It was a Friday eventide in 1975 , and Woody Wise was drive from Los Angeles to Palm Springs , with his two tyke in the car . He had pluck them up from schoolhouse in a haste , but they were n’t going on holiday . They were hiding out from the FBI .
While Wise was on the road , the FBI descend on his Burbank flat , guns pull , as his landlady would later tell him . Woody ’s offense ? cinema piracy . The cops would make away with dozens of film . But this being 1975 , he was n’t trading in DVDs or even VHS tapes . He was trading in film . material film . Long before the internet ’s bandwidth could deal the traffic of a exclusive photo , Hollywood studios see Woody and others like him as the Pirate Bay of the 1960s and ‘ 70s .
“ The FBI had a real hard - on for me , ” Wise told me late when I shoot the breeze him at his menage on the outskirts of LA . “ They recall I was the fully grown guy wire , but I was n’t the big guy . ” Wise was n’t the expectant name in the motion-picture show plagiarisation world of the 1960s . But he certainly was a name . And even the FBI could n’t kill his obsessional love for pile up picture show .
Woody Wise shows off one of the film projectors he keeps in his home.Photo: Michelle Groskopf (Gizmodo)
When it comes to medium , we ’re incredibly ball up here in the twenty-first century . Is there a particular old movie or TV show you ’d like to see ? you could probably find it on videodisc or a cyclosis service like Filmstruck . ( Most of the time , anyway . ) In the 1960s and ‘ 70s , if you did n’t catch something in the cinema or on boob tube , you were ordinarily out of luck .
Unless you could get a pirate copy . There was a loose - cockle community of pirate in the sixties and ‘ 70s who would prefer to be shout collectors . They lock in a gray surface area of movie legality , where manage a movie print outside of “ official channels ” set up by the movie studios probably meant that you were breaking the natural law . By the mid-1970s , the man of pre - video motion picture and TV plagiarism quickly became a risky subway in which to enter . And in 1974 and 1975 , at the behest of the Motion Picture Association of America ( MPAA ) , the FBI was pink down door to shut out down the film collector who sell movies from New York to Los Angeles .
Even histrion who just require copy of their own film got swept up in the maraud . Actor Roddy McDowall , who played Cornelius and Caesar in the original Planet of the Apes movies , had his North Hollywood plate raidedby the FBI in 1974 . The agents deal 160 of his 16 mm mark and over 1,000 video cassettes — many of which were movies that he acted in . No charge were filed in exchange for data about where he was getting his movie .
Figurines of director Alfred Hitchcock, a reproduction of the Maltese Falcon, and actor Humphrey Bogart, star of the 1941 version of the Warner Bros. film The Maltese FalconPhoto: Michelle Groskopf (Gizmodo)
“ They really wanted to make a statement , ” Wise told me about the FBI foray that would eventually make him a outlaw . But it ’s a felony that he does n’t really beware too much , now that he does n’t have to serve panel responsibility .
“ My first love was jut . I want to be a projectionist and I was [ a projectionist ] at 14 at this one-time country theater , ” the 80 - twelvemonth - old Wise told me as we sat in his living room in his home straddle the border of Glendale and Burbank .
Wise ’s neighborhood deem the formal name of the Rancho - Equestrian district , but it may as well be in the middle of Kansas . It has stalls , horse provender entrepot , and special lane that look like cycle lanes but are actually for sawhorse . It even has a horse - themed cafe . Wise ’s property , he told me , used to be the backyard of legendary actress Bette Davis where she hold on her own Arabian gymnastic horse . His house is a poster - fill shrine to the picture of yesterday .
Photo: Michelle Groskopf (Gizmodo)
“ I ended up being an usher , then a manager , then I ran a theater of my own , ” Wise said , explaining how he came to fall in sexual love with film in his small-scale Virginia town Franconia , right outside of Alexandria . Many picture show theater in small towns were struggling during the sixties , as they competed with people who might rather stay home and just watch TV .
“ Theater managers do n’t make a lot of money , ” Wise said , so he grow a side - hustle . He started handle the transportation of Zea mays everta and the pic prints from the major studios to regional Virginia . Wise would trip about an hour to the major movie studio ’ office in Washington , D.C. , doubly a workweek to find fault up new movies . Every studio had their own construction with offices and a large merchant marine department underneath where all the 35 mm film reels were stored .
Wise , a mass person , quickly became protagonist with the cargo ships section guys in the pic exchanges of studios like Universal , Paramount , and MGM in the summons . “ I be intimate people , I love to have lots of people around , and I usually can get along with just about anybody . Even if they voted for Trump , ” Wise told me with a laugh .
Woody Wise’s dog.Photo: Michelle Groskopf (Gizmodo)
“ When a movie breaks back then [ in the 1960s ] , they put it in like a hundred theater of operations , ” Wise explained . “ And , of course , that ’s plastic film . That ’s 100 films . After two or three weeks , they only want like 20 and [ the motion picture studio ] pay taxation on every print that ’s in the room … so they have to junk 80 prints — they have to throw them away . So you could kind of hazard the story there , when I bump out they ’re throwing these thing away … . ”
Wise state that when he found out they were just tossing celluloid prints in the trash , he start out to bid the low - level employees in the transportation department at the motion-picture show studio apartment a few bucks to take them . At first , it was just a individual film from prison term to time .
“ Well , that grew , ” Wise said in an understated way . The guy in the flick exchanges in Washington , D.C. , his friends , were more than glad to make $ 25 here or there for something that the studio was just going to cast in the landfill .
Woody Wise with his friends talking about movies.Photo: Michelle Groskopf (Gizmodo)
The practice of destroying film print was n’t invented in the 1960s , of course . When a movie was no longer profitable , having hundreds of prints around did n’t make any common sense at all . In fact , it was a strong-arm danger in the early days of film . Before the widespread adoption of “ condom celluloid ” in the other fifties , motion motion-picture show used to be made using nitrate stock , a extremely flammable material . It was so flammable that it was great tinder any clip that studios needed to produce a huge fire aspect in a movie . As the tardy motion picture critic Carl Sandburg oncewrote , “ The next time you follow Atlanta bite in Gone With the Wind , realise that these flame are in all probability being stoked with movie story . ”
And Wise ’s buddies let him have first dibs at all the major studios , set aside him to break up and choose what flick he want to purchase before they were scrapped or before any other underground dealers had a chance to get their workforce on them .
“ All these exchange , whenever they did a major rubble , I got to go in and cherry - pick everything . I might take 20 or 30 prints , and compensate them 15 or 20 bucks for each . And then I ’d betray them for 75 [ each ] . ”
“ So that was the film collecting days , and I ’m just one guy . This was happening in every major city , ” said Wise . “ I had that in , so I was known as a fairly enceinte one . ”
But Wise was getting more than $ 75 . Records obtained by Gizmodo show that he was make water as much as $ 575 per transcript back in 1966 .
I first came across Woody Wise by unknown accident , working on a long - condition book project about every single movie that the U.S. presidents have watched while in office . In the trend of my research , I often lodge Freedom of Information Act ( FOIA ) request with various government agency about a given movie .
After I file a FOIA postulation with the FBI to see if they had any document on the 1963 James Bond film From Russia With Love ( it was one of the last movies that John F. Kennedy view before his assassination ) , my lookup was airt to the National Archives . About a year later , I got about three dozen pages back . But the pages had just one mention of From Russia With Love . The files were actually about movie plagiarization in the sixties . The FBI had been tracking a number of film collectors , dealer , and sea robber during that full stop and From Russia With Love just materialise to be one of the movies that were being traded . And Woody Wise ’s name showed up .
Aside from a few Scripture , there really is n’t much scholarship about what movie plagiarism looked like precisely in the 1960s and ‘ seventy before TV live on mainstream . There ’s a marvellous Bible about the earliest days of picture plagiarism calledHollywood ’s Copyright Warsby Peter Decherney and even one about movie collector of midcentury calledA Thousand Cutsby Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph . detect these Indian file by some felicitous accident felt like bring out a strange piece of story largely forgotten by the popular imaging .
One of the most interesting things we can glean from the FBI files , currently sitting at the National Archives , is the price for various pirated film during that time .
For example , a 16 millimeter print of a film like Disney ’s The Sword and the Stone ( 1963 ) would mark you back $ 50 in the mid-1960s . Adjusted for inflation that ’s about $ 195 . But a film like West Side Story ( 1961 ) would cost as much as $ 575 , or $ 4,475 adjusted for inflation . Wise made as much as that on one sale , according to archival FBI documents .
The filing cabinet also include an interview with one of the film collectors that Wise sold movies to through listings in the film magazines of the sixties .
But even with the FBI looking into his sale , Wise never bugger off into any legal hassle in Virginia in the 1960s . At least none that Wise will admit to , nor any that I could dig up beyond the investigations at the National Archives . It was n’t until Wise travel to Los Angeles that the FBI finally crack down on the film pirate ship and he was just one of many targeted for distributing picture lawlessly .
Wise was visiting Los Angeles often in the sixties and go far to live on permanently in 1973 , first lick at the Harold Lloyd Museum in Beverly Hills . The fabled silent - era comedian become flat in 1971 , and the Harold Lloyd Foundation turned his estate of the realm , get laid as Greenacres , into a museum to celebrate his spirit . But it was just too out of the path to sustain itself as a museum . But all the while , Wise was selling films from his collection of “ pirated ” movies to collector all around the country . He ’d even place advertising in all the picture show gatherer magazines of the meter publicize what he had available .
Wise repugn that he was n’t doing anything wrong dealing in original junked mark in the early 1970s . These film prints were , after all , just go to be throw in the methamphetamine hydrochloride . But he was finally buck with interstate transportation of steal good . It was his sale of a single 35 millimeter print of the 1968 William Wyler picture Funny Girl , star Barbara Streisand , that the FBI decided to level him with .
“ The FBI had a little piece of hassle getting at me number one because it was n’t steal , even though they technically got me on a stolen mark . I purchase it . I never steal anything . But there ’s a very fine line there from the copyright picture show to showing something that you do n’t have a right to show or deal . ”
“ Today , everybody ’s sell film prints . ”
And Wise is good . Just take a looking at at eBay and you ’ll see tons of mass selling old 16 mm and even 35 mm films quite out in the open . Back in the late 2000s , I buy a few 35 mm cinema trailers for myself just because of the novelty of induce some 35 mm motion-picture show lying around to issue up in various art projects .
“ I had launch the store on Highland Avenue holler Hollywood Poster and Bookshop and out of the back I was dealing in 16 mm prints , ” Wise tells me about one of his many endeavors in collecting and selling moving-picture show in the 1970s . “ This guy in New Jersey was actually making new prints of things like Goldfinger and I ’d get it in and sell it out of the backroom . ”
Woody state me that his video memory board on Highland Avenue opened in 1975 , but after the FBI came calling , he let his partner take it over .
The large Pisces the Fishes that the FBI was purportedly after was whoever was selling prints to South African motion-picture show distributors . There was acultural boycottof the nation led by the United Nations , and the FBI was sweeping through the American moving picture collector community attempt to figure out who was supplying Hollywood films to theater of operations in South Africa . The major medium company , include Hollywood studios , were n’t sending films to the state in protest of apartheid , but amoral graphic symbol in the film collecting community were making a lot of money by shipping prints to South Africa for the black marketplace . Or , in some case , having South Africans pick up prints in Los Angeles .
But Wise maintains he had nothing to do with the trade in South Africa , and was only convicted for sale of stolen property and right of first publication violations .
“ I never sold anybody a print that would be used for expo , ” Wise said . He only sold to individual collectors of 35 mm and 16 mm print , even if his sale were on the unseasonable side of the jurisprudence . But the judge ease up him a break .
“ I was a single dad with two minor , so the judge [ … ] he said ok , I ’m extend to give you a twelvemonth , ” Wise said . “ I get a probability to plead and say , ‘ seem , I ’m a unmarried dad with two kids ’ and he gave in and rent me off with a gravid mulct . ”
“ I had a mulct and was on probation for five years and during that sentence I croak into actual estate and did video on the side , ” Wise said referring to the former seventies .
Wise expire into the TV patronage and read he gave up on handle in film prints all . He had a video storage in Burbank called Discount Videotapes ( later called Hollywood ’s Attic ) and began only selling to collector in things that had fallen out of right of first publication .
“ I dealt only in old picture . onetime public knowledge base war films , horse opera , cowboy movies , anything … ” Wise told me . He was also doing his own gemination of films — strictly of public domain movies , he swore . “ I was doing all my own duplicate . ”
The October 23 , 1981 issue of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner even lean an article about Woody about the legality of his film gemination business , explaining that the plastic film that had precipitate out of copyright were perfectly legal to deal .
“ I put advertising in all the small moving-picture show magazines and started establish up a mail - monastic order business ( four eld ago ) with Republic Westerns and stone concerts , which had no problem at the time , ” Wise told the Herald . “ There are a muckle of stone concerts , like ( performances by ) the Beatles and the Rolling Stones , that were consider in the public domain but have since become illegal . I do n’t betray those any longer . ”
Instead , the spunk of Woody ’s telecasting business enterprise was public demesne movies like Roy Rogers ’ earliest Westerns , and flick like It ’s a terrific Life , which circumstantially fall into the public domain of a function because the movie studio forgot to renew the right of first publication . Incidentally , that ’s why the movie became a Christmastime classic . When the 1946 film was made , copyright legal philosophy said that a motion-picture show could be copyrighted for 28 year and then , if renewed , it could be copyright for another 28 long time . When It ’s a marvellous Life ’s original copyright expired in 1974 , the studio forgot to renew it , and TV stations around the land started playing the moving picture at Christmas . The film was considered a fizzle in 1946 , but became a classic after decennium of tv set station play it , for no other reason than the fact that they could do so for free .
But even back in 1981 , while Wise was promoting his home telecasting business , could n’t help but romanticize the magic of watching films on the big screen .
“ Seeing them at home is still nothing like sitting in the theater and watching a motion picture , ” Wise importune to the Herald .
Wise retire in 2004 and sold his video concern .
In the earliest day of movie piracy at the turn of the 20th 100 , the concern was about earnings lost by corporations . Everyone was stealing each other ’s movies in the 1900s and 1910s , whether it was cook dupe , or sometimes just take - for - shot remakes of films . Some people even made remixes of movies by splice together , say , a Charlie Chaplin box moving-picture show like 1915 ’s The Champion with submarine footage . severely . The requirement for movies in the US and Britain was enormous , so film producer were constantly stealing ideas , and sometimes just build a strong-arm pic copy of a flick .
Most multitude are familiar with the controversies that surrounded the emergence of VHS — it was quite the malicious gossip in the other eighties that Americans might be able to record goggle box programs and picture right off their own TVs . The movie studio apartment insisted that if VCRs had a record push , people would never pay for content anymore . That did n’t flex out to be the case , but the studio still conceive they have a lot to lose today with film piracy becoming easy and easy online . estimate vary wildly , but the movie industry insist that it fall behind anywhere from $ 1.3 billion to$6.1 billionto movie piracy globally every year .
That ’s why they ’ve cracked down on downpour internet site like The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents as the people who scat those sites run from the practice of law . Artem Vaulin , the alleged owner of Kickass Torrents , was catch in Poland in 2016 during a layover on a family holiday from his native Ukraine to Iceland . When we think of movie piracy here in the early twenty-first century , it ’s almost alone in the form of ones and zeroes . The FBI and other global constabulary agencies have tried to clamp down on the communion of movies through internet , but whenever they shut down a internet site like Pirate Bay or Kickass Torrents , another site seems to pop right up to take its billet . But Wise ’s tarradiddle reminds us that movie plagiarization did n’t start out with the internet . you could still happen people hawk bootleg DVDs on the sidewalk in America ’s self-aggrandising cities . And motion-picture show plagiarization is as old as the innovation of picture show itself . It was just a bit more complicated before the VCR and the internet were fabricate .
These days Wise volunteers at Warner Bros. studio backlot museum . And he does it just to be close to the picture show story that he adores .
“ Just to be on the lot — where a stack of my favorite actors were [ … ] you got ta know what that feel like , ” he told me .
Wise also has a movie cabaret that he ’s kept proceed since the mid-1980s . They call themselves The Cliffhangers , named after the serialized natural process film that they turn up with , like The Lone Ranger , Zorro , and Dick Tracy . Wise is the de - facto leader of the group and the nine members of The Cliffhangers meet at his mansion every other Saturday to spill the beans movies , and watch out both serials and at least one feature pic .
There ’s even a low - budget documentary that was made about Wise ’s compressed - knit movie club call the Brotherhood of the Popcorn , which you canstream on Amazonand bargain on videodisc , but it does n’t include anything about Wise ’s experience with film plagiarization . That being tell , the documentary film is a great facial expression at his movie club and the common sense of community that movies can reach in a very analog fashion . Today , we often find alike - given film and TV fans online , debating theories and lionise piece of move image culture in the digital realm . But when you keep an eye on Woody and his ally talk about old movies at Woody ’s kitchen board it ’s hard not to get swept up by the idea that there was something more romantic about an geological era when you could n’t chance like - minded people with just a few clicks . Woody and his friend discuss and deliberate the films of their shared history . And I ’d weigh myself pretty damn favorable if I had a movie club like his when I ’m 80 .
Shortly before leaving I get a full tour of his star sign , and Wise shows me the screening room where his Cliffhangers fill . It has bountiful comfortable death chair , large 6 - sheet picture posting covering the walls . We then steer to his office staff filled with even more posters , plenty of books and DVDs , and an old - fashioned popcorn machine . I notice a new release of the 1941 Edward G. Robinson film Sea Wolf on his desk , but the blanket of the videodisc character is oddly black and white .
I gesture toward the DVD , bring up that I had n’t seen that movie yet and Wise tells me , “ Yeah , that ’s a new one . I chouse and made a copy . A friend of mine got it . ”
Movies
