Is Piracy Also Increasing The Quality Of New Movies?

from the more-data-from-the-front dept

We recently wrote about how the singer of the popular band the Fleet Foxes felt that unauthorized file sharing has improved the quality of new music, because it allows musicians to experience much more music, and that helps create more and better influences. This makes a lot of sense, as you realize how much creative content is really built on inspiration from other works. So, is the same thing true for movies? In a recent interview with film director and producer Tommy Pallotta (who did A Scanner Darkly), he talks about his latest project, American Prince, and its relationship to unauthorized file sharing. American Prince is a "followup" to Martin Scorsese's documentary American Boy from over thirty years ago. The Scorsese movie is close to impossible to find legally... and, even though Pallotta did get is hands on an "official" copy from the main character in the movie, he downloaded a copy via BitTorrent and found it to be better. With American Prince, Pallotta has also purposely decided to put the movie online for torrenting.

Still, the key point that Pallotta makes seems to fit almost exactly with what the Fleet Foxes were saying:

Scorsese's American Boy has been and is still generally unavailable for over 30 years, yet so many filmmakers have been influenced by it. The way we saw it is through multi-generational VHS tapes. Now with BitTorrent, there is a whole new audience and generation ready to be influenced by that film and I hope mine. Steven Prince is a gold mine of future cinema scenes and I hope a whole new generation of filmmakers will understand how he has influenced American Cinema.

In other words, by getting more people exposed to the film, more can be influenced to make better movies as well. In fact, he seems to view the combination of his own movie and it being available on BitTorrent as film school:

I would really like to encourage people to talk about the film, with each other as well as on the Internet. It would make me happy to see Wikipedia entries and IMDB boards as well as Internet sites. I would love for people to get together and have screenings of it with their friends, or for universities to suggest to their class for the students to watch it. I look at American Prince as the film school I never had, what I always imagined film school to be.

And, of course, unlike what the MPAA claims, Pallotta only sees the positives that come out of file sharing:

I absolutely believe how we watch and share movies will shape the future of film distribution. I believe it will have such a profound influence that it will even change how movies are made. I think it is a win-win for the filmmakers and the viewers. Filmmakers will have a more direct reach with audience and viewers have more to choose from. I wanted to release this film in support of file sharing and to prove to myself and others that it can have a profoundly positive effect.

So, of course, if you want to see the movie, Pallotta hopes you'll download it.

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