Leibniz’s Epiphany-YourNameHere Pictures is pleased to send you the enclosed screener of BUMMER FOR C-MAN AND THE JASE-MEISTER for your personal awards consideration. This “inspiring story,” according to the promo copy personally edited and re-written by Karenna, our boss’s latest girlfriend, “reminds us,” not of a script that made the rounds three years ago (which we wrote), but “of the beauty of the human-connection experience, and how one person can impactfully make a difference when he stands up by Doing The Right Thing.”
Critics and audiences alike are united in their indifference to this comedy, in which two idiots meet at traffic school and decide to kidnap the Dalai Lama. And yet here it is, promoted (for Oscars) via DVDs sent, gratis, to the various guilds. We know you are as excited as we are. Still, please read this letter carefully – it contains important information about your screener.
Please maintain the security of your screener.
Every year movie pirates seek out copies of awards screeners to upload to the internet and to create pirate discs sold around the world, causing great harm to our industry. One might ask, “How can pirates do more damage to the industry than the people who, of their own free will, deliberately made BUMMER FOR C-MAN AND THE JASE-MEISTER? How did such a thing happen, and get released?”
In reply, we refer you to our boss, whose executive-producing skills consist mainly of yelling and eating lunch. He has lavished the same sort of professional oversight on this movie as he has upon this screener package and its accompanying letter, which is none at all.
Instead, shortly before leaving with Karenna for Las Vegas, he simply left us a note to remind everyone: This screener may be individually coded with an invisible watermark that identifies the screener and any copies of the screener, with you personally. If authorized copies (including internet uploads) of the film are traced back to your screener, you risk civil and criminal penalties.
Yes, criminal penalties for helping to disseminate BUMMER FOR C-MAN AND THE JASE-MEISTER. Could any crime —other than actually making the film — be less worth committing?
Please be informed that your guild, if it is the Writers Guild of America, will be of no assistance to you should you incur such penalties. We have been a dues-paying member of this guild for more than four years and have yet to witness a single example of its competence, either in the matter of securing decent employment for its members, or in its vaunted “credit arbitration” procedures. We are talking, after all, about a guild panel which cannot see the patent, stark similarities between two-guys-meet-at-traffic-school-and-kidnap-the-Dalai-Lama-to-raise-money-to-save-an-orphanage, and two-guys-from-a-rich-prep-school-masquerade-as-the-Archbishop-of-Canterbury-and-his-aide-to-get-Superbowl-tickets.
Result: a plethora of writers forced to take low-salary, demeaning employment writing ad copy and industry communications for third-tier independent film production executives and their girlfriends.
So please treat your screener with care, and do not copy, loan, rent, sell, give it away or upload it to the internet.
If you do not agree to these restrictions, please call 1.800.555.8398 as soon as possible to arrange the return of the screener. You must do this before you view the movie, and return the screener’s protective envelope unopened. Note that you have learned of the above telephone number from this letter, which, after two days of unbelievably tedious and insulting manual labor, has been included inside 247 screeners’ protective envelopes. Therefore, you will be told that you have already voided the Return Option. This policy was Karenna’s idea.
It is then hoped that you will opt to subject yourself to BUMMER FOR C-MAN AND THE JASE-MEISTER, although you may of course decline to do so in favor of some more worthwhile activity, such as staring at the floor.
Destroying screener.
Once you have either viewed the screener or declined to do so, please take care to destroy the disc securely so your personal copy does not fall into the wrong hands. The easiest way is to take a pair of household scissors and cut the disc in half. However, unscrupulous movie pirates are well-practiced at rummaging through the trash of industry professionals, retrieving disc halves, and reassembling the disc using a proprietary pirate-type cement, apparently.
Or so our boss has told us, and Karenna swears that she, too, “read somewhere about it.” Therefore just destroy the disc with a chain saw or a pair of electric hedge clippers, the sooner the better.
Thank you for protecting this copy of our movie so we can continue to provide you with screeners featuring movies like, and indeed indistinguishable from, BUMMER FOR C-MAN AND THE JASE-MEISTER, in the future. It will be a future in which “our” industry will continue to appropriate other people’s ideas, produce horrendous swill by committee and girlfriend, and then solicit trophies for it while the guilds stand by in mute impotence. This will happen whether you view this movie, elect not to, give it to pirates, upload it to the internet, cut it in pieces, or shove it up your ass. That’s what our industry is. Let’s face it. In fact, fuck it. We quit.
Enjoy the show!
John Ward
http://tinyurl.com/n82nz6c
