April 22, 1996

As they careen into the information age, the media
are increasingly becoming the butts of their own
jokes.

The Internet is awash in spoof press releases (some may
recall the classic, “Microsoft Buys Catholic Church”).

The comedian Dana Carvey simultaneously blisters and
bows to the gods of advertising on his new television
series. The hilarious cable television show “Mystery
Science Theater 3000,” now a feature film, provides
acidic yet affectionate commentary on movies and pop
culture via two robots and a guy who sit in the front
row of a theater and wisecrack their way through
stunningly bad films.

And considering the preoccupation with all things
interactive, it’s not surprising that a couple of
Hollywood multimedia types would find a way to stir
technology into today’s irreverent media attitude. The
result is a CD-ROM title, still in development, that
they call Movieoke.

The Movieoke concept is derived from the karaoke
sing-along, a popular pastime in Japan that has been
moderately successful in the United States as well.
Karaoke companies license the rights to record a popular
song from a music publishing company. Then they record
the sound track, without vocals, mix it with some video,
and print song lyrics along the bottom of the video
screen.

Karaoke happens when a normally thoughtful human being
gets up on a stage, usually in a bar and after a certain
amount of imbibing, and proceeds to sing the song,
accompanied by aforementioned sound track and video. Fun
is had all around.

Public humiliation, however, is not a requisite of
Movieoke, which can be performed in the comfort and
privacy of your computer nook. OK? There, the disk plays
scenes from classic movies — the demonstration version
uses scenes from “Casablanca” and “Young Frankenstein”
— strips out the dialogue, and allows you to dub your
voice in place of, say, Humphrey Bogart’s or Madeline
Kahn’s.

Speaking into your PC’s microphone, you can read the
real movie script as it scrolls along your computer
screen — whether in your own voice, your best Bogie or,
say, an imitation of Mr. Ed, the talking horse.

As with karaoke, this provokes much hilarity. And you
can save the dubbed dialogue to a hard disk or diskette
so you can replay it for the amusement of your friends
and family, or to send along to other Movieoke players.

Who knows if there’s a mass market for such a toy, but
the developers — Harry Marks and Jim Lambert — have
interesting resumes.

Marks, a former television vice president and creative
director for both ABC and CBS, is now a multimedia
graphic designer and senior adviser to the American Film
Institute’s Advanced Technology Program.

Lambert, a multimedia author who developed the recently
released Hot Wheels Computer Cars for Mattel Corp., also
just shipped three CD-ROMs — “CineNoir,” “Bimbo Movie
Bash”and “Sci-Fi Movie Machine” — that enable users to
splice together their own movies using clips from
different B-grade genres.

Marks and Lambert, who’ve been working on the project
since January 1995, want to ship Movieoke’s dubbing
software, along with 10 movie scenes, on the first
Movieoke CD-ROM. Later versions would bundle the dubbing
software with scenes from specific genres like noir,
romance and action adventure.

Movie studios are lining up for the opportunity to
participate, right? After all, most Hollywood studios
became involved with interactive media in the first
place because they saw it as a way to “repurpose”
existing assets and recoup a few more dollars from
material they had already paid to produce.

But as it turns out, Hollywood doesn’t have much of a
sense of humor when it comes to sacred cash cows like
“Casablanca.”

Marks and Lambert have found they can’t finish Movieoke,
even though the technical guts of the program are
completed, because they can’t buy the rights to use the
classic movie scenes that everyone recognizes.

“Because amateur performers could make a mockery of the
film, on an ongoing basis rather than a one-shot parody,
this kind of usage could damage its value,” said Mickey
Kapp, a music industry consultant and former Warner
Music executive who has dealt extensively with copyright
issues.

He said that parody writers in the music world have been
successfully sued for “damaging a copyright” if they
changed the interpretation of the original material.

Because of this, Kapp said, he finds it unlikely that
the film studios would want to risk such damage by
issuing licenses for Movieoke.

This situation isn’t necessarily curtains for Movieoke.
Though dubbing a B-movie doesn’t have the same cachet as
intoning your own “Hasta la vista, baby,” as Arnold
Schwarzenegger glowers from your monitor, the purveyors
of B-grade footage are usually more than willing to
license for laughs.

And if Movieoke were to incorporate the requisite
software tools so that folks with their own video and
computer equipment could create their own Movieokes,
then there still may be a business in the technology.

But whether or not Movieoke ever makes it out of
development, the larger issues it raises are worth
pondering.

Garry Hare, the president of Fathom Pictures, a
multimedia developer in Sausalito, Calif., likes to tell
the story of a baseball CD-ROM title he wanted to create
in the early 1990s.

By the time he toted up what he would need to pay to the
players to use their likenesses, and to Major League
Baseball, and to music publishers — and on and on –
Hare said he would actually be paying out more in
licensing fees than he could recoup from any reasonable
retail price for the disk.

The artistic and intellectual property issues of media
re-use are important, in an era when digital technology
is making replication instantaneous and infinite — with
or without the permission of the copyright holder.

But whether or not they choose to play along with
new-media pranksters like Movieoke, entertainment
companies may need to begin rethinking their old-media
notions of copyright sanctity. Otherwise, they may end
up copyrighting themselves right out of the few
potentially lucrative markets in multimedia.

Denise Caruso

Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company

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