Media Wonk

Follow the money - February 6, 2007

The MPAA flexed its considerable DC muscle Tuesday, putting on a day-long “symposium” at the ornate and newly restored National Portrait Gallery that amounted to a crash course on Hollywood economics for lawmakers, their staffs and other federal and state officials.

In addition to such top studio execs (and major political donors) as Sony Pictures chairman/CEO Michael Lynton and Warner Bros. CEO Barry Meyer, the day featured appearances by actors Will Smith and Clint Eastwood, who received the first annual Jack Valenti Humanitarian Award, and a lineup of A-list directors that included Steven Soderbergh (Oceans’s Eleven, Erin Brockovich), Taylor Hackford (Ray, An Officer and a Gentleman) and Michael Apted (Coalminer’s Daughter, The World is Not Enough).

The Governator sent greetings from California via video.

The purpose of the concentrated firepower was to help prepare the ground for the MPAA’s emerging new approach to Hollywood’s policy agenda in Washington.

No longer content simply to bash piracy and the technology companies it blames for the industry’s woes (although there was plenty of that Tuesday), the MPAA has lately moved Hollywood’s importance to the U.S. economy front and center in its appeal to lawmakers.

“The creative output of the American motion picture and television industry is widely appreciated around the world, yet its contribution to the nation’s economy is seldom recognized,” MPAA chairman/CEO Dan Glickman said in his opening remarks. “We are pleased so many of the industry’s best and brightest are converging on Washington to tell our economic story.”

He then rattled off numbers from a new report, The Economic Impact of the Motion Picture and Television Production Industry on the United States:

• More than 1.3 million U.S. jobs
• $30.24 billion in wages to U.S. workers
• $30.2 billion in revenue to U.S. vendors and suppliers
• $10 billion in state and federal taxes
• $9.5 billion in trade surplus

The “new” report was in fact a distillation of an earlier “new report” issued at an MPAA press conference last week, Copyright Industries in the U.S. Economy. But the pattern is clear.

“Policymakers need to understand more clearly the economic power of the movies, the incredible risk and investment involved in making a movie, and the challenges we face as an industry,” Glickman said. “An important event such as this is long overdue in Washington.”

Will Smith took up the theme in his remarks, noting that moviemaking doesn’t just affect the economies of California and New York.

“I’ve shot two movies in Miami, I shot a movie in Philadelphia, I’ve shot in New York,” Smith said. “Movies get made all over America.”

So will the MPAA be able to recast piracy as a jobs issue?

So far, so good. Tuesday’s event featured appearances by Sens. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Diane Feinstein, a committee member, along with Reps. Howard Berman, chairman of the House subcommittee on intellectual property, and Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

All pledged to do more in the 110^th Congress to promote, protect and defend a “uniquely American” industry, both here and abroad, often in strident terms.

“We need to put more enforcement people overseas, we need to stop turning a blind eye to piracy in other countries, and we need to say, it’s stealing, it’s theft and it’s wrong,” Leahy said at lunch. “People in America need to understand that we can no more trespass on copyrights than you can in someone’s house, or steal their car.”

Other highlights from the Business of Show Business:

In his luncheon remarks, Warner Bros. studio chief Barry Meyer pimp slapped Consumer Electronics Assn. president Gary Shapiro on his own turf, calling Shapiro out over his keynote address at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show.

“The CE industry decries as draconian our use of digital rights management as a tool to control access to and use of our content,” Meyer said, his voice dripping with disdain. “I obviously disagree. Any distribution scenario short of posting our films on free websites or giving away DVDs on the street corner involves a certain amount of regulation…DRM is about making our content available in a variety of formats and price points to give the consumer choices. The only choice we’re not offering is free.”

He then went on to accuse the CE industry of confusing consumers by creating mutually incompatible hardware formats, including Blu-ray and HD DVD.

“We’re not the ones responsible for creating and promoting non-compatible formats, for producing devices that don’t ‘talk’ to each other,” he taunted. “We’re producing in all formats for all outlets, offering consumer’s choice and not tying them to one particular kind of software or hardware.”

So there…

Sen. Diane Feinstein departed from the script at one point to whack the studios for producing too many movies “with no redeeming social value.”

Far too many movies today, she complained, “celebrate murder, glamorize torture and degrade women…It’s easy for the industry to say that the growth of sex and violence in movies simply reflects the culture at large. But movies also shape the culture.”

With that, she left.

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