Digital Makes Everything Easier

Including, we might note on the weekend where the seventh Star Wars movie opens, movie theft.

Theaters today receive their digital movies as computer files, often downloaded from dedicated and secured servers. Thieves who want to pirate them may try to break into the servers, somehow "eavesdrop" on the transmission, or maybe even break in to the movie theater's projection computers.

Of course, there's always the option of just bribing a theater employee to somehow allow access to the network for copying, or to play the movie so that it can be recorded onscreen: Set up a camera of some kind in an empty theater late at night, hit "record," and play the movie. Sometimes a bootlegger will surreptitiously record the movie during a regularly scheduled performance, meaning there could be interruptions as other people in that aisle need restroom breaks or begin conversations picked up by the bootlegger's equipment.

In moviedom's earlier days, enjoying a pirated copy of a movie meant having to own a 35mm projector, because projectors were the only ways you could watch a movie. As home video cassette systems became widespread, then the pirates had a suddenly wide-open field of customers who didn't need expensive projectors and screens. All they had to do was get one copy of the movie, play it and record it onto videotape, which could then be dubbed as many times as it would stand before becoming a murky mess.

The key, though, was getting your hands on a copy of the movie, and the only places that could happen were movie theaters that were showing it. In some cases, that meant breaking in to the movie theater. In others, like the one mentioned here in Mental Floss, it meant robbing the theater at gunpoint so you could get a copy of Return of the Jedi.

Because no one was hurt and because I remember working at a movie theater, I could laugh a little at the guy who planned to steal the print and sell it to a taper. He first had to wait around until the movie emptied out (because it's hard to steal a movie while it's playing) and then while the theater employee unspooled it for transportation. Before digital movies, the film was on several reels, and one of the things we had to do when a new movie was delivered was splice it together into one continuous length. You used the projector to unspool it from the several different reels onto a large horizontal reel (the weight of the combined whole movie would break or bend a spindle if the whole thing was vertical), using special sprocket-holed tape to link them together. The thief in the story had to wait while the movie was unreeled from the large plate, cut apart at the tape, and then loaded into the individual shipment reels.

Turns out after all that work he found an honest video store owner who set him up with the FBI, and they promptly arranged a sting where he met two agents who watched a reel of the movie to be sure it was the right one and then arrested him. He received a sentence of five years probation and 120 hours of community service, which he spent trying to remove a piece of gum from the theater floor.