MPAA Episode I: The Fanedit Menace

Anyone following the story of the MPAA's piracy crackdown will know that the MPAA is not too keen on the DVD format. The relatively mild Digital Rights Management (more commonly known as "DRM" or "the stuff that doesn't let you copy the DVD") gets cracked faster than it can adapt, and as the organization's spokespeople are constantly pointing out, anybody with a computer (and the necessary technical know-how) can distribute perfect digital copies of any movie.

Those who have seen ADigitalMan's Episode I: A Vergence in the Force, however, might get the idea that piracy isn't the real concern for the MPAA - creativity is.

Working from the footage available on the commercially-released DVD, ADigitalMan edited his own version of George Lucas' Episode I: The Phantom Menace. It's not just a pirated copy - A Vergence in the Force is a complete re-imagining of Lucas' first Star Wars prequel. The new running time is four minutes less than the original, and it contains deleted scenes that have been restored to their original place, as well as containing a lot less Jar-Jar Binks than the theatrical release.

And ADigitalMan is not the only one to take on the menace of Jar-Jar. A popular website for the cataloging and distribution of these homegrown projects lists 67 fanedits for the Star Wars series, alone.

Nor is Star Wars the only film to feel the amateur editor's digital scissors. The Superman films have seen numerous fanedits, as have the Matrix films, and even Titanic and Pearl Harbor. In fact, almost any movie released to DVD stands a good chance of being fanedited. Faneditor Slark has released Doc Salvage: TheFan-edit of Bronze, a re-edit of Warner Bros.' 1975 Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Faneditor Gangrel has reached even farther back, editing a handful of Three Stooges shorts released between 1947 and 1953 into a 46-minute film, Hold That Lion: The Extended Redux.

The reasons for fanediting are almost as varied as the fanedits themselves. Some, like ADigitalMan's A Vergence in the Force, are motivated by a desire to improve the movie that was released. Gangrel's Hold That Lion was motivated by a desire to extend a classic Stooges short into a longer film. Still others just enjoy seeing what changes they can make in the story. And others seek to take sequels and make them fit more closely to their original chapters, as in Dislexsick's Clerks 2: The Budget Cut and CBB's The Matrix: DeZIONized.

Of course, fanedits exist in a grey area legally speaking. They create new versions of copyrighted materials, almost always without the permission of the copyright holder. There are discussions of fair use, but they remain for the most part untested. In the meantime, the fanedit community tries its best to keep up its work while operating under the spirit - if not the letter - of the law, with many faneditors reminding their viewers that "You need to own the original DVD's to legally watch them."

The fanedited films are interesting enough in themselves, but they raise an even more interesting question. Anybody who frequents their local multiplex can think of at least one time that they have left a show feeling disappointed with what they have just seen. Faneditors, however, actually do something about it - and many times do it so seamlessly that the end product is comparable to an official release.

These faneditors work for the most part on consumer grade hardware, often working only from footage available to the general public. Are the fanedits an improvement over the original? It varies from edit to edit, but many people seem to think so. What does it mean, then, that Hollywood can spend tens of millions of dollars to produce work that fails to impress, while faneditors can take equipment that costs less than a decent used car and turn that same work into something that gets rave reviews?

It's a question that Hollywood may be understandably reluctant to face. Hollywood professionals can rarely agree within their own circles as to whether the director or the editor of a given film is more responsible for its success or failure. In the meantime, faneditors continue to work underground, distributing their bootleg cuts via Bittorrent, p2p networks, usenet, and other under-the-radar outlets, providing dissatisfied moviegoers with the films they've never seen - but should have.