It was perhaps inevitable that at the Q&A that followed a screening of Alex Winter’s Napster documentary “Downloaded” on Monday night, one audience member would ask if the movie was going to be available on the internet for free.
The film, after all, chronicles the rapid rise and equally rapid fall of the file-sharing service that fundamentally changed the music industry, ushering in a generation of music fans who got their music for free online rather than paying for it in record stores.
To admirers, it was a revolution that put power in the hands of the fans; to the record industry, it was an assault on copyright and intellectual property, a case of organized piracy on a scale that virtually destroyed the music industry.
And since he’d made a non-judgmental movie about Napster, the questioner asked, would Winter be fine giving his movie away?
“I get that question a lot,” Winter told TheWrap the day after his screening at the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles. “And I don’t want to disparage the people who think that all content should be free.
“But as a content creator, I’m not quite as eager to leap into a future of free content. And I still believe that we are close to developing a monetizable system in the digital landscape.”
Winter – a director, writer and actor who is perhaps best known for starring as Bill alongside Keanu Reeves' Ted in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” in 1988 – is working on deals to show “Downloaded” in a variety of media, from theatrical to streaming to VH1.
He describes it as being similar to the model used on the Banksy documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” and says it is a way of adjusting to an independent-film arena whose old business models are as outdated as the record company models derailed by Napster.
“I’ve been a member of the DGA and the WGA and SAG my whole life, and I don’t want to say anything bad about the people who pay my family’s health insurance,” he said. “But I can’t believe the lack of understanding of the root technology that the public is using.
“People need to get educated very quickly, because there’s no reason why we can’t have a fully monetized system for distributing film using new technology.”
“Downloaded” began life in 2002, shortly after Winter met Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning. Initially, he pitched it to MTV Original Movies as a narrative feature, got a green light and wrote a script. Then MTV, he said with a laugh, “folded their movie department and became a reality TV house,” so he took it to MTV Films at Paramount, got another OK and wrote a new version in ’04 and ’05.
When that project went into turnaround, he abandoned the film for years – until frustration over the lack of progress on the issues raised by Napster persuaded him to revisit the material as a documentary featuring extensive interviews with those on all sides of the issue,including extensive interviews with Fanning and co-founder Sean Parker.
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