Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  But with Annika and her friends scouting locations and managing the logistics of getting people from rendezvous places to whatever civil defense bunker, sewer, graveyard, abandoned warehouse, or other romantic spot, it became a kind of assembly line.

  Oh, 26, Chester, Dog, Jem, and I all helped with the setup still, sneaking in chairs, usually wearing the old standby disguise of a hi-viz vest and safety hat; Hester and her friends also threw their backs into the work with a great deal of enthusiasm. But for us at the Zeroday, the real work wasn’t playing stevedore with bits of furniture; we were making films.

  Every spare minute that occurred, every hour that could be stolen from sleep, we were buried in our edit suites, cutting and mixing. Confusing Peach had got bigger than ever, and there were more secret sub-boards that we were being invited to all the time. There were loads of people making and posting videos, and there were loads of kids who loved their 3D animation software, and working with them, we realized new possibilities. Rabid Dog found a crew of Italian kids from Turin who loved the monster films nearly as much as him, and by working with them, he was able to realize some of the funniest disembowelment and dismemberment scenes in the history of illegal horror.

  And now I came to appreciate just how enormous the whole remix world was. A little venturesome wandering online and I was smack in the middle of music mixers, visual mixers, text slicers and dicers. They were just as obsessed as I was, just as driven to make new out of old, to combine things that no one had ever thought of combining. Of course, they were just as threatened by TIP as we were, though they were much lower-profile targets than those who raided the entertainment industry’s multimillion-pound crown jewels.

  I discovered that I was far from the only Scot-obsessive in the world. A pack of kids in Rio were dead keen on him, and they were incredibly skilled with a bunch of free 3D animation packages; what’s more, they’d been perfecting their own Scot 3D models for years, trading polygons with other 3D kids all over the world. They had hardly any English and I couldn’t speak a word of Portuguese when we started but we had loads of automatic translation engines, and a shared love of Scot. Apparently, he’d been huge in Brazil. Working with Sergio, Gilberto, Sylvia, and them, I was able to make Scot do things he’d never done in the films, and now we were really cooking.

  We had Pirate Cinema nights every Friday and sometimes also on Sunday afternoons, changing locations every time. Sometimes we’d be in a big, derelict Victorian down by Notting Hill, with different screens in every room showing films to rapt crowds. Sometimes it’d be long, sooty, abandoned tube tunnels with films splashed on the ceiling, and loungers wedged between the steel rails so you could recline and watch. Sometimes it was warehouses, and once we even took over an actual cinema, one that had been closed down for fifteen years but still had working popcorn machines. For that night, we made ourselves proper usher’s uniforms, sewing gold brocade onto our shoulders and down the sides of our trousers, and we packed the house—six hundred masked faces watching as the films we’d made and found unspooled on the huge screen.

  Masked? Oh yes. After Sewer Cinema and my unexpected personal fame, Annika hatched a plan to keep all our identities secret—we’d turn Pirate Cinema nights into a masked ball. Some people came in simple domino masks or surgical face masks, while others went in for Black Block balaclavas, but the best were the elaborate carnival masks that people made for themselves. You’d get people tottering in with enormous confections on their heads—fantastic animals, monsters, cruel papier-mâché caricatures of politicians. There was a pack of zombies that came regularly, much to RD’s delight: they competed each week to see who could do the most gruesome makeup; they’d fake dangling eyeballs, gaping slit throats, latex holes in their cheeks exposing “teeth” and gums. It was magesterially stomach churning.

  It all went by in a blur. No sooner would we tear down a show than we’d be setting up for the next one. And now that the press knew who I was, I was getting all kinds of requests for interviews—as Cecil B. DeVil, of course. Annika encouraged me to do these—“just don’t take them too seriously.”

  The first three or four made me very nervous, but then I realized that the press always asked the same questions, so I’d just flop down on the sofa with my laptop and my headset and take the call while Jem fed me so much jet fuel it was a race to see whether I could finish the interview before I attained liftoff and sailed into gabbling, babbling coffee-orbit.

  I don’t think I ever worked harder in my life, before or since. I’d roll into bed at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., having come off a night’s binge-editing; it’d be even later if I’d been out at a Cinema night. I’d wake up five hours later, merciless alarm beating me into wakefulness. I’d attempt coffee in the kitchen, and the sound of my fumbling inevitably roused Jem, who hated to be woken, but hated the sound of someone murdering his precious beans even worse. He’d make me a pot of French press and I’d go back to work, devouring the night’s emails, status updates, tweets, and IMs, many from other people running their own Pirate Cinemas in other cities around the world, others from filmmakers who were hoping to get screened at one of our nights. Plenty of messages from fans, too, people who’d been to one of the nights or had seen the videos on ZeroKTube or some other site and wanted to sing my praises, which felt insanely great.

  It was so much stuff that I actually created two separate identities, one for press queries—I’d get half a dozen of these every day, many for email interviews, others for video or audio linkups. Some even wanted to come and meet me, but I never said yes to these, because I was paranoid that they might bring the police—or be the police. But I did all the others. The email interviews were easiest, since they always asked the same five or six dumb questions, and I just kept a huge file of prewritten answers in the form of a FAQ on the Pirate Cinema site. I’d just cut and paste the answers straight into the email and be done with it.

  Then there were all the organizational emails. Annika and her people were amazing location scouts, always finding new places for us to try. But then there was the problem of smuggling in the attendees—and getting them there without tipping off the cops about our location in advance. For this, they employed tactics from the golden age of rave parties: they’d announce a rallying point and then someone would meet them with instructions for another location, and then another. On the way, hidden scouts would check them out, looking for anyone suspicious. Finally, they’d put them in white builders’ vans with no windows and ferry them to the actual spot. I could think of fifty ways for the cops to defeat this, but it lent the whole thing an air of mystery and excitement, and it seemed the cops were not trying that hard to intercept us just then, because we didn’t get busted once.

  So—organizational emails, then I’d shove some food in my gob without tasting it, and hit the editing suite again. I was turning out thirty to forty-five minutes of video a week, and it took me more than an hour to edit together every minute. And on top of that, I still had to do my runs to the skips to harvest food, and on top of that I was always on the lookout for scraps for the mask-making projects, which had sprawled all over the Zeroday, taking over every horizontal surface with sloppy papier-mâché remnants—torn strips of newspaper, wheatpaste, paints, beads, glitter, fur, scraps of fabric and bone, even a load of false teeth that Aziz had dug up from somewhere.

  Someone was always making masks, and it had turned into a competition and a game. 26 had upped the ante by making a mask for me one week and demanding that I give her the mask I’d been planning on wearing—a giant muppet head made out of fake electric blue fur with hundreds of eyes sewn all around it (the real eyeholes were hidden behind a scrim of window-screening). Thereafter, we inaugurated a ritual of trading masks just before heading out on show nights, and we’d surprise one another with our bizarre and hilarious creations.

  By the time the editing and the grocery shopping and the eating and the interviews were done, if I was lucky I’d get an hour or two with 26, who was doing alm
ost everything I was doing, plus keeping up with her final year’s worth of schoolwork, before heading out for the night—either to one of our cinema nights or to some meeting that Annika’s people had put together to talk about how to make things better next time.

  I’d get home exhausted but unable to sleep from all the coffee and adrenaline and excitement, and often as not I’d spin up a little pin-sized spliff and then smoke it while I did a few more edits and waited for it to kick in and tie weights to my eyelids and my arms and legs and drag me off the chair and onto the mattress on the floor, until the alarm woke me to start it all over again.

  Week after week this continued, punctuated by increasingly common phone calls home to Cora and my parents. It looked like Cora would finish out her year okay, not the best grades she’d ever got, but not the worst, either. She was using the newly restored network connection to do a series of independent study projects on how corrupt the Theft of Intellectual Property Act’s passage had been, and was making a bloody pest of herself calling up the offices of MPs who’d voted for it, asking them to talk to her for the projects.

  It turned out that her teachers adored this sort of thing and had put her up for some kind of district-wide student-work competition, with the winning essay to be published on the BBC’s website and presented nationally. Which would be quite a laugh, what with it making Parliament look like a bunch of corporate lickspittles. Well, I’d laugh, anyway. Mum and Dad were doing a bit better now that the network was back, and most times when I rang, we could get through ten or fifteen minutes without them recriminating against me and telling me that I should come home and asking me what I was doing with my life.

  I didn’t answer this last one. My face hadn’t been in the papers for quite some time now, and to be honest, that’s how I liked it. It had been ages since anyone on the street had recognized me, since anyone on a bus had squinted at me from across the aisle, as if trying to remember where they knew me from. All in all, that was for the best.

  But without my picture on the front of the paper, Mum and Dad quickly forgot how proud they were of me and once again began to worry that a wee lad like myself might get led astray by bad company in dirty old London. Nothing I said could dissuade them from this, and to be honest, if they knew, actually knew what I was up to, they’d say that they were perfectly correct about what had happened to their beloved son in the terrible city.

  But those calls didn’t get me down for long. Nothing did. That sense of overwhelming, all-consuming busyness kept anything from making so much as a scratch on me. I had too much to do to mope or grump or moan. I was living life, not complaining about it, and Christ, didn’t it feel wonderful?

  Yeah, so that was my life there for quite some time. It was all our lives, thrown headlong into it, and every week there were more emails, more films, more press queries, more people who seemed to care about what we were up to. And there were more people coming to the cinema nights, and there were more cinemas—not just ours. They popped up all over town and I tried to go to as many as I could make it to—even if it meant skipping out for part of ours. I wanted to see what they were showing, and if it was any good, I wanted to poach it for one of our nights. Plenty of it was good and some of it was so bloody fantastic, I wanted to find the makers and prostrate myself at their feet and beg to be taught by one so skilled.

  Of course, it couldn’t last.

  * * *

  26 let herself into the Zeroday one Wednesday afternoon, just like any other Wednesday afternoon. She had her own key, and she came over plenty of days after school—her parents didn’t mind so long as she spent at least three nights per week at home and kept her grades up. I was on the sofa in the sitting room, using a hot-glue gun to attach feathers from a feather duster to a mad birdy crow mask with evil button eyes and a cruel beak made from a bit of curved umbrella-ribbing draped with black vinyl, every bit of it rescued from the rubbish.

  She plonked herself down on the sofa next to me and gave me a giant, flying cuddle that nearly crushed the mask, biting hard on my earlobe and my neck so that I squirmed and pushed and screeched, “Gerorff!” and tickled at her with one hand while holding the mask away from the melee with the other.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” she said, chortling and holding her belly and kicking her legs in the air while leaning back against me. “It’s so fantastic, wait’ll you hear!”

  “What?” I said. I couldn’t think of what it was—a great video she’d found, a daring location for the next cinema, top grades in some subject at school?

  “I’ve had a call from Letitia. She says that she’s going to introduce a private member’s bill to repeal TIP. It’s been such a disaster—there’s over two thousand people gone to prison now, and most of them are minors. She reckons that between that and all the civil disobedience in the pirate cinemas, there’s never been a better time to get the MPs whipped up about the issue. Everyone says there’ll be an election before the summer, and no one wants to be on the ballot after voting for a bill that put kids in jail for listening to music and watching telly.”

  I cocked my head. “I don’t know much about this stuff, but isn’t this kind of a, you know, a gesture? Is there any chance they’ll pick it up in Parliament? Why would they vote for this when they wouldn’t vote against TIP in the first place?”

  She waved her hands airily. “When they were debating TIP, the entertainment lobbyists were saying that we were all overreacting, that it would only be used selectively against organized crime kingpins and the like. Now we can show that we were right all along. I rang Annika on the way over and she thinks it might be a goer, too. She says that the cinema nights have kept all the attention on what real creativity is, and on the injustice of TIP; what’s more, they’re a perfect place to beat the drum for people to get out and support it.”

  I allowed myself to feel a small glimmer of hope. This was better than I’d ever dreamed: the Pirate Cinema nights weren’t just empty protest or a way of having a great party and showing off, they were going to make a difference. We would change the law, we’d beat back those corporate arseholes, take power back for the people.

  I set down the mask and gave 26 a huge, wet kiss that went on and on for quite some time. I couldn’t stop grinning—not that evening, and not that night, behind the elaborately painted surgical mask I’d swapped Rabid Dog for. The films had never been better, the crowd never more fascinating, the night never more magic.

  Chapter 9

  IS THAT LEGAL?/COWARDICE/SHAME

  Of course, it couldn’t last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste of heaven to (it’s the epigram from Wasabi Heat, the deservedly least-known of Scot’s rom-coms).

  I really dressed up for Letitia’s office this time. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s cos I spent so much time in weird-looking rags that were carefully calculated to half-offend people from the straight world, like Letitia Clarke-Gifford: middle-class, ultra-respectable, law-abiding. If I was going to be spending my life eating garbage, squatting in pubs, begging, and making illegal films, I wanted to be sure that the people I met knew what an ultra-alternative, cutting-edge type I was.

  But now that Parliament was apparently on my side, I felt like I should at least turn up looking like I’d made an effort to meet them halfway. Lucky for me, slightly out-of-date formal clothes are common as muck in the charity shops, since fashions change so often. I was able to score a very smart blazer-and-slacks outfit with a canary-yellow banker’s shirt made out of cotton with a thread-count so high you could use it to filter out flu viruses. The previous owner had scorched the back with an iron, so I reckoned I’d just keep the blazer on.

  When I met 26 at the Maida Vale tube, she looked past me twice before recognizing me. Then she clapped both hands over her mouth, crinkled her eyes, and made a very large show out of not laughing at me.

  “Come on, it’s not that bad,” I said. “She’s an MP, after all!”

  26’s shoulders shook. She took severa
l deep breaths into her palms, then straightened up and put them down at her sides. She gave me a kiss and squeezed my bum.

  “Do I look that stupid?” I said.

  She shook her head. “That’s what’s got me horrified! It suits you! In another life, you could have been a junior banker!”

  “Now you’re just being cruel,” I said. I felt self-conscious all the way to the MP’s surgery.

  * * *

  At first, Letitia didn’t even want to talk about the bill. Mostly, she wanted to talk about the films.

  “I can’t stop watching them. They’re like popcorn! I download one, then there’s another one I want to see, and another, and another—before I know, hours have gone by. Did you make the one where that Scot Colford is driving a black cab around London, describing all the landmarks with out-of-context lines from his actual films?”

  I nodded. “The video was dead easy. I just took a matte of the back of Scot’s head and some videos shot out of the windows of the Google Streetview cars, and stuck ’em into a taxi interior I’d cut out. The tricky part was finding dialog that worked with all the neighborhoods. ’Course, I was able to cherry-pick the streets and landmarks I had good dialog for, so it was a bit of a cheat.”

  “God, I loved that bit about ‘made of ale!’”

  That had been inspired. The first time I’d ridden out to see 26 on the tube, I’d listen to the announcement as we pulled into Maida Vale, but heard it as “The next station is made of ale.” Which got me off on a whole tangent about some lost Victorian art of ale-based construction out of thick brown bricks and so forth. Well, one night, I’d been watching Scot in Barman’s Holiday, mixing up exotic drinks for thick Americans in a seaside bar in the Honduras, and one of them says, “What’s this one made of?” waving a mug in his direction. Scot deadpans back, “That is made of ale.” When the two clicked together, comedy was born. From there, it was just a matter of picking out some other Scot lines—“That shop. That is made of ale. That bike. That is made of ale. That boy. That is made of ale.” I was worried the joke would get less funny with repetition, and I think it did, somewhere around the 0:30 mark. But by 0:45, it had gone through stupid and out the other side, which is an entirely funnier kind of funny, and the first time I showed it live at a Pirate Cinema, they’d laughed like drains, howling. Even now, people liked to point at random things and say, “That is made of ale.” It made me feel brilliant.