One Y-Life editor's quest to download The Phantom Menace
by Josh Robertson
Not everyone got to see The Phantom Menace the day it opened back in May 1999. I did, but only because a friend won a radio contest. Everyone else had to wait in line for hours with light-sabre-toting weirdos. Or you needed an Internet connection. Say what? Yes, you could get the movie online, or so it was rumoured. Back then, the only film I'd seen online was a clip of a zookeeper having a bad day in the elephant house--I had never downloaded a full-length picture. So I set out to change that. Episode I seemed an obvious place to start.
 Franciso Caceres |
The URL ended in .fr--France. Things that aren't legal in the US often are legal in France. But "server too busy" messages led me back to the discussion board. After reading dozens of posts like "I watched star wars as a kid. phantom menace is great! please make more sequels!!!", I decided this wasn't the elusive lair of lawless whiz kids I was seeking.
I then found a Tripod page called the Phantom Menace Download. It asked me to click on an AllAdvantage banner. I got an operation timed-out error. I then followed a link to the guy's home page, where he confessed, "I'm sorry, this is a fake site. I just put it on to get people to come to this page." Pathetic.
Further sifting through the Google results proved fruitless. I started clicking on anything in a foreign language. Swedish, Portuguese, Polish--sometimes, things that are illegal in the US are legal in Sweden, Portugal, and Poland. But no... more gaming sites.
Soon, I had located a few underground primers on the art of capturing bootleg films. I wasn't going to get a movie straight off a site; I'd get the address of a file transfer protocol (FTP) site, from which I'd download many big files that I'd then stitch back together. Bootlegged files of all kinds are known as "warez." Some of the formats I'd be dealing with: MPEGs and AVIs cloned from DVD, DivX, or VHS.
So I crammed the Google window with these terms: ftp warez DVD DivX, and I came up with sites hawking, as it were, their warez. Pop-ups everywhere, fake links, and no movies. Then I found a site called XS 4_ALL.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
