Chapter 773: An Oscar Surrounded by Piracy

Cloaked in night, Los Angeles remained brightly lit and bustling with noise, though certain high-end neighborhoods were perfectly quiet. Outside a standalone villa in Beverly Hills, the tall, long-legged Gal Gadot walked out of the courtyard. Behind her, the visibly pregnant hostess escorted her all the way to the gate.

"Nat, it's a little chilly outside," Gal Gadot said as she turned around, looking at the pregnant hostess with genuine concern. "Hurry back inside."

"It's fine..." Natalie Portman held onto the fence gate. "I'm just glad you came over to keep me company."

As the two spoke, camera flashes began to pop in the surrounding darkness, capturing their silhouettes. Gal Gadot immediately stepped in front to shield Natalie Portman, but Natalie seemed completely unbothered.

"It'll get out sooner or later. Let them take their pictures."

"Yeah." Gal Gadot nodded, a flash of mockery disappearing from her eyes as quickly as it came. "Go back inside. I'm leaving."

She waved to Natalie Portman, turned away from the gate, and walked to her car. Pulling the door open, she slipped inside, started the engine, and quickly drove off down the street. After taking two turns, she gradually slowed her speed. Thinking back on her recent interactions with Natalie, she couldn't help but marvel at just how brilliant the woman's methods truly were.

'Just how shrewd is a woman who uses even her unborn child to her advantage? How deep does her scheming run...'

It was glaringly obvious that Natalie Portman was going all out for next year's Best Actress Oscar. 'But is this really enough to secure the Golden Statuette?'

A few mocking thoughts flashed through her mind. Gal Gadot turned onto Rodeo Boulevard and parked outside a cafe. She checked her watch and waited in the car for a while. Only when she saw a familiar figure step into the cafe did she unhurriedly get out and follow him inside.

Her bright eyes quickly spotted her agent. Gal Gadot picked up her pace, walked over, and took the seat across from him.

"How did it go?" The agent set down his coffee cup, reminding Gal Gadot, "We've reached the critical moment."

Gal Gadot opened her clutch and pulled out a Voice Recorder, sliding it across the table to her agent. "This is everything from the past few days. It includes a private conversation about the Oscar between Nat and Martin Miller that I secretly recorded."

"Well done, Gal!" The agent's eyebrows practically flew into his hairline. "With your brains, you're definitely going to make it big!"

Gal Gadot shrugged. Preparing to leave, she asked one last question, "What about our plans to jump ship?"

"Rest assured." The agent carefully tucked the Voice Recorder away. "Nancy Josephson will have everything sorted out before the Oscar Awards Ceremony begins."

Hearing this, Gal Gadot felt relieved. She turned and strode out of the cafe, knowing that the path ahead of her was only going to get wider.

She drove out of Beverly Hills and returned to her apartment in Burbank. However, she didn't go to rest immediately. Instead, she poured herself a glass of wine. Standing on the balcony, she gazed into the distance toward Warner Studios. It wasn't too far from her apartment, and even though it was incredibly late, the studio lot was still ablaze with light, as though everyone there was still frantically busy.

That was exactly the case. Just as he had for the past few months, Duke was still working overtime at Warner Studios, pushing to complete the final touches on Gravity as quickly as possible. Following an internal test screening, the film would get a limited release in North America between Christmas and New Year's to secure the basic qualifications for the Oscar race. Once the New Year holidays began, the film would transition into a wide release across North America.

In the editing room, post-production had reached its final stages. After supervising the crew as they attached the end credits, Duke turned to Tina Fey beside him. "Have someone deliver the final cut to Warner Brothers immediately. Tell them to press the DVD screener as quickly as possible. Before the New Year, I want a screener of Gravity sitting on the desk of every single voter."

"Got it," Tina Fey said, gesturing to the security personnel who had been standing by. She took the encrypted drive from Mike Dawson and looked back at Duke. "Don't worry, I'll oversee it personally."

Watching Tina Fey leave, Duke finally breathed a sigh of relief. After more than half a year of non-stop work, he had managed to catch the last train for the Oscars.

However, this wasn't the time to completely relax. After all, pressing the DVD screeners and mailing them out was no easy task.

Every awards season, studios vying for the Oscar sent DVD screeners of their films to members of various Hollywood guilds and awards season voters—such as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the America Screen Actors Guild, and so on. Factoring in industry guild members and the press, a single film might ship out over 50,000 DVD copies...

And 50,000 was just the bare minimum. Most films mailed out numbers far exceeding that. For instance, studios backing previous Oscar Best Picture nominees routinely mailed out over 100,000 screeners.

One crucial factor was that the same person could easily receive multiple DVDs of the exact same film. The reason was simple: "A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is highly likely to also be a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts or the Producers Guild. Some people might bother to ask an extra question to ensure they don't repeatedly send the movie to the same person, but most people don't do this."

A major reason for this overlap was simply the fact that many Oscar voters rarely watched the films. From the studio's perspective, the more copies a voter received, the higher the chances they would actually sit down and watch it. That, in turn, meant the film was more likely to pull ahead in the voting process.

Such a massive mailing campaign of DVD screeners naturally brought its own corresponding problem—piracy!

For films released earlier in the year, during the spring season or the summer season, mailing out screeners during awards season didn't pose much of a piracy risk. But the vast majority of Oscar campaign films only began their theatrical runs in November and December. Furthermore, to build strong word-of-mouth, they usually started with extremely small limited releases, waiting until well after the New Year to expand into wide release.

These were the films most vulnerable to the threat of piracy.

In fact, nearly every year's Oscar race was marred by screener leaks of varying scales. Even with studios taking extensive preventive measures, the issue proved impossible to completely eradicate.

If a studio wanted to run an Oscar campaign, it had to bear the corresponding risks. Mailing out screeners was a mandatory part of the process. Expecting all the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to answer a studio's call and actually go to a theater to watch a nominated film was nothing short of an unbelievable tall tale.

Out of those six thousand voters, if even a fifth of them walked into a theater to watch a popular Oscar contender, it would be considered an astronomical figure.

As a result, mailing out screeners became an unavoidable chore for the producers and distributors of any Oscar hopeful.

Still, the studios took a series of anti-piracy measures. For example, the mailed screeners—commonly known as advance DVDs—were deliberately kept at a lower resolution, far inferior to a standard commercial DVD release. Both the packaging and the feature presentation itself would constantly flash "warnings," reminding viewers that copying or uploading the film was a violation of US federal law.

Furthermore, invisible watermark codes were embedded throughout the playback of the film. If a pirated copy popped up online, the studio could use the watermark code to rapidly trace the source of the leak.

However, even these measures couldn't completely stamp out piracy, especially on the internet.

Just before Christmas this year, a screener of Weinstein Pictures' major Oscar contender, The King's Speech, had been uploaded online. In just twelve hours, it racked up over 800,000 downloads, leaving Harvey Weinstein and Bob Weinstein absolutely furious. After all, The King's Speech was only playing in limited release across fewer than 200 theaters; the blow from piracy was bound to hit them hard.

And it wasn't just Weinstein Pictures. The piracy group responsible for the leak, Hive-CM8, publicly announced that they possessed copies of other Oscar-campaigning films and would be steadily releasing the files for forty other movies...

Although Gravity had avoided this fate due to its tight production schedule, Duke still spoke up in support of Weinstein Pictures and the other targeted studios.

On this front, the interests of Hollywood studios, producers, and directors were all perfectly aligned.

True, the picture quality of a screener could only be described as trash, but the sheer destructive power of the piracy couldn't be ignored.

This was obviously terrible for business. First and foremost, the box office of films yet to hit wide release would inevitably take a massive hit. Furthermore, even if a film was already playing in theaters, the studio still had future DVD sales to rely on. With pirated copies floating around, countless fans would just download and watch it for free.

Weinstein Pictures had already contacted the FBI. The watermark embedded in the leaked copy of The King's Speech couldn't be easily scrubbed away, and it definitively proved that the pirated copy was the exact same screener the studio had mailed to Andrew Kosove, the co-CEO of Icon Entertainment Company.

The FBI subpoenaed Andrew Kosove over the matter. In the face of the accusation, Kosove adamantly declared that he had never even seen the DVD, let alone touched it. He also publicly announced to the press that he would fully cooperate with the FBI, while simultaneously launching an independent investigation of his own.

The investigation had temporarily reached a stalemate. Currently, the FBI was busy sweeping Icon Entertainment Company's headquarters in California.

However, industry insiders like Duke were well aware that Kosove's Icon Entertainment Company had very little direct competition with Weinstein Pictures. It was practically impossible for him to commit an act that would get him blacklisted by all of Hollywood.

Andrew Kosove was the co-CEO of Icon Entertainment Company, a studio that had co-produced films like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, 16 Blocks, and The Blind Side. He was a renowned producer in his own right, making him far more likely to be a victim in this scenario rather than the chief culprit.

In a region like North America, where the copyright system was relatively robust, such an incident might have seemed unbelievable. But in Duke's eyes, it wasn't the least bit surprising.