He welcomes the audience to the promotional screening of tonight's movie, then tells them about the rules everyone must follow. Mostly it's about courtesy: Take screaming babies out to the lobby, for example.
But the main reason he's here is to reiterate the policy about cellphones in the theater. It's a simple policy: Use a cellphone, whether it's to call or send text or use it as a flashlight, and you're out. The rationale is that a cameraphone could be used to record images from the movie - images that could be uploaded onto the Internet and disseminated to the world.
With that announcement, a roomful of people who picked up free tickets at the Wienerschnitzel have been thrust into Hollywood's war against movie piracy. And, like our ongoing war against terrorism, it's a war against an unseen and shadowy enemy - and it's largely being fought on the wrong front.
Movie critics have been thrown into this battle, too. I'm often told to turn off my cellphone before entering a screening. Occasionally I've been asked to leave my cellphone in my car. Sometimes my bookbag is searched. Metal-detector wands have passed over my body, and my movements during the show watched by guards wearing night-vision goggles.
Others have similar experiences. The most famous may be when Roger Ebert, before a screening of "Finding Nemo," watched as a rent-a-cop went looking for cameras in his turkey sandwich.
The problem with this method for fighting movie piracy is that it's spending money on the wrong problem. Neither Ebert nor I are going to be posting a movie on the Web. If a movie critic tried such a thing, he or she would likely be caught, and the studios would blackball the critic from any screenings - if the critic's employer didn't fire him or her on the spot.
Sure, bootleg DVDs get made and sold in major cities every week. But they often are poor-quality discs, shot on camcorders and cameraphones in crowded theaters with all the audience shouting and other background nonsense intact.
The vast majority of movies that get pirated - and there is a 2003 study from AT&T Labs that backs this up - are inside jobs, stolen by people within the industry.
The most recent case is of Michael Moore's "Sicko," which showed up last weekend, all 122 minutes of it, on YouTube (which since has removed the 14 segments on its site) and made available through several file-sharing sites.
"This wasn't a guy taking a video camera into a theater," Moore told The Hollywood Reporter this week. "This was an inside job, a copy made from a high-quality master and could potentially impact the opening weekend box office. Who do you think benefits from that?"
Lionsgate and the Weinstein Company, "Sicko's" distributors, took fast action to fight the piracy. Besides lawyering up, they rushed to release the movie in New York a week early - this weekend. (It opens nationwide, including Salt Lake City, this coming Friday.)
The incident has opened Moore, who personally supports downloading and believes U.S. copyright laws are too restrictive, to charges of hypocrisy - mostly from the right-wingers who dislike Moore's liberal politics anyway. But the bigger question is whether movie piracy is a victimless crime.
I believe there are victims, and I'm not talking about the big bad corporations who are screwing the public anyway. Pirating movies hurts the artists who make movies, who put their heart, soul and credit-card debt into their work, all in the hopes of signing a distribution deal. Often such deals include a chunk of the profits - and if a movie is pirated, there's less profit to be made.
If Hollywood wants to get serious about fighting piracy, going after audiences or critics isn't the answer. Instead of looking inside my bookbag or Ebert's sandwich, studios should be looking inside their own ranks.
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* SEAN P. MEANS writes the daily blog, "The Movie Cricket," at www.blogs.sltrib.com/movies.
Send questions or comments to Sean P. Means, movie critic, The Salt Lake Tribune, 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84101, or e-mail at movies@sltrib.com.
