[IP] Spielberg loses out at the push of a button
Begin forwarded message:
From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: January 11, 2006 4:38:01 AM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Spielberg loses out at the push of a button
Dave:
Here's a nice front page story from today's (UK) Guardian, about
region-protected preview DVDs, and how Steven Spielberg is likely to
lose his chance of getting a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and
Television Arts ) award for his latest film.
Cheers
Brian
Spielberg loses out at the push of a button
Xan Brooks
Wednesday January 11, 2006
The Guardian
From Jaws and Close Encounters through to War of the Worlds, Steven
Spielberg movies have rarely had trouble connecting with audiences
in the UK.
But the man who put a capital B into the contemporary blockbuster,
whose films have grossed billions and whose name is usually the
stamp of glorious cinematic success, has been humbled. By a button.
Pushed, it seems, mistakenly.
This has had a profound effect on the director's latest opus, at
least as far as the members of Bafta are concerned. By tomorrow
they have to nominate the films they think worthy of accolade, and
Spielberg's Munich was expected to be among them, tipped for awards
both in Britain and at the Oscars.
But the preview DVD sent to the academy's members is unplayable on
machines used in the UK. As a result the majority of Bafta's 5,000
voters will not have seen the film, due to be released in Britain
on January 27, and can hardly be expected to recommend it for acclaim.
Sara Keene at Premier PR, the company coordinating Munich's Bafta
campaign, blamed the mistake on human error at the laboratory where
the DVDs were encrypted. "Someone pushed the wrong button," she
said. "It was a case of rotten bad luck." She insisted that the
film's distributor, Universal, was not at fault.
The problem, it appears, was partly down to teething troubles with
the limited edition DVD players issued last year to Bafta members.
Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their
owners to view encrypted DVD "screeners", but prevent the creation
of pirate copies. Munich screeners were encoded for region one,
which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than
region two, which incorporates most of Europe.
The faulty DVDs only reached Bafta members on Saturday, which meant
the film had already missed out on the first round of voting on
January 4. In a further twist to the tale, a previous batch mailed
out before Christmas were reportedly held up by customs officials
in the UK. "It's been quite a cock-up," said one Bafta member, who
spoke on condition of anonymity.
"We were promised that they were going to send screeners before
Christmas, but they never arrived. Now we finally have a copy but
there is no way we can watch it.
. . .
Full story at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/
0,16518,1683818,00.html
--
School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon
Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxx PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/
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