This week's LA Weekly has a long feature on the copyright wars in Hollywood: not the side of the wars that has studios suing their customers, but rather the stuff that has film-makers suing each other. This is most pernicious for documentary film-makers, whose visual vocabulary is composed of clips from diverse, impossible-to-clear sources:
When Thom Andersen's acclaimed documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself screened at the Egyptian Theater four times over the course of a week in late April, marking its second extended run in its eponymous city, there was very little media fanfare. The distributor didn't take out full-page newspaper ads. The publicist didn't wrangle magazine or TV coverage. There were no plans for a DVD tie-in. It almost seemed like a well-kept secret that the filmmakers finally, reluctantly, were forced to tell.
The reason was simple: the 206 separate film clips — one for every bone in the human body — incorporated into Andersen's 169-minute essay about Hollywood, its physical and psychic environs and the distance separating the two. Although there is no way to know for sure, since Andersen didn't bother to ask, the cost of licensing all of these clips for commercial exhibition, TV broadcast and DVD sales (domestic and foreign) could easily stretch into the millions of dollars.
