Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  Well, come to think of it, I wouldn’t put it past them. It was a bit like an old-fashioned witch hunt: they knew you were guilty, so if they couldn’t find any evidence, it must mean you were really guilty, because you’d hidden your deeds away so smartly. But hell, if it came to that, I’d be burned for a witch in any event, and I’d been meaning to try out this new TrueCrypt business for ages. It meant backing up all my data and repartitioning the drive, which was bloody tedious work, since the little lappie I’d built at Aziz’s had a four terabyte RAID striped across the drives in its two internal bays, and it took almost an hour to format that much storage, not to mention backing up the data to an old external box I had lying about, and then clean-wiping the backup disk by writing random noise to it twenty times over, while its pathetic little fans whined to whisk away all the heat from the write-head going chugga-chugga-chugga for hours and hours.

  But when it was done, I had, essentially, three computers. The outmost layer was an obvious shell, with nothing more than a browser and some config tools. But unlock the inside disk and you had a browser profile with cookies to log in to a bunch of pretty-much public email/Twitter/social accounts, the kind of thing I’d use to participate in public conversations and correspond with my fixer. Inside that layer, I stashed my real workspace, with all my hard-cataloged Scot video clips, all the sliced-and-diced audio, and all the private messages with my mates and Cora (I used a different account to talk to my parents, of course). Even as I was putting the finishing touches on this, I was thinking of all kinds of ways that I could still be done with it—for example, my inner layer, supposedly my main workspace, had no Scot material on it at all. But everyone knew I made all those Scot videos, which meant that anyone who looked at it would have a bloody good reason to think I was hiding something.

  Oh, well. If it came to that, I’d have to just brazen it out and say that I’d seen the light, deleted all my Colfordalia, and gone straight. I even knew what I’d say: I loved Scot Colford’s films. This was true. The geezer’d been a true genius, and not just as an actor, as a writer and director, too. And by all accounts, he’d been a decent sort, two kids who never said a word against him, a wife he stuck by all his adult life, just recently passed on. If my imaginary interrogators wanted proof of my Scot Colford trufan status, they’d just have to look at the passwords they forced out of me: I’d made them up by taking the first letter of each word from some of Scot’s best-ever speeches, then rotating them forward one letter through the alphabet.

  For example, “You think that you’re special, just cos you were born to some posh manor? All that means is that your grandad was the biggest bastard around. You’re not special. You’re common as muck, and if you came over to mine, I’d count the spoons before I let you leave.” That was from Hard Times, and if you took just the first letter, you got:

  Yttys,jcywbtspm?Atmitygwtbba.Yns.Ycam,aiycotm,IctsbIlyl.

  Now, shift each letter forward one and you got:

  Zuuzt,kdzxcutqn?Bunjuzhxuccb.Zmt.Zdbn,bfzdpun,JdutcJkzk.

  Then I used some simple number substitution and got:

  2uuz7,kd2xcu7qn?Bunju24xuccb.2mt.2dbn,bf2dpun,Jdu7cJk2k.

  It wasn’t exactly random, but I could remember it and I’d never have to write it down, and you’d have to be pretty sharp to guess which Scot speech I used and so forth. Just to make things interesting, I rotated the inner password one letter backward and the inner-inner password forward by two positions. I felt like a right James Bond, truly.

  I’d just rebooted and tapped my way into the second layer when I saw that I had an email to one of the very public Cecil B. DeVil accounts, the one I put at the end of all the videos. Not many people sent me emails—usually they just dropped me IMs or little updates on my social networks. Email was almost always from someone who was a little on the stuffy side—cops, lawyers, MPs, reporters, that sort of thing. So I always got a little flutter in my tummy when the flag went up. But I clicked it, because you’ve got to, right?

  To: Cecil B. DeVil

  From: Katarina McGregor-Colford

  Re: My grandfather

  My finger trembled over the DELETE key—“My grandfather” made me think of the kind of spam that promised you millions if you helped smuggle someone’s dead relative’s fortune out of some foreign country. But the name Katarina McGregor-Colford rang a bell. I scrolled down.

  Dear Mr. “DeVil,”

  My name is Katarina McGregor-Colford, and Scot Colford was my grandfather.

  Whoa. That’s where I knew that name from!

  For more than a year now, I’ve been watching your little remixes of Grandad’s films. At first, I was a little off-put, to tell you the absolute truth. I grew up watching Scot Colford films and they’re something of a holy writ in my clan, as you might imagine.

  But as time went by, I saw the clear and unmistakable love in your work: love for my grandfather’s films, love for film itself. And it didn’t hurt that you clearly know what you’re about when it comes to editing videos. I’d assumed from the start that you must be in your late twenties, like me, but when I read about you in The Guardian, and I discovered that you were just a kid (no offense), I was perfectly gobsmacked. Frankly, your work is very good, and sometimes it’s brilliant. You’re a talented young man, and I foresee great things ahead of you.

  What’s more—and here I come to the meat of this note—I know Grandad would have approved of your work. How do I know this? Because my grandfather, Scot Colford, was a mashup artist long before anyone had heard of the word! That’s right! Grandad was an inveterate tinkerer and a proper gadget hound, and he kept a shed at the bottom of his garden that was absolutely bursting with film-editing and sound-editing equipment, several generations’ worth, from enormous, boxy film-cutters and projectors and lightboards to a series of PCs connected to so many hard drives it sounded like a jet engine when he switched them all on!

  On top of that, Grandad had loads of video. He’d collected films when he was a boy, and later on he’d digitized them himself, hundreds and thousands of hours’ worth, along with the raw dailies from many of his films and, later, digitized VHS cassettes and ripped DVDs. It was his most-favorite pastime to disappear into his shed and make up one of his “special films.” These were usually quite comical. He had a whole series of Star Wars ones that he’d show to us kids at Christmas, a little film-festival’s worth, with Chewbacca and the Ewoks break dancing, Luke flying his spaceship through a series of other films (mostly Grandad’s own ones!), and so forth. It was the highlight of the family Christmases.

  A few of my cousins actually learned some editing from Grandad. I tried once, but to tell you the truth, he could be a little impatient with slow learners, which I absolutely was, and so I gave up. I ended up going into medicine, as it turns out, but I do have one cousin who works as a very successful editor in Bangalore. He’s actually the one who sent me your films in the first place. At the risk of swelling your head, he thinks you’re dead brilliant.

  Oh. My. God. She was talking about Johnnie Colford, who’d cut 4 Idiots, and the Asha Bosle biopic, and, well, practically every Bollywood film I’d ever thrilled to. He was a legend. And he thought I was “dead brilliant!” I practically fainted at this point.

  When I first found your films, I was a little offended, yes, but more than that, I was reminded of my own grandfather, and some of the happiest moments in my childhood. I see now that they’re suing you for 78 million pounds, though as far as I can tell, you never made a penny off your works. Well, I don’t control the Scot Colford estate and I can’t speak for it, but speaking as one of the man’s descendants, I felt I had to write to you and tell you that a) We’ve made (and continue to make) plenty of money off Grandad’s works, notwithstanding your so-called piracy and b) If Scot Colford had been born when you were, he would have done exactly what you’ve done.

  And you can quote me on that, Mr. DeVil.

  Warmly,

  Katarina

  PS: The Internet
being what it is, you might be wondering if this is a fake (I certainly might!). You’ll find my office email on the list of NHS doctors in London at nhsonline.org, and you can reply to me at that address. What’s more, if you supply a postal address, I’d be delighted to send along a drive of some of Grandad’s favorite little films, as I have a mountain of them here.

  It took all of two minutes to locate Katarina McGregor-Colford on the NHS registry. She had a practice in Islington, in a posh road, and I replied to the email address on her record.

  Dear Katarina,

  I can’t thank you enough for your email. You’ve made my day—even my century! I mean, wow!

  I honestly don’t know what to tell you. I’m speechless. Your grandad was a legend for me. I make the films I do because of how he inspired me.

  I’d be completely utterly thrilled to get some of his mashups! I mean honestly, they’re like holy relics for me! I wish I was more clever with words, I don’t know how to express what I’m feeling right now. I’m on the ceiling, over the moon and around the bend. I’d even come round and get them and save you the postage!

  Cecil

  I sat there, feeling the warm glow, and moments later, I got a reply.

  Cecil

  The pleasure’s mutual. I can have a thumb-drive at the reception at my practice for you tomorrow morning.

  She followed with the address I’d already looked up. I forwarded the message to practically everyone I knew, and then spent the next hour on the phone and on IM with people who wanted to congratulate me on it. Then I had more interviews to do about the TIP-Ex, and there was a video I was cutting that I wanted to finish so I could drop it by Katarina’s practice the next day, and by the time I wound down and stuffed a fistful of cheese and salami slices—we’d found a mountain of dried salami in the Waitrose skip that week, and even after giving away fifty of them to the folks round Old Street Station, we were still struggling to eat the remainders—into my gob, it was nearly midnight. I called 26 to tell her I loved her and she blew me a kiss and told me she was nearly done with her final paper for the school year, and then I sank into a happy sleep.

  * * *

  I leapt out of bed the next morning like I’d been fired from a cannon. I had dropped my latest Scot film (Scot gets strip-searched on his way into the premiere of Brown Wire, one of his top-grossing films; the cops find five cameras, three phones, and a laptop on him, and he faces them down with withering sarcasm—I was dead proud of it) onto one of the leftover thumb-drives from the Leicester Square caper, and I slipped it in my pocket before heading out the door. I practically ran all the way to Islington, not even bothering with the bus—my enthusiasm, plus a triple espresso from Jem’s own hand, had filled me with more energy than I knew what to do with.

  I reached Katarina McGregor-Colford’s surgery—a smart, narrow storefront in Upper Street between a health-food store and a posh baby-clothes shop—a little after ten. The secretary behind the counter was an older Asian lady in a hijab, and when I told her I’d come for a drive that the doctor had left for me, she smiled and asked me to wait because the doctor has asked to be notified when I was in.

  I sat in the waiting room between various sick people, old people, and restless kids for fifteen minutes, jiggling my leg and looking up every time someone went in or out of one of the consulting rooms. Then a tall woman in a cardigan and jeans came out of one of the little rooms. She conferred with the receptionist, who pointed at me, and then she smiled and crossed the waiting room in three long strides and stuck her hand out.

  “You must be Cecil,” she said. Her voice was uncannily like Scot’s, though shifted up an octave. Something about the inflections or the accent—whatever it was, I could have picked her out as Scot Colford’s granddaughter by ear alone. I jumped to my feet and wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs and then took her offered hand. “I’m Katarina. It’s such a pleasure!”

  She looked like him, too, had the same famous eyes, the same trademark lopsided dimple, the same little gap between her top front teeth. She caught me staring at her face and stuck her tongue out and crossed her eyes. “You can stop making a checklist of all the ways I look like Grandad, now. It runs in the family—we’ve all got it.” She had such a warm manner, and I knew that she must be a brilliant doctor to have.

  “I can’t thank you enough, doctor—” I said.

  “Katarina,” she said. “‘Doctor’ is for my patients.”

  “Katarina,” I said. “I, uh, I made a new film and I wanted you to see it first. It’s got your grandad in it.”

  She looked over her shoulder at her receptionist. “How much time have I got, Sarina?”

  The receptionist looked at her screen. “Ten minutes,” she said. “Maybe twelve, if the usual gentleman is late as usual.”

  Katarina jerked her head at her consulting room door and led me in, closing it behind me. “I’ve got a regular Monday morning appointment with a fellow who is habitually late. Sarina always juggles things so he can get in to see me, though. Now, you said something about a video?”

  I handed her the drive and she pulled a little media player out of her handbag and stuck it in. “Not allowed to plug anything into that, of course,” she said, indicating the screen on her desk.

  “’Course,” I said.

  The video was only a minute and a half long—I’d based it off footage from an antipiracy ad they made you sit through before every film—and Katarina spent the next ninety seconds laughing her head off at the video. Before I could say anything, she ran it through again.

  “It’s very, very good,” she said. “I mean, absolutely marvelous. I know Grandad would have loved this—it’s so up his street. Speaking of which—” She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a couple of old thumb-drives emblazoned with the logos of an office supply store. “I loaded one of these up with a bunch of Grandad’s remixes, and the other one with some of my favorite family films. Stuff the public never saw—Grandad just being himself, not ‘Scot Colford.’ Thought you’d appreciate it.”

  My hands shook as I took them. “Katarina, I—” I took a deep breath and made myself calm down. “Listen, you can’t know how much this means to someone like me. You know there’s a whole legion of people like me who are mad for your grandad’s work—when someone discovers a rarity, like one of the Japanese adverts he did or some outtakes from a film, it’s like gold. It’s cos every clip opens up the chance to make a whole world of new creations, films and stuff. It’s like we’re chemists discovering a new element or something.” I grinned. “You know, I only know about chemists and elements because of Scot’s Mendeleev film, Elemental Discovery.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Even I don’t know that one.”

  “Oh,” I said, “well, it’s quite rare. The Open Society Institute funded it as part of an educational series for the Caribbean. Most of them weren’t very good, but Elemental Discovery is really brilliant. It’s dead funny, too. I can get you a copy, if you’d like.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’d love to see it. You know, I really struggled with chemistry at uni. I had no idea Grandad knew anything about the subject.”

  “I don’t think he did, really. He did an interview with Sky where he said he needed to do dozens of retakes because he couldn’t keep the element names straight in his head.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  I shrugged. “You can’t really make films by remixing them unless you know a lot about them. Whenever I watch a video, I’m looking for dialog or shots or effects or cuts that I can use in one of mine. It feels like I’m picking up pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that’s been scattered all over the shop, and maybe it’s three or four puzzles, or dozens of them, even, and I don’t have the box and I don’t know what piece goes with which puzzle. But every now and again, I’ll find an edge or even a corner and a big piece of it snaps together into a video. Then I sit down and cut and edit and hunt down missing bits and reconsider things, and if I’m lucky, I end up with a
bit of video that looks like the film I’ve got in my head.”

  “Gosh, it sounds like a lot of work. Don’t take this the wrong way, but wouldn’t it be simpler to pick up a camera and shoot the stuff that you want?”

  I squirmed a little. I hated this question. “I don’t know. Maybe I will, someday. But when I started, I was just a little kid, and I didn’t know any grown-ups who would act for me, even if I had sets and all that. So I cut up what I could find, trying to get at that thing I could see in my mind’s eye. Now I’ve been doing it for so long, it feels like cheating if I make my own thing. You know what it’s like? There’s this arsey, posh estate agent’s near Old Street Station, Foxton’s. They have this enormous sculpture in the window, a kind of huge moving thing made out of old silver spoons and other bits of Victorian cutlery and plates and china, and it’s all geared up with old bike chains, and they make it all whirl around in this kind of crazy dance. The first time I saw it, I was completely taken away by it—not just because it’s beautiful, but because I was so impressed with the idea that someone had found the beauty that was in all these bits of junk that they’d found lying around. It was like they’d unlocked something wonderful and hidden away, like the most wonderful diamond in history pulled out of the muck.