Filmmaker Alex Winter, whom you may also know by a moniker he's surely never going to be able to kick (Bill S. Preston, Esq. from classic 80s film team Bill & Ted), has completed a "rock doc" for VH1 called Downloaded. Winter's impressively crafted documentary takes us deeply and intimately into the "tragedy" -- in Winter's words -- of the history of Napster.
The film debuted at SXSW and Winter, who showed the film and spoke about it at Tech Crunch NY Disrupt on Tuesday, April 30, says a full distribution scheme is coming to bear shortly in which everyone will be able to see the film for free via AOL.
A full theatrical release of Downloaded is in the works as well, Winter said.
Winter explained the film began as a feature not unlike The Social Network, which dealt with the story of Facebook. Winter wrote his Napster feature film and was set to roll in 2002, but the picture soon fell into turnaround and he left to pursue other projects.
Two years ago, though, Winter was "shocked" and "dismayed" at how little resolution had been made as regards music file sharing and similar services. Thus he took to his blackbook, called up his Napster contacts -- including founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker -- and rebooted his project as a documentary.
Back when Winter was still onscreen air guitaring through time aside Keanu Reeves, he got "really into the web" and became "extremely fascinated" by Napster as a service when it first launched as a music file sharing community in 1999.
Clearly passionate about Napster and about what he referred to as the "hostile environment" he still sees years after Napster fell apart as an ultimately (and massively, as the film chronicles in engagingly heart-breaking detail) failure, Winter said he knew MTV and VH1 would be a perfect place to re-contextualize his vision being that the networks have a treasure trove of archival footage he could employ for completion.
Downloaded does show us such rock stars via this spellbinding footage as Billy Corgan, Trent Reznor and David Bowie deliberate over the pro's and con's of Napster throughout the most intense years of the heated debate at the turn of the century. We also see the likes of particularly staunch opponents to Napster such as Lars Ulrich of Metallica lambasting the service as a means for piracy and theft.
Ulrich was notoriously not alone in his convictions, as Downloaded shows, presenting the various court cases that Napster fought all the way to the top, all the while two confessedly naive kids barely out of their teens -- Fanning and Parker -- at the vortex of the storm that lasted years and ended up costing literally hundreds of millions of dollars overall.
Winter feels strongly that the technology that was being developed for Napster more than a decade ago could have been vastly successful had there been resolution between the developers and the music industry that never occurred.
Winter points to other sharing services today and how even contemporary social network companies such as Airbnb have to deal with local municipalities and the like that continue to resist this brand of disruptive technology.
"We're certainly not trying to raise bias," Winter claimed, adding that he certainly has "simpatico" for those individuals or companies who don't understand this technology, in Winter's words.
There's no doubt, however, that whether you have a chance to hear Winter speak about his allgedly bicameral approach to the subject or not, his bias is axiomatic throughout the film.
This might be one of the only apt critiques of Downloaded.
Yes, we do see Ulrich and other Napster haters such as Dr. Dre wax poetic on why the service was criminal, but the footage is all from the MTV archives, all dated and clearly used in a pointed way in order to paint these pontificaters as the villains and Napster personnel as the beleaguered victims of the ruthless, ignorant and flat-out evil corporate steamroller.
Winter claimed he did talk to at least Ulrich, but that because Metallica recently released its entire catalogue on Spotify (which, peripherally, Parker fronts), there was no reason to include Napster's most vocal opponent in the film aside from via older footage.
This, along with a cutting paucity of other such pundits against Napster in Downloaded, leads the film to be less three-dimensional than it could have been, especially in a world that continues to embrace more and more disruptive technology, with opponents now being more of the "crazy" disrupters than the disrupters themselves.
In essence, it would have been nice to hear valid points here and now about why Napster was and could even today be a negative thing.
To Winter, as he said prior to the TechCrunch screening and as is espoused throughout Downloaded itself, Napster was more of a social community than a means of exchanging music. The sharing, to Winter -- and at least to Fanning -- was and continues to be more important than the files.
Whatever the case may be, Downloaded -- marvelously edited, vastly dramatic (and occasionally hilarious), purely edifying and scored brilliantly by trip-hop pioneer DJ Spooky -- is ultimately a cautionary tale about what happens when the new world meets the old and all that happens thereafter.
"The Napster story is a tragedy and it is still being played out," Winter said.
Downloaded will be out soon, and for those wondering, it looks like Bill & Ted's third installment is definitely at least in the talking stages, according to Winter who graciously answered that question when timidly asked at the end of his panel.
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