to be little defense against dramatic reworkings of original content or the wholesale lifting of music, costumes or other copyrighted materials.

And while the vast majority of fan films appear to run afoul of copyright law, studio attorneys are well aware that prosecution could result in a backlash among die-hard fans and reams of nasty p.r. (witness the public drubbing Warner Brothers has taken over its prosecution of “Harry Potter” fan sites.) And until very recently, there hasn’t been much point. After all, how worked up can a well-heeled studio attorney get about bringing down the hammer on a kid with a store-bought costume and a Camcorder?

“The question of whether it’s bad business to aggressively pursue fan-based content is a very difficult issue,” says Chris Murray, Chairman of the entertainment and media department at O’Melveny & Myers, which counts several studios as clients. “But legally, I don’t think there’s much question that most fan films constitute actionable copyright infringement.”

So far, however, studios seem flummoxed—or completely unaware—of the phenomenon. A representative for Sony, which is producing the upcoming Spiderman feature, says “our attorneys have not done any studies” of fan films. And Sandra Ortiz, senior vice president of business affairs for 20th Century Fox, says she doesn’t know of any formal studio strategy related to fan films. But according to Ortiz, Fox would likely “have major issues” with a fan film like “Tie-Tanic,” a clever cut-and-paste job in which Imperial fighters attack the Titanic to protect the Star Wars franchise (In overdubbed dialogue, Vader warns his minions that “the ability to control the medium for 20 years is insignificant next to the power of a good chick flick.")

“They’re using our actors, our stories and our product and they’re manipulating it in a way we have no control over,” says Ortiz. “There are all kinds of copyright infringement, trademark infringement and even talent-residual issues to address here.”

Studio attorneys would do well to study the nuanced approach of former Super 8 hobbyist George Lucas, who has had 25 years to figure out how to deal with copy-cats. Lucas encourages movies protected under fair use statues, tolerates efforts that swipe some protected material and goes after filmmakers who attempt to profit from it. The strategy is expressed on the Star Wars Fan Film Network, a Lucas Film joint project with AtomFilms that offers production tips, access to a sound effect library and free hosting—even paying filmmakers a portion of revenue from banner ads.

“Our fans are our core foundation and with the Web we have a wonderful way to maintain our relationship,” explains Jim Ward, vice president of marketing for Lucas Film Ltd. “With the official site, we’ve created an environment where fan filmmakers can show their stuff.”

But what at first appears to be a bold embrace of borderline digital content is actually a pretty safe play. Noticeably absent from the official site are ambitious fan films like “Duality” or “The Dark Redemption” – the Fan Film Network only hosts “spoofs and documentaries,” which are protected by copyright law anyway. And Lucas Film has made it clear that they will take action against anyone who attempts to directly profit from their work.

That attempt hasn’t been altogether successful. Bootleg tapes featuring “Troops,” “Hardware Wars” and other fan films routinely fetch upwards of $20 a pop on eBay, and at comic book shops and conventions. There is in fact a bustling gray market in bootleg fan films of all sorts, says Dan Poole, director of the Superman tribute “The Green Goblin’s Last Stand.”

“Copies of ‘Green Goblin’ turn up online all the time,” he says. “It makes my blood boil. I’ve never tried to make money off this, so I take real offense when some scumbag comes along and tries to profit from my work.”

While fan filmmakers may not profit directly, economics do play a part in many amateur productions. Poole made his movie as part of an unabashed effort to land a job on the Sony-produced “Spiderman” project, while the makers of “Duality” say they also plan to circulate their project as a demo reel.

“We’re trying to get our names out there,” says Dave Macomber, who runs a martial arts studio in Santa Barbara when not toiling with Macintosh filmmaking software. “We’re hoping someone will come along and say, ‘If these guys can do this with three grand, just think what can they do with five million.’”

While Macomber and his partner Kevin Jones are true novices, many of the films that receive the most recognition are produced by professionals using production equipment in off-hours. Rubio, whose film “Troops” is cited as the grandfather of the current wave, parlayed the experience into a development deal at the USA Network. Even back in 1977, Ernie Fosselius and Michael Wiese were both working filmmakers when they made “Hardware Wars.”

“Fans talk about ‘Hardware Wars’ like we were kids with student cameras and nothing could be further from the truth,” says Weise, who now runs an independent production company out of a cottage in Cornwall, England. “We were both in our thirties and really just hoped for a chance to meet George Lucas. It was just a goof really.”

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss fan films as desperate attempts to advance studio careers. Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative media Studies department at MIT, takes a much loftier view, calling fan filmmakers renegades who challenge the “monopoly power over cultural mythologies.”

Jenkins says fan filmmakers are reviving pre-Industrial Age folk traditions, in which “common mythologies were built up over time as people added elements that made them more meaningful to their own contexts.”

That doesn’t change the fact that all but a few fan films are still pretty awful. By definition, fan films are made by people who have mastered the minutia of a made-up universe – the sewage schematics on the Death Star, say, or the complete dating history of Captain Kirk – but who also may remain oblivious to more earthly matters like sound mixing, story arcs or lens caps.

Witness “Alien vs. Predator,” a spasmodic montage starring two rubbery black shapes that look less like creatures from outer space than luggage with teeth. Elsewhere, you can witness hefty girls from Ohio training in the Jedi arts or a duel between the captain of the Free Enterprise and a villain called Darth Bobo (catchprase: “Never underestimate the power of a dark clown.")

And while most fan filmmakers want nothing less than to upset their heroes – “We don’t want to make uncle George mad at us,” says Macomber – a few are using fan films in an attempt to influence, mock or challenge their favorite franchise. Justin Young, who operates the Web site fanfilmxchange.com out of his Kentucky dorm room, says he hoped his own fan film “Ascension” might convince producers to resurrect the “Highlander” series. And on posting boards where fan filmmakers go to trade tips and gossip, there’s been talk of creating a entirely new “fan cut” of “The Phantom Menace.” (Note to Jar Jar Binks: kiss your ass goodbye.)

As digital cameras get cheaper and broadband connections more common, we can expect to see more fans rework favorite films, explore the worlds of minor characters, even create endings they wish they’d seen. By then, the guardians of intellectual property may have a major problem on their hands. “I hesitate to raise the red flag, but the industry can’t ignore this much longer,” says Jenkins. “They’ll all be running out sending cease and desist orders as fast as they can. And if they shut them down now, they won’t have them when they need them. Going after your audience is suicide.”