UPLOAD

This wasn’t the
first time fans had
felt ripped off by
a movie series,
but this time, they
had the tools
to do something
about it.

AUTHORIZED MASHUP: George Lucas
has tried to co-opt the fan editors
by letting them reshuffle just a few
selected clips on an “official” site (left).

into a “trilogy,” separating the tangled storylines in chronological order. This utterly destroys John Travolta’s feel-good strut out of the diner at the close of the original version.

Since this demented effort annihilates not just the structure, but the whole point of the original film — its disregard for chronology in favor of clever storytelling — the re-edit is both the most pointless and most brilliant fan remix ever. You can find copies at the torrent sites listed earlier.

MASHUPS AS A

LITERARY TRADITION

In one sense, none of this unauthorized editing is new. A couple hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson chopped up the Bible, taking out all the spooky God stuff in favor of what he considered the book’s useful moral teachings. In the mid-1980s, John Oswald’s Plunderphonics created mashups of other artists’ songs back before the word mashup existed. Emergency Broadcast Network edited music and film clips together into evening-long dance club extravaganzas. What’s changed now is that you don’t need anything more sophisticated than a standard PC to create your own samizdat film epics.

It’s possible that in a few years a new Tarantino or Sofia Coppola will emerge from this underground world. What better way is there to understand how

76 Make: Volume 12

movies work than by taking them apart, seeing how the parts sync up, and then putting them back together again?

“Fan editors” of Star Wars, The Matrix , and Harry Potter might constitute the next generation’s film school, the movie equivalent of a young guitarist hunched over in his bedroom, learning the solo from Eric Clapton’s “Layla” one note at a time. And when these new filmmakers invade Hollywood to produce their own original films, you can bet that their fans will be waiting in the wings to hijack their work, remake it, and start the cycle all over again. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s about damned time.

RESOURCES Where fan editors and their fans hang: faneditforum.com

Bit Torrent: bittorrent.com

u Torrent: utorrent.com

Azureus: azureus.sourceforge.net

Other Bit Torrent sites: thepiratebay.org, mininova.org, torrentreactor.net