I need some advice here. As a member of the Television Academy and the Writers Guild and a couple of other groups, I am periodically deluged with "screeners" — DVDs of current motion pictures and television programs. They're sent to us free in the hope that we'll vote for these movies and shows when we vote on awards.
There are hundreds of these things piled up and filling boxes in my home. I may even have a few crates of 'em in my public storage locker…and I'll tell you how long I've been getting them. I have at least four boxes of screeners on VHS tapes. I might even have one or two on Beta.
I have not watched all of them, of course. No one who gets screeners in the quantity that I get screeners watches all the screeners they get. You couldn't. But I watch some and, truth be known, a few have perhaps left me more inclined to vote for what I saw for some trophy. At least one or two have left me less disposed.
But I welcome them all and have even done some the honor of placing them on the shelves where I store DVDs that I intentionally purchase and wish to keep in my library. That still, however, leaves a helluva lot that I don't know what to do with.
The nature of screeners has changed. When I first began getting them, they were usually accompanied with stern, lawyer-authored letters and warning stickers ordering you to watch them and then destroy them like you were a C.I.A. agent receiving hush-hush top secret instructions which could doom Democracy if they fell into enemy hands. You were threatened with incarceration if you sold them and the death penalty (or worse) if you did anything with them of a bootlegging nature. Your copy, you were warned, was encoded with tracking information that could lead the FBI to you faster than you could say "Efrem Zimbalist, Jr." — that is, if you could even say "Efrem Zimbalist, Jr." I can't.
I never understood two things about those warning letters. One was that why they were so worried about someone bootlegging a DVD of a TV show that could be recorded off the air or a movie that could be rented in two weeks from Netflix. At one point, this perhaps made a wee bit of sense as we sometimes got screeners of films that wouldn't be released on home video for a few months. But the time between a film's theatrical exhibition and its availability on DVD and Blu-ray has now narrowed to almost nothing. Moreover, the same ominous warnings came on a DVD screener of an episode of Sex in the City that I still had on my TiVo and which would rerun five times the following week on HBO.
I'm against copyright violation but I have to wonder: Has any pirate ever not pirated because he didn't get his copy of the movie free and had to go rent one? Is there really a lot of dough to be made by duping and selling a DVD of two episodes of Pawn Stars? You probably couldn't even pawn the thing.
The other thing that puzzled me was whether the folks who wrote these letters really understood what they were writing. What all the threatening notes and stickers seemed to be saying was this…
We know you didn't ask for this video but we sent it to you anyway and you're in big trouble, fella, if you don't handle it the way we tell you to handle it!
Can I really get arrested for what I do with an unsolicited gift? And is trying to intimidate someone like that a good way to get them to vote for your movie as Best Picture of the Year?
Anyway, the screeners pile up here and I'm trying to figure out what to do with them. I'm not going to go to the trouble to destroy hundreds of DVDs. Too much effort. And I think it's tacky and probably illegal to try and sell them…and besides, there can't be a lot of money to be made there.
Someone I asked suggested I post a list here and offer to mail a few to any readers of this site willing to pay postage. I don't want to spend my time taking and filling orders.
I could just throw them out but that seems either wasteful or like I'm just handing them out to strangers. On trash night, there are people who come by in trucks and go through the garbage bins in this neighborhood, looking for stuff they can use or sell. I guarantee they'd grab these. (I once saw a homeless guy on Hollywood Boulevard set up with a display of screener DVDs for sale.)
Is tossing them out for the trash-rummagers my best option? It may well be. But before I take it, I'm putting the question out for suggestions. Even though those threats from the studio are kinda vacuous and empty, I'd like to not violate the spirit of their silly, unenforceable laws. I also have environmental concerns.
I can't be the only one to have this problem, though few have perhaps allowed the accumulation to reach the magnitude of mine. Is there a practical way to recycle hundreds of DVDs — some in cardboard folders, others in elaborate and expensive special bindings — in a way that the studios bless? Is there some charity that could use them? An agency that ships them to servicemen and women? Anything like that? Drop me a line if you have a great solution.