1 post tagged “wga”

So looking at Dave's Links from yesterday, I saw an article he put in there about screeners for the Oscars and pirating.
As a member of the Writers Guild of America (they're the Union that represents me at work) I get screeners too! They're so I can vote in the Writers Guild Awards.  Last year I only got a few (Crash was one of them as mentioned in the story above), but this year it's been like a bonanza.  I've gotten like eleven or twelve so far, plus scripts/screenplays.  Mostly they've come from smaller quasi-independent studios (Fox Searchlight seems to have

figured out it's a good way to get votes for their movies), though I've gotten a few from major studios too.  None from Disney-proper so far (which is funny, as I work for Disney), though I have gotten some from Miramax (owned by Disney).   Guess they don't send out their custom DVD players for just any old award. 

It's been fun to get movies in the mail a few times a week, but the selection of movies has, as you might expect, tended toward serious dramas, which are very good, but I'm not always in the mood to watch (I just can't quite bring myself to watch United 93, or World Trade Center).

Anyway, one thing I've noticed is that some of the screeners they send are either of very poor quality or have a lot of copy protection on them, because my main DVD player doesn't like some of the discs very much.  Little Miss Sunshine would virtually pause every few minutes, and other movies stutter here and there (don't know if it's copy protection, low quality DVD's or watermarking that my DVD player doesn't like). Fortunately my 360 seems to have no objections to playing anything I throw at it, so we've been able to watch everything we've wanted to so far.

On the other side of things, at least some studios seem to just send out the commercial

DVD's they sell anyway.  Yesterday I got a copy of The Departed (which I'm very excited about!) that doesn't look like most screeners (doesn't have "for your consideration" and things like that all over it).  As best I can tell it's just the same DVD they'll be selling in February.  It may be watermarked to me in some way or another, but it looks to simply be the comercial DVD. (The World Trade Center DVD also looks to be the comercial release, it's even the 2 disc special edition.)

The funniest thing that's happened so far, and this must have been a mistake, was when I got a copy of Thank You For Smoking (which is excellent by

the way). The copy that they sent, appears to be in PAL format rather than NTSC.  My DVD player, bless it's heart, tried it's best to play it but it was in black and white, and seemed to be shifted toward the bottom of the screen.  Amazingly my 360, was happy to play it. 

The lesson here is that screeners are weird and sometimes don't play well with some DVD players, but the 360 is a pretty good DVD-Video player, and will play a lot of stuff, even if it is rather loud.